A study of the Times’s most-emailed articles shows people want to spread positive, awe-inspiring news.

N.A.S.A. launches David Bowie concept mission.

Someone leaked a memo about Operation Stardust to the papers…I ate Dexamyl for dinner.

I work on the Bowie principal—do something once and it’s a mistake; do it three times and it’s an arrangement. L.R.B. personals editor serves up his favorite ads.

As the Olympics roll up once again, editors cringe over writers who verb “podium” and “medal.”

Arizona Tea Partier plans a summer run against McCain, who counters with an awkward move to the far right.

White House proposes a new climate service to provide farmers and water regulators with global warming forecasts.

Matthew Lickona explains why he wrote a comic book about an aborted fetus.

British designers draft a safer pint glass.

A man turns the detritus of his life into a yard of scrap memories, and his neighbors hate him for it.

Google Voice poetry.

Matthew Baldwin’s 2010 “Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool” is now open and ready for your party’s picks.

You can only put so many goldfish in a tank. How to measure economic activity from outer space.

Op: We the idiots are responsible for America’s political and economic crisis.

Shanghai moves to discourage people from wearing pajamas in public.

“Triumphalist nature” of Sinatra’s “My Way” cited as why it has fueled so many fatal fights in the Philippines.

Photos: Underage migrant workers flood India.

Women who give birth after 40 nearly twice as likely to have a child with autism; however, older mothers barely account for the increase in autism diagnoses.

She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.

Studies show that massive bonuses discourage people from working to the best of their abilities.

Study of graffiti trends in college bathrooms.

Snow-shovel racing pulls back from a super-modified future, and the world championship witnesses no injuries.

Vancouver welcomes the Olympics with its largest show of force since World War II.

Roger Ebert pays tribute to the London life he remembers.

The argument for Chatroulette, and the argument against it, sort of.

Many worry Canada’s housing recovery may have been so swift that it will cause another bubble.

Palin calls not considering a 2012 presidential run “absurd,” even though it wasn’t written on her hand.

How a man arrested for attacking his prostitute girlfriend and ex-wife (while on a steroidal rage) became Illinois’s new lieutenant governor.

America’s worst political ads.

How the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl spot came together without CGI.

We meant to give it to you when you bought your Prius, in your Prius, to secure the engine block.

This year’s Olympic medals are made from recycled electronic parts.

All my life I have grafted fistfuls of dimly grasped concepts to a series of barely articulated goals. Going whole grain.

TMN seek a winter intern; applications due next Monday.

For Kevin Nguyen, karaoke has taken him from the living room to the Czech Republic—just like Taylor Swift.

“It’s the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” Vintage Yalies react to their alma mater’s new admissions video.

Scientists make model of dinosaur as it actually was: with feathers.

Op: Obama promised to fight corruption and has not; faith in congress is gone; our democracy is feigned, breeding cynicism.

Part one: The U.S.-China relationship is too big to fail; we’ve seen these snafus before.

Part two: Neither the U.S. nor China will prosper if disagreements become conflicts.

Part three: We treat China, a crucial economic partner, as an adversary; how many enemies do we need?

Slideshow of five world leaders unknown to be dead or alive.

Instapaper for Saturday: Port-au-Prince is a city of high walls, all of which came down.

Blog chronicles a frozen house in Detroit.

Announcement TMN seeks winter intern.

Some states store baby DNA; outside researchers sometimes get specimens with names attached.

New form of insulin derived from safflowers.

Nature calls on scientists to write more popular books (see also: Q&A on writing a textbook).

Audio: Radiolab’s Krulwich exhorts CalTech graduates to tell stories—if only to combat ignorance in Turkey.

“Neurocriminology,” applying neuroscience to understand criminality, is limited, but it’s meeting less institutional resistance.

Thought-controlled lighting to be demoed at the Winter Olympics.

Reporter’s account of having her brain temporarily “switched off.”

Deresiewicz calls the new Nabokov “a sham, a scam, a red herring,” a Knopf canard for cash.

Videos: Appreciation, with notes, of the great Buster Keaton.

Archive of 38 years of Super Bowl commercials.

Instapaper for the commute: Survey of the remaining grit in La Françafrique.

Russia confirms it too will drop its moon program.

Op: Biden sends a better message when he goes off-message.

Confessions of a Salinger gatekeeper who didn’t like his books much anyway.

Google and the N.S.A. team up for cyber-defense; N.S.A. historian “a little uncomfortable” with close cooperation.

Family Research Council would like gay behavior outlawed.

Estimated profits of Hollywood’s top earners; Emma Watson, #14, is the top woman.

Profile of the “Bling Ring:” L.A. teenagers who stole $3 million worth of clothes and jewelry from celebrities.

Demographic data turned into urns.

Scottish thugs’ favorite drink, Buckfast, includes 15% alcohol and as much caffeine as eight Cokes.

Photographs of Mars made from paprika, cinnamon, and chili powder, and other strange miniatures.

Video: Bluebrain Year One, attempting to reverse-engineer a human brain.

“Underwater plane” can carry three passengers 36,000 feet below the ocean surface.

Classical musicians essentially need to be in the business of adult education if they are to keep their audience.

Gapers Block editor shares the original Facebook: his high-school journal, with friends’ contributions.

Laundry detergent, energy drinks, and Hyundais all experienced recession-related sales increases.

Whether Toyota will speedily recover from this setback or suffer permanent harm is uncertain, but the betting must be on the latter.

Senate report details how large American banks are unwittingly laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for African politicians.

Harvard crowdsources its disease research.

Op: The retraction of a 1998 paper connecting vaccines to autism won’t slow the anti-vaccine movement.

In a new study of 54 vegetative patients, five show brain activity to indicate awareness; one could respond to questions.

“I believe it is of crucial importance to work with, in harmony with nature.” Prince Charles declares war on the Enlightenment.

Do not be tempted to use a certain word to describe the news cycle around Emanuel’s use of “retarded.”

None of the children taken…were orphans nor even particularly desperate. American missionaries in Haiti jailed for child trafficking.

Photos: 100 feet below Grand Central, M.T.A. workers cut through solid rock to connect four L.I.R.R. tunnels.

Chock Full o’ Nuts converted to a coffee chain in the 1930s; ever since, it’s been tough business for Manhattan nut roasters.

Choire Sicha interviews Paul Ford about online magazines and the paywalled web.

Four months after the massacre, power is transferred peacefully in Guinea.

Various world leaders measured for sickness, sneezing, colds.

Twenty years after its first store in Pushkin Square, McDonald’s chooses Russia as its top country for reinvestment in 2010.

A.I.G. to pay out $100 million in bonuses, plus tens of millions more in March.

Chart of Olympic medals versus G.D.P.; colleges ranked by the popularity of their web sites.

Op: McCain the former war hero doesn’t believe in military readiness.

“There’s nothing more to be said about ‘why no bipartisanship,’ once one recognizes the G.O.P.’s discipline.”

Condé Nast sets up snitch line for employees to tattle on one another.

On the Edwards sex tape: “To remove all digital evidence of her dalliance, [Hunter] should have burned it, preferably in a licensed incineration facility.”

Fascinating photos from one cubic foot of ecosystem.

The pitch of the blues: Blue whales are singing in a lower key, which suggests they’re flourishing.

Writer consults the compulsion to pare down his style and quit foregrounding the rendering.

Art to see: “Glean” in New York, “Default State Network” in Los Angeles; “Art Bin” in London.

Sound map of the United States needs your samples.

Accounts of recovering art from the Nazis.

House members issue letter to Toyota, seeking proof its purported fix will solve the problem of unexpected acceleration in its cars.

A former lawyer for Toyota claims he has proof of the automaker’s history of concealing safety issues.

Dispatch from Tarnac, home to France’s enemies of state.

Three years ago, McCain said he’d support a ban on “don’t ask, don’t tell”; today, he calls it “imperfect but effective.”

Upper-East-Siders, drug dealers prefer silent dogs, face ethical questions over their decision to debark.

This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This is a typical incendiary blog post.

Early version of the Constitution unearthed in Philadelphia.

C.I.A. offers corporate side-jobs to agents.

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot… Faber editor sends an open letter to Morrissey.

TMN needs an intern for the winter months.

An interview with James Dickey’s son, Christopher, on the event of his father’s birthday.

He…is allowed to evolve past the cycle of samsara to nirvana. The philosophy of Bill Murray.

Arenas: If I steer just one young person away from violence, then I’m living up to Abe Pollin’s legacy.

How Davos is like a magazine cover: by the time a trend percolates up, its time has already past.

Data shows that modern college-educated women are more likely to be married at 40, more likely to describe their marriages as “happy.”

Little Sweetie’s billions won’t go to the feng shui master who gave her love and a $6,500 head rub.

Pratchett: I would like to die peacefully before [Alzheimer’s] takes me over.

Video analysis of the forces involved in an aerial skiier’s “double full full full.”

Instapaper for the commute: How to survive a fall from 35,000 feet.

Brief history of the modern use of executed people’s blood to treat epilepsy.

So people in 2010 are dicks? Nerd informs 1990 self about the iPad, Obama, and cynicism.

Interactive graphic defines associations between colors and words.

Bartenders tell TMN’s Clay Risen about the most commonly mispronounced drinks.

Explanation of the “surprisingly helpful” theory that we all live in a giant cosmic hologram.

Audio: The sound of Saturn’s rings.

Ze Frank’s “Pain Pack”: messages of hurting transformed into song.

English writer awarded grant to use sheep to make poems.

Al Qaeda dropouts may provide the key to radicalism.

Scientists create possible nuclear-waste-eating Venus flytrap.

Choire Sicha offers the most accurate review possible of When in Rome.

A new kind abstinence-only program—it doesn’t preach morality or marriage—has actually diminished rates of teen sexual activity.

Video: Jane Chen shows how a low-cost, portable incubator could save the lives of millions of infants in developing nations.

The new model: Submit your Super Bowl ad, respond in outrage after it’s rejected, get more publicity than the ad would have generated.

New Orleans will love Archie Manning, no matter what his son may do; the Super Bowl trip is the best thing that has ever happened to the city.

A visit to Next Media’s Taipei offices, where animators reenact the news the cameras can’t capture.

TMN is looking for a winter intern who can give this headline more of a hook.

A Q&A with the Marxist professor accidentally responsible for Texas banning Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Plenty of teenagers still love Catcher in the Rye. In fact, my Facebook feed was full of tributes to Salinger the day he died.

Recalling a bad idea to visit Salinger and demand he turn over everything he’d written since 1965.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did. An interview with Bill Watterson, reclusive Calvin and Hobbes creator.

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.