columnist and author of the 'nanny state'

O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there even been another place on earth where so many people of wealthand power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders?

I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.

I liked one of these a lot more than the other:

Wall Street Journal: To Tweet, Or Not to Tweet: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—at times—seem all the digital distractions of this world.

Washington Post: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

(William Buckley)

(Nat Hentoff)

(Albert Einstein)

(Al Gore)

(Martin Amis)

(Martha Stewart)

Folks have started sending me more.

(Michael Pollan — his book, ‘A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams’, is about building this office.)

(H. L. Mencken)

(J.G. Ballard)

(Ass kicking.)

(Cornel West)

Here is Brian Doherty’s excellent post on Alex Chilton.

Paul Westerberg.

I’ll be taping a segment of Stossel for Fox Business News this Wednesday. If you’re interested in attending this, or another taping, here is the information:

Join our live New York studio audience! To reserve your seats, please call us at 1-877-369-8587 or send an e-mail to stosseltix@foxbusiness.com!

Please be sure to include the date you wish to attend (see below for details on dates and show topics), the number of seats you need, and a phone number where we can reach you.

WHEN: Wednesday, March 17th
TIME: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
TOPIC: Science & Politics

My recent column, “Peculiar be thy name”, opened with this sentence:

Perhaps no finer Christian name has ever been bestowed upon a child than the one Jermaine Jackson, of Jackson 5 fame, came up with for his son: Jermajesty.

I may be proven wrong.

The name of Mike Affinito’s Facebook page says it all: “MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON.”

Launching the page on February 27, Affinito had more than five months to rally the million followers before the baby is due.

It took only 13 days.

Tickled by the idea of naming the child after the leader of the Decepticons in “The Transformers,” 10 Facebook users joined in the first hour. Now, each hour brings thousands of new fans. The official count, as of this writing, reads 1,097,139. Not bad for a wager that no doubt sounded absurd in the beginning.

(Via Allahpundit)