Brooks: Geithner and Obama saved the global economy and deserve credit.

The case for This American Life as the newest propaganda arm of the conservative movement.

Positive correlation found between a country’s belief in hell and the strength of its economy.

Will Ferrell rated by Forbes as Hollywood’s worst investment property.

Senator Santorum enjoys laughing, but he doesn’t know any jokes. Comedian poses as 10-year-old to get politicians to share jokes.

Louis Armstrong’s memoir of a Jewish family shows his take on the moral failings of his own people.

Analysis of various superheroes’ powers’ scientific properties.

Christo committed to honoring the promise he and Jeanne-Claude made to each other: to continue the work.

Weekend activity: Tell us about your nontraditional holiday traditions.

Long, nuanced account of renegade whaling and contemporary American Indian law.

Slideshow: Death masks of Keats, Robespierre, Lincoln.

Profile of “the world’s most problematic political prisoner,” Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, now its most famous prisoner.

Irish program where young criminals apologize in lieu of imprisonment sees decrease in reoffenders.

Shanghai is obsessed with real estate like New York, and like New York it’s unlike the rest of its country.

Costa Rican scientists build rocket to pick up space garbage.

Op: Now that water’s been discovered on the moon, we can start building our new homes.

Ten senators draw their own states; Saxby Chambliss has no idea what Georgia looks like.

High-falutin’ rock-and-roll dust-up between Radiohead, Fiery Furnaces, and Beck.

Bates Gill, Bill Gates; Milton Glaser discusses drawing while drawing; many bookshelves.

Marines’ PowerPoint, made for other marines, about the softer side of counterinsurgency.

Instapaper for the commute: Riveting story of the feared Texas judge indicted for sex crimes.

See also: Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church?

Op: Women’s ski jumping is an indicator of cohesive democracy.

Palin’s stylist comes forward to protect her retail honor.

Emeril got bam, I got Shaka. Extended interview with Coolio about cooking.

Story of the single most desired artwork of all time—neither under-protected, nor portable, yet frequently stolen.

Useful general-audience story on how to proactively guard against identity fraud online.

Greater proportion of black people than white people among the internet-using population on Twitter.

Catalog of sources for pictures of hipsters’ interiors.

Minnesota father only spoke Klingon to his child for three years—he’s not a Trekkie, just a businessman selling translation.

Father tells his son the second-worst swearword in the world.

Philip Roth, Nick Cave shortlisted for this year’s Bad Sex prize.

Argument for much more sex to be shown if publishers insist on creating video trailers for new books.

Warhol’s foray into children’s literature: The Little Red Hen.

Some claim doctors’ neckties harbor disease; for physicians who don’t want to lose the air of formality, there is now antimicrobial neckwear.

Exercise makes you less anxious; heavy alcohol consumption reduces risk of heart disease.

Scientists give mummies CT scans, find ancient heart disease.

The five hot dogs that will kill you.

Tell us your unusual, your unique, your nontraditional holiday traditions.

New research says that fearless toddlers are more likely to commit crimes later in life.

I’m at the Brooklyn Bridge, intent on stalking rogue, tour-guideless tourists. TMN’s Leah Finnegan finds out who’s traveling to Brooklyn.

This week, H&H Bagels and B&H Electronics headed into New York courts on unrelated charges.

New York police and prosecutors investigate newspaper delivery union for bribery, favoritism.

Colum McCann wins the National Book Award for fiction; Robert Birnbaum’s 2007 chat with McCann.

Bookmaking illustrated in 3,000 photos.

Sexting takes hold of the elderly.

I invariably observe that the majority of the other hydro-phobes keeping pace with me are firmly in the females-over-fifty set.

Baldwin, Alec, preference for Stephen over, 314. Index for Going Rogue.

Winning in Aghanistan means thinking like an Afghan politician, not a peacebuilder; i.e., think bribes.

The case for suspending mail on Saturdays, seeing how the U.S.P.S. may soon be eliminated entirely.

An E.U. anthem will likely need to avoid its members’ own soldier-y lyrics.

Op: The occupation has eroded Israel’s moral fiber, and now its leaders can slough off charges of war crimes.

Maersk Alabama attacked again by Somali pirates.

Merticus, spokesperson for the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, says vampires “are mostly like anyone else.”

In Pakistan, conspiracy rumors are the currency of people completely locked out of power.

Video: Trailer for Slackistan.

Upset about noise in libraries, gasbag professor of Renaissance studies can’t stop complaining.

Inside the molecular gastronomy lab of Microsoft’s Myhrvold, soon-to-be cookbook author.

Op: Millions spent to market drugs yields billions for Pfizer & Co.—and this disgusting practice needs to stop.

Mega-marathoners: obsessives who run hundreds of marathons, age be damned.

The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Umberto Eco on lists.

Blockbuster would like its movies back, please.

Op: At best, Palin’s misunderstanding of the Israeli settlement debate is alarming; at worst, it’s dangerous.

Running and losing for vice president has never been a promising route to the Oval Office. History shows why Palin won’t be president.

Slideshow: Insane asylums through the years.

Photos of the H1N1 pandemic—especially worth seeing are the eggs.

Due to heavy rains in the Midwest, pumpkins are in short supply and may not last beyond Thanksgiving.

For this month’s “Of Recent Note,” tell us: What are your nontraditional holiday traditions?

Christoph Niemann finds unusual examples of biodiversity in fallen leaves.

A blog devoted to faux obis: things that are (k)not wood.

Was the movie cheesy, tacky, or corny? English offers more words, more opportunities for nuance.

Video: Visualizing the decline of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish empires.

The best books for girls and young women, a companion to the best books for boys and young men.

Most subway riders will give up their seats if you just ask—though the less reason given, the higher your chance of success.

The economics of pinball.

A brief guide to the different ways to tie a scarf.

Slideshow of potential candidates for our next president.

Op: Egyptians playing political games are too stupid to appreciate the artifacts we stole.

Citizen disarmament in Yemen threatens to dull the fun of shooting guns at weddings.

Now that porn is portable, public viewing is increasingly popular, making many uncomfortable.

The game’s perverse achievement was to make me feel bad about myself. The anti-war case for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Evidence shows you shouldn’t trust wine critics, mutual fund managers, or political experts—but you will anyway.

Gladwell calls Pinker a Google wank in a muscly and polite reply to Pinker’s recent critique.

Op: Plagiarism online is called aggregation.

Africa’s frequently called a single country by outsiders—shades on the conundrum from a conference of African writers.

Lovely Paula Fox on New York real estate and L.J. Davis.

A walk through an English cardboard factory.

A map you do not want to possess for your vacation home.

Brooks: China has faith in its future, and it seems to be working—why don’t we?

It is not known why, but West Indian men are three times more likely to die of prostate cancer than white men here in the U.K.

Though emergency rooms can’t discriminate based on ability to pay, the uninsured are 80 percent more likely to die from traumatic injuries.

A woman marries her fiance a year after he died; legal in France, there are dozens of posthumous weddings each year.

This year’s Oxford Word of the Year is “unfriend”: To remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Tell us: What are your nontraditional holiday traditions?

Geological apocalypse is a better bet. Physicist looks at 2012 prognostications, recommends you continue paying your mortgage.

Illustrator renders Shakespearean plays as graphic novels.

Polish children’s books; the most botched adaptations of children’s books.

TMN’s Sarah Hepola investigates the phenomena of 30-something, book-loving, romance-novel-eschewing women addicted to Twilight.

Man-wolves plague Wisconsin.

There were martyrs on 9/11. They were the firefighters. Profiles of British Islamic fanatics who have given up jihad.

Missing Labrador found after a year lost in the Afghan desert.

Undersea gliders track whales through clicks and squeals.

Nepal’s caste of musicians—untouchables and oral historians—race to catch up with modern times, even if it means wandering less.

Notes on France’s spending a billion euros annually to keep its press alive.

Tour through the “background players” of Obama’s family in Kenya.

South Carolina prisons sell playing cards with unsolved cases as the faces; article finishes with killer closer.

Heavy multitasking impedes efficiency, light multitasking OK.

Slot machines go interactive.

Former prostitute and anonymous blogger Belle du Jour unmasks herself; turns out she’s a doctor in neurotoxicology.

What’s odder than a doctor in neurotoxicology? A link blogger.

Audio: Calvin Trillin eats poutine.

New Yorker writer goes to lunch with a Michelin inspector.

Video: Perhaps the world’s funniest pullback, or, What to Eat at the Pyramids.

Mexicans reverse the fortune, sending much-needed funds to out-of-work relatives in the U.S.

#mathowielove: The Metafilter founder tells how his brain tumor was discovered and treated, and how the internet helps when you need it most.

Those of us who grew up after the Wall fell may never completely understand what it was like before November 9th, 1989.

The coming battleground in the war against smoking in New York: your living room.

What it would look like if New York and Tokyo flooded.

German architect aims to build world’s largest fake mountain.

Interactive map shows the changing American electorate since 1960.

“What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look. Adam Gopnik on our fascination with cookbooks.

As we enter the holiday season, Ben Schott queries his readers about their favorite terms for being Dean Martoonied.

Also helpful: Our most dependable hangover cures.

They tried to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of a sun wheel, a form similar to the swastika. How the Nazis stole Christmas.

The recording of a star-packed audio version of the Bible, and the “troubleble with Zerubbabel.”

New wealth tactic: Invest in the companies that make you angriest.

Op: At the very least, it should be government’s job to say what’s inherently governmental (e.g., assassination).

Commie Obama T-shirts banned in Beijing.

Indonesia’s hamburger king turns 13 McDonald’s into Toni Jack’s outlets, complete with pirate logos.

Survey of wristwatches worn by Russian officials.

Before holiday shopping begins, a method for improving all of your online passwords in a few minutes.

It’s one thing to be contrarian about minor things like the economics of sumo wrestling. Clay Risen on the downfall of Freakonomics.

Newly revealed Nazi sympathies may endanger the validity of Hannah Arendt’s work.

Liberia’s laws are being held for ransom by former justice minister.

When it comes to folklore in Indiana, and perhaps beyond, Google’s book-scanning program serves the side of good.

You’ve got to admit that Pluto really pioneered the exploration of that icy zone of the solar system. Ode to Pluto.

Scientist reflects on the first troubled year of the Large Hadron Collider.

Scenes from an alternate universe where The Beatles accepted Lorne Michaels’s offer to be on SNL.

On the set with Octomom—the Catch-22 of needing media attention to support your family.

Sven Birkerts on Updike and Wallace: “two Pisces, their element water, their salient quality mutability.”

Time to kill: Fifty best inventions of 2009; Quizipedia.

I really do think the presence of Sarah Palin made it nearly impossible for him to be elected. For as many times as McCain tried to scare voters by quoting Biden’s “make no mistake, Obama will be tested…” line, any sober voter from either party had to, in a quiet moment, imagine the world on the day Sarah Palin was forced into service as president. What would it be like if Russia invaded its neighbors with Sarah Palin as president? How many points would the Dow Jones lose on the day Sarah Palin was being sworn in?

Someone like Mitt Romney, who is perceived as having economic experience based on the fact that he has accumulated a lot of money, probably would have helped McCain’s standing in the current crisis. Would it have been enough to win? I have no idea.

This election (and this economy) has opened up some pretty serious fissures in the Republican party. There are the intellectual elites, and the fiscal conservatives, the libertarians, and the neo-cons, the good old boys, and the Plumber Joes. For a variety of reasons, none of them could really get behind this ticket. I suspect now they are going to finger point and grumble and then pull out the Newt Gingrich playbook for inspiration.

Obama is going to have a honeymoon, of course. He’s lucky to have been elected this year, as the economy is scraping bottom, instead of last year when the Dow was just coming off its all-time high. I’ve said it before, the more people see of Obama, the more they like him. That’s going to feed his numbers for the next year or two, I suspect.

This is all to say that if your name is Nancy Pelosi and you are a congresswoman from California, dress for battle. Under siege, the rag-tag, fractured Republicans need a common enemy and Nancy Pelosi is looking like the most likely cylon. We are about to see an escalation of the culture wars and the Republican’s newest axis of evil is going to run from her office to Harry Reid’s.

Three states had initiatives on the ballot to ban gay marriage, and a fourth, Arkansas, had a remarkable (and I suspect ultimately unconstitutional) initiative barring gay couples from adopting children. Unless they find some uncounted votes in California, all four of those initiatives will pass, even in states where Obama won. Look for 20 states to have similar initiatives in 2010.

Interestingly, the three state initiatives seeking to limit or ban abortion all look like they will fail. I suspect abortion will actually take a back seat as an issue in the next couple years. Despite Kathryn Jean’s hysterics, Obama is hardly a radical. He’s a center-left pragmatist and that’s especially true on abortion. Catholics, who were a reliable Democratic voting bloc before Roe v. Wade, voted more than 53% for Obama. Part of it might have been this from Obama in the last debate:

There surely is some common ground when both those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say we should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.

Those are all things that we put in the Democratic platform for the first time this year, and I think that’s where we can find some common ground, because nobody’s pro-abortion. I think it’s always a tragic situation.

That’s where the country is on abortion—keep it legal, but keep it rare—and that’s where Obama is. He understands that abortions peaked during the Reagan and Bush administrations and decreased under Bill Clinton’s tenure, when social services were more widely available. Couple that with the fact that Obama will likely appoint at least two justices, making the battle at the high court moot, and I think the ranters like Kathryn Jean Lopez, who seem less interested in actually reducing the number of abortions than they are in getting a license to prosecute someone for “infanticide,” are going to be marginalized.

Obama understands the pathological dysfunction that can overcome those with unchecked power. Here in Illinois, Democrats control both houses of the legislature as well as the governor’s mansion and yet the state is mired in gridlock. The house speaker won’t even talk to the unpopular governor while he schemes to have his own daughter replace him in the next election. The next election isn’t soon enough for the lieutenant governor, who tried to organize a constitutional convention largely for the purpose of getting his own boss recalled.

Republicans are going to wait and hope for President Obama and giddy Democrats in Congress to overplay their hand. Clinton did it with health care and the Dems paid dearly in 1994. Obama set the tone well in his speech last night. If the Democrats can remain somber and gracious, Republicans might have to keep fighting themselves for awhile.

Nothing lasts forever, though. That’s the only thing I know for sure.

I know this is supposed to be a time for magnanimity and extending hands across the aisle. John McCain’s speech was classy (though his supporters were classless) and Obama’s speech was sober and serious, rather than joyful, with not a hint of “I told you so,” in the text or the delivery.

Shit, even Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were gracious over Obama’s victory last night, but fuck it, I’ve been spending the morning cruising the conservative blogosphere and enjoying the wailing and gnashing of teeth. My favorite dummy of the right, Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review’s The Corner did not disappoint:

What Freaks Me Out About This Election is how oblivious to facts people have been. Everything about Obama’s judgment and radicalism — whether Sean Hannity or Stanley Kurtz or Andy McCarthy etc. is telling you about it — was essentially deemed irrelevant (including largely by the McCain campaign, save for Palin eventually talking about Ayers). Abortion? Near no one outside a handful of conservatives were talking about his record on infanticide — beyond abortion.

People are in for a rude awakening. And a mature conservative movement, with both an ear and a solid voice, will be needed.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Dummy! If this is the core of a mature conservative movement, I think we’re looking at an easy Obama re-election in 2012.

The margin is both comfortable and close at the same time. Most of the states Obama flipped that padded his EV total - Virginia, Florida, North Carolina - were very tight margins, and in the case of Virginia and North Carolina, Obama ran well behind the democratic senate candidates. If those states had gone the other way, we’d be talking about how Obama won in a relative squeaker.

Which brings to mind the big question I want to ask you and what I’ve been thinking about is whether or not McCain (or another republican) could have won? The concession speech McCain didn’t make me want to throw a brick through me TV. If that guy had shown up with Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney on his arm would K-Lo be crowing about a future end to infanticide this morning?

All of the sudden, I’m exhausted.

I’m sure tomorrow we’ll talk more about what happened, why, and how we can get our hands on that hologram technology, but for now, I’m signing off so I can enjoy this.

Go Franken.

Virginia goes for Obama, which means two of the four states I’ve lived in (Illinois, Virginia) go blue.

Here comes the final call from Wolff.

And that’s it, the Grant Park crowd goes wild.

President Obama!

They’ll be dining on bull in Kogelo.

Anderson Cooper watching his journalistic credibility go the way of the Apple Newton.

Bennett just took exception to the implication that the Republican Party is now made up exclusively of “old, white, confederate men,” but thus far, the results pretty much show it to be a truism.

Breaking: Will.I.Am hologram from grant park. He has a purple aura around his entire body.

Do you think they’ll get Obama for a holographic in-studio interview?

Second most useless expensive television graphic ever.

Plus, Al Franken’s floating point head!

Forget about Sean Hannity, Edward Tufte just busted a nut.

UPDATE: Speaking of Tufte, here’s an electoral map from two years ago speculating about a possible McCain-Obama matchup in this election.