This blog is overrated.

Fumes Kathryn Lopez at National Review,

Are Men Necessary? Maureen Dowd asked that ridiculous question in her book, as you’ll recall. What is up with a culture that not only amuses the question, but in which our fundamental cultural institutions works to deride and undermine men, as if to say: “No, of course they are not necessary!”?

But it doesn’t stop there! Lord Peter Wimsey creator and noted woman-hater Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote a book titled Are Women Human? And law professor Catharine MacKinnon later used the same title. Clearly, then, they both believed that women are not human.

What is up with this culture, where such questions can be asked — sorry, amused — with impunity? Well, I’m off to work on my new book, Does Civilization Exist in Cities Other Than Ann Arbor?

Hyde Park — the new Ann Arbor? In terms of being shorthand for “effete liberal intellectual enclave”, perhaps. Hyde Park is definitely an enclave of some sort; try driving into it from Lake Shore Drive without having memorized all the one-way streets and “Do Not Enter” signs, or taking public transportation there at off-peak hours. Although how effete can you be if you live in a neighborhood where things like this happen on a regular basis?

There’s too much nonsense in this Ivy-bashing essay from The American Scholar to dismantle it all in detail. It’s especially telling, though, how the author starts out promoting trendy ideas about “different intelligences” (”social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite”) only to end up tsk-tsking pityingly at students who socialize with each other too often and in ways of which he doesn’t approve, at the expense of the profound solitude necessary for the true intellectual life:

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.

Well, maybe there are different social intelligences. Did he ever think of that?

I sound much less inane in this Business Review profile than I did in the News article. But, “softens”? Does this mean that the last couple years of AAIO were like the late-period album a punk band releases when they’ve lost their edge, and the critics fall all over themselves insisting, “No, ‘mature’ really doesn’t mean boring”?

One of those unfocused multi-link posts I usually dislike so much:

• It’s not just the Times’ Health section that has a moralistic stance on prescription drugs.
• Amazing post from The Apostate.
  

  The ‘of color’ folks think I’m the wrong sort of ‘of color’ person. The white folks think I’m the wrong sort of feminist (I don’t like head-scarves, you see). All the leftists think I’m the wrong sort of immigrant (successful, fluent in English and ‘documented’) … Liberals lost their edge on the intellectual front and the activist front with the rise of postmodernism. The conservatives managed to hold on to their sanity and are still able to talk about the real world, while liberals are busy debating if there IS a real world.

• Where’s Ann Arbor, Charlotte and Austin on this best-cities list? Zurich? Whatever.

Yes, the new 4th edition D&D rules seem pretty exciting. But what’s going on with the Monster Manual? No metallic dragons. No krakens. And no air, earth, fire or water elementals. As for the elementals that did make it in, well, see how you do with this quiz. 4th Edition Elemental … or Powerade Flavor?

1. Arctic Shatter
2. Rockfire Dreadnought
3. Firelasher
4. Mountain Blast
5. Thunderblast Cyclone
6. Solar Flare
7. Green Squall

Click below for the answers.

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Great post from Megan McArdle (did I just write that?) about the absurdity of the idea that one’s weight is entirely controlled by willpower. “More and more, the evidence on diet is showing just how effective your appetite is at putting your weight where your body wants it to be.”

A couple months ago, when the theory was floated that diet soda might somehow make people gain weight, the obvious consternation among conventional-wisdom-spouters was as delicious as a Boylan’s cane cola. They weren’t sure which way they wanted this to go, so as to sustain the least damage to their essentially moral view of weight. If it’s not true, that would mean that there’s no punishment for upsetting the natural balance of things and enjoying a sweet carbonated drink with no calories. But if it is true, then they might have to admit that losing weight is more complicated than “eat less, exercise more.”

You don’t need to be a “prestigious business magazine” to get local newspapers and Chambers of Commerce talking about your city rankings. RelocateAmerica, an obscure site owned by a real estate broker in Michigan, has just released its list of the best cities to live, and towns like Aiken, Georgia (which made the top 100 but not the top 10) are just ecstatic about their placements. After all, if you can’t trust real estate brokers to value things correctly, whom can you trust? Says an Aiken county administrator, “That kind of verifies what those of us who already live here know … Aiken has a lot of big-city features with a lot of cultural activities without losing that small town feel that people love so much.” That sounds familiar.

As pointed out in the MSN story, top-ranked Charlotte also made Forbes’ list of “most miserable cities.”

Because there’s no better way to strike a blow against crass consumerism than by subversively altering ads to depict bloodily decapitated women. Smash the corporatocracy, boyz! (Via Metafilter.)

What’s the difference between a “classic college town”, a “college friendly city” and a “college centered city”? You won’t get many clear answers from this befuddling Inside Higher Ed story. Madison and Boston are somehow both exemplars of the third category, while Ann Arbor fits into the first, a group characterized by “dive bars and bookstores and movie theaters that still charge less than a meal.” A movie ticket in Ann Arbor does indeed cost less than a meal in Ann Arbor.

There’s not a lot new here. Academics want to move to “your usual suspects of hot cities to live: New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Austin” (although, as pointed out in the comments, they often have very little choice.) This has been the case for a long time. Long enough, anyway, that if your job is compiling a best-cities list every year, you might almost be inclined to start touting Provo and Boise just to break up the monotony. Or at least to transfer the monotony to anyone credulous enough to take your rankings seriously.