Quick Reads

1. Dan Carlson, in his ongoing series on the best television of the last 20 years, writes about Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. Good review.

2. Andrew Gelman's new book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way they Do looks interesting. Just in time for the election. Here's a list of facts vs. myths which are on the book jacket:

Myth: The rich vote based on economics, the poor vote "God, guns, and gays."
Fact: Church attendance predicts Republican voting much more among rich than poor.

Myth: A political divide exists between working-class "red America" and rich "blue America."
Fact: Within any state, more rich people vote Republican. The real divide is between higher-income voters in red and blue states.

Myth: Rich people vote for the Democrats.
Fact: George W. Bush won more than 60 percent of high-income voters.

Myth: Religion is particularly divisive in American politics.
Fact: Religious and secular voters differ no more in America than in France, Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries.

Pretty interesting. You can get the book from Amazon. And, correction, it looks like it was published a few weeks ago.

3. Buffy the cartoon, the pilot, is on youtube.

4. Brian May, guitarist for Queen, finished his PhD in Astrophysics and found a publisher for his dissertation. It's at Amazon. I'm betting this will be the best selling astrophysics book in history. If it sells more than 2, actually, it'll be the best selling astrophysics book in history. But, I bet they're hoping for a kind of Stephen Hawking, Brief History of Time - that erudite coffeetable book which everyone had in the 1990s, but no one had read, as it was actually quite dense. Correction, at $71.96, maybe Springer wasn't looking for a bestseller.

5. Virginia Postrel writes about Kerwin Charles and Erik Hurst's bling studies on conspicuous consumption and inequality in The Atlantic. Of it, she writes "The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes."

6. Ian Ayres reminisces on when Obama was editor of the Law Review and he oversaw publishing Ayres now famous paper on discrimination in negotiations over automobiles.