As someone who has finally transitioned to the iPod generation and carries around my entire CD collection in my vest pocket, I already plug it into my car system whenever I’m not in the mood for NPR during my daily commute. But this certainly takes things to the next level.

The myth and math of Kerry’s electability. William Saletan writes in Slate: “By media consensus, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over. Why? Because John Kerry has won 12 of the 14 primaries and caucuses held so far. And why has Kerry won these contests? Not because voters agree with him on the issues. The reason, according to exit polls, is that voters think he’s the candidate most likely to beat President Bush. There’s just one problem: The same polls suggest this may not be true…

By and large, the closer you move to the center and center-right of the electorate, where the presidential race will probably be decided, the worse Kerry does. The opposite is true of Edwards.” And then there’s that Drudge infidelity gossip…

“The Crimson reported Kerry called for U.N. control of troops in 1970″. — Harvard Crimson The content of Kerry’s 1970 views is not as important as the inevitability that both their radicalism and their contradictions with his recent positions will be grist for Karl Rove’s mill (“…a spokesperson for President Bush’s reelection campaign said Kerry’s 1970 remarks signaled the senator’s weakness on defense.”). Robert Reich defends Kerry’s comments as appropriate for the time, when he was a just-returned veteran and the Vietnam war still raged. It goes without saying, but did Dubya even have a coherent thought about a political position in his head in 1970? Here’s a cogent observation from Rafe Coburn:

I kind of feel like people are having trouble seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to President Bush’s service in the National Guard. The issue here is that Bush took the rich man’s way out and went into the National Guard on the wings of a political favor, and then said Sunday in his interview with Tim Russert that he supported the war in Vietnam. Everything after that is window dressing. Even if he showed up and was the most conscientious National Guardsman during his time of service, he still decided he was too good to fight in a war that had his support. Isn’t that the character issue here? The fact that the paperwork is jumbled and they can’t find any actual people who will admit that they saw him doing his duty is a side dish.

It is equally, but not more, important to contrast their positions back then as it is to compare their ‘war records’ and, thanks, Rafe, for thinking through this latest troubling hypocrisy on Bush’s part. But it is taking the easy way out to punt on the AWOL issue. It would be far more than a ‘side dish’ if the commander-in-chief shirked his duty and is trying to cover it up with clumsy half-truths. You cannot blithely dismiss the dearth of evidence supporting Bush’s claim to be up-and-up on his National Guard duty as a paperwork snafu when a far more dire possibility exists.

But if Bush was more of a hypocritical ‘draft dodger’ than a deserter, let us hope the press and the Democrats bulldog him on the issue as the Republicans did to Clinton.

“The Blogger decision to offer Atom only has angered supporters of RSS, who accuse Google of helping to splinter a wide network of RSS-using bloggers.” — Ziff-Davis

“Criticism from Republicans and Democrats that President Bush gave a shaky performance on Sunday on ‘Meet the Press’ did not stop his re-election campaign from incorporating digitally enhanced excerpts from it into a promotional video that it posted on its Web site on Tuesday.

The campaign said it would remove the video from the site after NBC News complained that it was unfairly using the interview to support the re-election effort. The campaign said that it had violated no laws, but that it decided to take the video off after it realized how angry NBC News was over the use.” —New York Times

“February can be a hard month for movie lovers. The studios continue their annual winter clearance sales, dumping dumbed-down damaged goods into the multiplexes to offset their Oscar contenders. A few interesting films usually straggle into view, but it is easy to become dispirited and to succumb to gloomy grumbling about the sad condition of cinema.

Fortunately the Film Society of Lincoln Center is doing its part to help New York audiences dispel their midwinter malaise. The society’s fourth annual Film Comment Selects program, which starts today and runs for two weeks at the Walter Reade Theater, is an eclectic and intriguing minifestival, a collection of overlooked, underappreciated and sometimes just plain odd movies that should satisfy a wide range of tastes.” — New York Times Synchronicity strikes; see the Ripley post below. One of the films in the series is

Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel with John Malkovich in the title role… Though the film plays well on television (where it has turned up recently on cable, never having received a theatrical release), its unnerving, cold-blooded calm would be better experienced on the Walter Reade’s big screen. Ms. Highsmith’s elegant viciousness is brilliantly captured in Mr. Malkovich’s slithering performance, and Ms. Caviani’s chilly sensibility provides a good antidote to Anthony Minghella’s overwrought and over-costumed version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

“A serial killer may have murdered 12 men, hidden their bodies then assumed their identities, police feared last night.

Detectives believe he struck in the style of The Talented Mr Ripley, the fictional character who murdered a friend and took on his wealth and life.

A major search has been launched for 11 missing men following the discovery of a bloodbath at the home of a 12th, a retired librarian.

The body of the 63-year-old man is believed to have been dismembered there and dumped at a secret location. Then, it is alleged, his killer assumed his identity to steal more than £30,000 from his investments.

Yesterday, it was revealed that the librarian’s name and 11 others were on a list found at the suspect’s home. All the others have disappeared and senior police sources said there were ‘grave fears’ for them.” — femail.co.uk

Certainly, this item fits in my ‘Annals of Depravity’ department, but I was grabbed by the emulation of Patricia Highsmith’s chillingly sociopathic and (dare I say it?) curiously charming character. I have been a longtime fan of the four Ripley novels, which have enjoyed renewed attention given recent film adaptations. While there are endless debates about whether media and cultural violence make for a violent society, we are not talking here about a statistical increase but the ability to galvanize one twisted soul. How much must a serial killer’s story be in the zeitgeist to become an inspiration for real life gruesome acts? and to be familiar enough to the police investigators that they will recognize it as the inspiration? With the society’s infatuation with monsters, are life-imitates-art repellent crimes becoming more common?

“Every President makes foreign policy. Only a select few, over the sweep of history, design what scholars term grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country’s mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy’s grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries, of policy.

Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation’s most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.” — Boston Globe

‘Homosexual’ is passé in a ‘boi’s’ life: “First, there was the term ‘homosexual,’ then ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ then the once taboo ‘dyke’ and ‘queer.’

Now, all bets are off.” — San Francisco Chronicle

In this interview, Peter Singer argues that evolutionary theory has much to say that the Left ought to listen to. He claims that Leftist utopianism has failed to take account of human nature and blames that naiveté for the corruption and authoritarian failures of socialist regimes; the discipline of evolutionary psychology, Singer feels, is the key to understanding this ‘human nature.’ “I think it would be true generally that anyone who has views about how society should end up will have a better chance to achieve that if they understand the Darwinian framework of human nature.” In particular, because it offers an explanatory framework for understanding the development of human reciprocity, evolutionary theory helps us understand the basis for any ethical theory on which changing society must be based. — The Philosopher’s Magazine [via Butterflies and Wheels]

“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it, or read it, even in this newspaper: ‘The proof is in the pudding.’ ‘No, it isn’t,’ I want to scream. ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ Cervantes wrote that four centuries ago. And don’t get me started about having your cake and eating it, too. You have to have your cake in order to eat it. The trick is to eat it and still have it.

At least it used to be, back when we knew our proverbs and weren’t misusing the word ‘proverbial.’ Not that America is going to fall apart because we butcher a few bromides. But I’m concerned about a country that’s not quite sure what it’s saying and doesn’t seem to care.” — Boston Globe Magazine

“Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease.

But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.

The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University and will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.” — New York Times

She was one of twenty-five volunteers in a study of larger than therapeutic doses of the investigational antidepressant duloxetine, which Eli Lilly is developing under the trade name Cymbalta. Four days earlier, the apparently non-depressed young woman had been switched from the active drug to the placebo arm of the study. Her death bolsters critics’ claims that antidepressants carry a risk of suicidal tendencies for some, especially younger, people. A federal advisory panel has just recommended that the FDA issue stronger warnings to doctors about the risks of these drugs in children and adolescents. Four other people given duloxetine during earlier trials have also committed suicide, the company revealed. A review panel has told Eli Lilly to stop entering new patients into this study and have all existing subjects receive an evaluation by an independent psychiatrist.

I thought, when I read the news, that the patient’s death was more likely to be an effect of the discontinuation of the drug than of its administration. (The New York Times reporter who wrote this story apparently thinks so too, as I was surprised to find when I scrolled down the article. The reporter is either very psychopharmacologically astute or he has an unattributed advisor in deep background. I was surprised, indeed, that the article includes no comments from psychopharmacologists outside of Eli Lilly spokespeople. Is it possible no one is willing to go on record with comments that will alienate the company?) Antidepressants that are eliminated rapidly from the body after cessation of use, most notably paroxetine, are known to cause a discontinuation syndrome including severe agitation; the investigational drug is another that has rapid elimination and the study design apparently involved high doses of the drug and a so-called ‘crossover design’ in which patients are switched abruptly and unknowingly between the medication and a placebo. You would think Eli Lilly would be aware of the risks of such a practice. My guess is that they were. The profits at stake if Lilly comes up with another blockbuster antidepressant to replace the market share it has lost with the expiration of the patent rights to its cash cow Prozac are worth a few wrongful-death settlements. (My friend Abby points out that human investigation subjects probably indemnify the company against wrongful death during the study anyway; I haven’t looked at a consent form recently and don’t know. This young woman had dropped out of college to participate in the study, for which she was paid $150/day.) Duloxetine is a good candidate for the next big thing; it has a similar mechanism of action to venlafaxine (Effexor) — dual serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibition — which is newer and better than the SSRIs and has supplanted them in terms of prescribing volume and profitability.

As I usually add in covering this ongoing controversy over antidepressant safety, it is not the drug that is dangerous, but the way in which it was administered.