The Cool Hunter on renovating old churches into a number of things, including cooler churches. tjc

The New Yorker on the campaign trail: Barack as the new RFK, Hillary losing Bill's supporters, and the looming threat of the Republican machine. Excerpt: tjc

A former Clinton Administration official explained his decision to support Obama by urging me to read the two candidates’ autobiographies side by side. Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” unlike Clinton’s “Living History,” he said, reveals a narrator who has struggled through difficult questions of identity and resolved them, and who, as a result, is comfortable not just with himself but with the complexity and contradiction of the world. “When I’m with her, I feel she wants to impress me,” the former official said. “When I’m with him, I feel he wants to know what I have to offer him.”

Salon on buying real estate on the moon. tjc

New research suggests that harmful bacteria is evolving faster than antibiotics can be created. Wash your hands, people! jmj

The impressive book list of Art Garfunkel. Really, you'll be surprised. tjc

Scientific American on the development of islands of intelligence, or how science is gathering all the little guys together to compete on a global scale. tjc

I've been listening to a lot of The Replacements lately, as well as Paul Westerberg's solo efforts, and enjoying them both immensely. Gibson.com's Ted Drozdowski discusses the creation of the monumental 1987 album in his piece Torn and Frayed: The Story of the Replacements’ 1987 Classic Pleased to Meet Me. I guess I'm making up for what I was too young to enjoy the first time around. jmj

Wired and Sarah Silverman team up on 33 things that suck and a small treatise on things that don't suck: tjc

Things that don't suck: TV screens in the back of airplane seats. Twice-baked potatoes. Dryer sheets. DVRs. The set design on Mad Men. Farmers' markets. Tap water. Touchscreens. Scissors. Pocketknives. Thumb drives. Kites. Strike-anywhere matches. Doorstops. Run-flat tires. Netflix. Noise-canceling headphones. Casual carpool. Guitar Hero. Salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Bicycles. Kevlar. Velcro. Carbon composite. Dradis. Flip-flops. The first half hour of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seat belts. Zippo lighters. Spartan Laser. Heated seats. Public libraries. Remote control. Ice cream.

Learn how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day became a holiday. jmj

PsyBlog on why experiences trump possessions every time. tjc

I feel obliged to include The New Yorker's profile of Poor Richard's Almanac, not just because Joe dubbed Ben Franklin the O.M., but also because of detailed passages like this, about how Franklin learned to write: tjc

The boy too poor to go to Harvard had taught himself to write by imitating the prose style he found in an English gentleman’s magazine, The Spectator. He made The Spectator the tutor he never had: he read an essay, abstracted it, and then rewrote the argument from the abstract, to see if he could improve on the original. To make his prose more lyrical, he then turned the essays into poetry, and back again. In an essay he later wrote on literary style, which reads like Strunk and White, he pledged himself to brevity (“a multitude of Words obscures the Sense”), clarity (“To write clearly, not only the most expressive, but the plainest Words should be chosen”), and simplicity: “If a Man would that his Writings have an Effect on the Generality of Readers, he had better imitate that Gentleman, who would use no Word in his Works that was not well understood by his Cook-maid.”