WILL THE NEXT KINDLE FEATURE a front-lit display?

AT AMAZON, Kindle E-Readers as low as $79. I’m still liking my Kindle Fire. Sarah Hoyt sent me the manuscript of her next novel, A Few Good Men, and the PDF transferred over just fine.

I also read an advance galley John Birmingham’s Angels of Vengeance, which comes out tomorrow, that way. It’s the wrapup to his series begun in Without Warning and After America. Very nice, and definitely recommended.

DEREK LOWE EXPLAINS his doubts about taking resveratrol.

JIM TREACHER: “So Bill Gates wants to take raw sewage and turn it into something suitable for human consumption. You’d think he’d have learned his lesson after Vista.”

BUBBLICIOUS? Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.

AN APPALACHIAN STEREOTYPE YOU MAY HAVE MISSED: Success In Hill Country.

A SIMULATION I COULD DO WITHOUT: I Had Arthritis — For An Hour.

“HUMAN WAVE” SCIENCE FICTION: Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt. “Writing is communication. Your objective is to communicate with as many people as possible. Or at least to amuse them, distract them, or make the burden of life less burdensome for a while. Wishing to feed your family is also an acceptable goal.”

And Charlie Martin. “We experience Establishment SF as a depressing, dyspeptic, dystopian, and ultimately disagreeable subgenre in which conformity to certain imperatives, often shared with the mainstream of literary, New Yorker, Iowa Workshop genre of legacy fiction is expected — and enforced.”

NEUTRAL REPORTAGE: Times Picayune: Local activist becomes New York Times reporter for Danziger Bridge sentencing. “Local left-wing activist Jordan Flaherty led a demonstration last summer celebrating the convictions of five New Orleans police officers in the shooting of unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina. The demonstration was posted on YouTube; Flaherty begins speaking about the convictions about 1:40 into his remarks. Last week, Flaherty helped to cover the sentencing of the five officers as a reporter for The New York Times. He was credited as a contributor to the newspaper’s report.”

ANDREW KLAVAN ON NBC’S EDITGATE: The Big Double Standard.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson writes: “The NBC News editing of the Zimmerman 911 call really makes me wonder how many times in the past several decades something like this happened and we never knew anything about it.”

JAMES O’KEEFE allowed to vote Eric Holder’s ballot.

MEASUREMENTS: Waist Size Helps Predict Heart Risk in Teenagers.

Using waist measurements together with body mass index may better predict a teenager’s cardiovascular risk than using B.M.I. alone, a new study finds.

Pediatricians and medical groups routinely use B.M.I. as a measure of unhealthy weight in children. But the index, calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by the square of one’s height in meters, cannot differentiate between fatty and lean tissue. So an athletic, muscular teen could be classified as overweight or obese using B.M.I. alone.

Some researchers have proposed using waist circumference percentile — or a similar measure, waist-to-height ratio — as a better gauge of health. But the new study, published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that neither measurement alone was sufficient.

Anything’s better than BMI, which makes bodybuilders with 3% bodyfat measure as grossly obese, and which was never intended for individual evaluations.

MONOLITHS FROM THE nuclear netherworld.

AN ETHNIC MONOCULTURE: It’s “Game On” At Obama’s Chicago Campaign HQ, If the Game You’re Playing is “Whites-Only Dungeons & Dragons.” Whiter than any Tea Party rally I’ve attended. Heck, it’s as white as a Howard Dean meetup. Funny that the media folks didn’t notice. They seem to pay closer attention to the ethnic mix at Tea Party rallies. But then, Tea Party rallies actually have an ethnic mix. . . .

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Myth of America’s Decline.

IS PROF. PHILIP KITCHER PEDDLING the philosophical equivalent of tainted meat? “What’s the most misaligned aspect of my analogy? It’s that the butcher would prefer to have untainted meat to sell. He’s not using meat as a vehicle for delivering e. coli.” Ouch.

Plus, from the comments: “Strangely enough, ‘progressivism’ was broadly associated with eugenics and racism and yet the only people who remember that are the people accused of being social darwinists.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Don’t Know Much About Theology? Then There May Be A Job For You In The Media.

A newly-released study from the University of Southern California provides chilling evidence that the MSM’s religious incompetence and insensitivity runs deep. A key discovery:

One-half of reporters say the biggest challenge to covering religion is a lack of knowledge about the subject. Only a fifth of reporters say they are “very knowledgeable” about religion, and most of these are mainly familiar with their own religious traditions, not the wider array of faiths and practices.

This doesn’t just tell us something about the qualifications of journalists. It says something depressing about the ability of editors to hire people with the background and the knowledge that allow them to cover world events intelligently. With some significant and honorable individual exceptions, the mainstream press today lacks the expertise it needs to assess and report some of the most important stories on the planet.

Indeed.

MICKEY KAUS: “Why can’t teens get jobs in manufacturing? The answer can’t be that new manufacturing jobs require computing skills. Teens have those, no?”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmarks to Return if GOP Porkers Get Their Way. “Proving they’ve learned nothing from lessons of the past, some House Republicans are pushing to bring back the wide-scale use of earmarks to Congress. These pigs in elephants’ clothing want to end a three-year moratorium on earmarks and start trading pork projects for votes in order to pass legislation, even though their big spending, earmarking ways during the George W. Bush era cost them dozens of elections.”

I guess it’s too late to primary them. This time.

SPENGLER: An Open Letter to Günter Grass. “I should like you to think about something that is less well known, Herr Grass, and that is the fact that the First and Second World Wars were entirely unnecessary. That’s right: the fact that they were fought in the first place is entirely the fault of people like you.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY for younger kids.

AT AMAZON, a spring sale on Men’s Levis.

WORTH REVISITING: James Fallows’ 1996 Piece On Why Americans Hate The Media. Alas, things have only gotten worse.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:

Black caucus chairman condemns Dem claims GOP is waging ‘war on women’.

Mickey Kaus: Nameless Scapegoat Watch.

My Second Amendment Penumbras piece, just out from the Southern California Law Review, hits #1 on SSRN.

David Kirkham For Governor.

What The “End of Retail” Means for Young Workers.

Poll: Only 15% of likely voters think Supreme Court limits government too much. Twice as many think the answer is “not enough.”

Some names in the NBC “EditGate” Story.

Hope and Change: Crowd Beats, Strips & Robs Tourist On St. Patrick’s Day; Incident Caught On Camera.

Good news for space entrepreneurialism.

Battery chargers.

Germany set to tax young to pay for old.

Disaster Prep goes mainstream.

Diversity problems at the University of Iowa.

Women write dirty books for other women to read. Bill Bennett blames men.