WILL THE LAST RETAILER LEAVING THE STRIP MALL TURN THE LIGHTS OFF, PLEASE? “Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually:”

We left the store, my friend having made his purchase but both of us fuming.  I was reminded of a line from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” One character asks another how he went bankrupt.  “Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly.”  Best Buy, I thought, is doing the same, just as many big box retailers have done in the last decade.First comes the strategic bankruptcy, well in progress at Best Buy, where management’s sole focus is improving some arbitrary metric from last quarter, even when doing so actually interferes with customers trying to buy something else.  The financial collapse comes later.  But if history is any guide, the second part, once it starts, will be quick.

As with many large retailers unable to cope with new channels and new consumer expectations, the company will continue to sputter on fumes, slowing down bit by bit until one day it just stops moving. Think of Elek-Tek, Virgin Megastores, or KB Toys.  (See a non-exhaustive, nostalgia-inducing list of recently-failed retailers over at Wikipedia.)

Or Borders Books. I love Amazon, but I’d like to think there will be a few retailers left in the coming years where you can walk in and buy a product — and even have a cheerful experience doing so. But as Larry Downes writes in Forbes, Best Buy seems to be doing its darnedest to alienate its customers, both those walking into its stores, and especially those shopping online at Christmastime. The result, Steve Green notes at Vodkapundit is “weaker than expected” Christmas sales numbers for the retailer. “I don’t know whether the bad numbers were due to the weak economy, or because Best Buy has entered its death spiral,” Steve writes.

Possibly, the answer to both halves of that equation is yes.

ANDREW FERGUSON: The Chump Effect: Reporters are credulous, studies show.

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.

Read the whole thing.

IS POP CULTURE IN PARALYSIS? That’s the question that the Hoover Institute’s Emily Esfahani Smith asks on her blog, with an assist from Kurt Anderson of Vanity Fair.

The downside: It’s much harder to have a unified sense of culture now that the mass media of the 1920s through the 1980s is no more, thus leading both to the existence of “present-tense culture,” and the desire to hang onto the beloved older forms of the past. (See also: endless Hollywood sequels and the ubiquity of forty year old rock songs.) The upside: it’s much easier to create your own.

MICHAEL WALSH: Hey, Remember This Guy? During primary season, let’s not forget the real problem — Obama.

AFTER THE NEW HAMPSHIRE DEBATE, Peter Ingemi meets the most important person in the bar.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Why is Romney doing such a lousy job defending his record at Bain Capital? “Not only is Romney’s Bain record on trial here, so is the whole idea of Schumpeterian, entrepreneurial capitalism where ‘creative destruction’ creates a massive net benefit for society. This is exactly the idea that the Obama reelection campaign is attacking as promoting unacceptable levels of inequality. (Apparently bad government investments — like in Solyndra — that lose jobs are OK.)”

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Judge Cabranes’ Three-Part Prescription for Law Schools.

MOTHERS, BABIES AND CELL TRANSFER:

During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland.

Moms usually tolerate the invasion. This is why skin, organ, and bone marrow transplants between mother and child have a much higher success rate than between father and child. . . . It turns out that when fetal cells are good, they are very, very good. They may protect mothers from some forms of cancer. Fetal cells show up significantly more often in the breast tissue of women who don’t have breast cancer than in women who do (43 versus 14 percent). Why is this? Fetal cells are foreign to the mother because they contain DNA from the baby’s father. One theory is that this “otherness” stimulates the mother’s immune system just enough to help keep malignant cells in check. The more fetal cells there are in a woman’s body, the less active are autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. These conditions improve during pregnancy and for some time afterward — suggesting that the mother’s immune system is more focused on attacking the “other,” not herself. There’s also tantalizing evidence that fetal cells may offer the mother increased resistance to certain diseases, thanks to the presence of the father’s immune system genes. These are new weapons in the war chest.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Don’t Blame For-Profit Colleges for the Higher-Ed Lobbying Epidemic. “For-profit colleges aren’t the first, or even the biggest, education lobbyists. They simply learned from the best: America’s beloved public and nonprofit universities.”

RON RADOSH: Republican Infighting — A Gift To Barack Obama?

BOB KRUMM: The Tyranny Of Bureaucracy.

TOM BLUMER: The Associated Press’s Stinky ‘New Distinctiveness.’ “When you read the memo’s text, and just a bit between the lines, what you find is a justification for and formulation of a new form of agenda journalism from the people whose only job should be relaying the facts, something they have been doing progressively (pun intended) more poorly in recent years.”

SO LET IT BE WRITTEN, so let it be done.

THE DEBATE THAT MADE NO DIFFERENCE: “At about 10:28pm tonight, as Mitt Romney pivoted from a question on tax loopholes and started in with, ‘the real issue is vision,’ I had recorded this thought in my notes, ‘He just clinched the nomination,'” Michael Barone writes.

UPDATE: Team Romney: Stephanopoulos has a strange obsession with contraception. (By Glenn).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Fairness lost. Stephanopoulos struggles with fairness during New Hampshire debate. “ABC News commentator George Stephanopoulos directed pointed, hard-edged questions to Republican presidential candidates during Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate, often attacking without providing evidence to justify his broadsides.”

Meanwhile, those interested in Griswold might be interested in my piece on the case, Sex Lies and Jurisprudence: Robert Bork, Griswold, and the Philosophy of Original Understanding. In short, I think that Griswold was correctly decided. However, were it applied faithfully, many other state and federal laws having nothing to do with contraception would have to go, too. Which would be fine with me . . . . (By Glenn).

FIVE KEYS TO SLEEPING WELL TONIGHT.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Cornel West’s rap album, and William Shatner’s spoken-word releases.

JESSICA HESLAM ON Santorum’s mourning and her own.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Exercise & Fitness.

Also in Activewear.

PALESTINIAN SESAME STREET FALLS VICTIM TO US CONGRESS: “Every election cycle we see stories about how those heartless Republicans want to kill Big Bird by privatizing PBS. But did you know we’re also picking up the tab for the Palestinian version of Sesame Street?”

ON THOSE NEW JOBLESS NUMBERS: “The recession may have ended in mid-2009 according to the economists, but the normal rate of growth in the size of the labor force stopped in 2008 and has yet to return. Heck of a job, Mr. President. If you drive enough Americans out of the labor force, unemployment will get down to the 4 to 6 percent range it was during the Bush years!” They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please. . . .

HMM: U.S. auto execs are the least optimistic about electric-drive adoption.

BOB KERREY MAY JUMP INTO SENATE RACE to replace Ben Nelson in Nebraska. Walter Mondale, Frank Lautenberg and other would-be Democratic senatorial retreads could not be reached for comment.

INTERVIEW: Stephen Hawking at 70.

WHILE THE REBUILDING OF THE WTC PROCEEDS AT A GLACIAL PACE IN NEW YORK, the Chinese are putting up time-lapse videos showing a 30-story hotel being built in 15 days.

But will there be any occupants?

STACY MCCAIN: Two Excellent Arguments in Favor of a Jon Huntsman Presidency.