AT AMAZON, up to 40% off on select Baseball Training Equipment.

Also, deals galore at the Home Audio & Home Theater Store.

ARKANSAS STUDENT ARRESTED for filing false rape report. I like that they published her name and picture. When you file a false rape report, you’re not a victim.

DOES THE FACT THAT SUPERMAN CAN MAKE DIAMONDS JUST BY CRUSHING COAL IN HIS HANDS UNDERMINE THIS LIST? Richest Superheroes, Ranked.

HMM: The Obama Coalition Is About to Come Apart: He owes it all to the Keystone Kops of the leisure class.

AT AMAZON, up to 50% off Makita Tools.

Also, new markdowns in Spring Clothing, for men, women & kids.

OOPS: Another Russian Rocket Explodes.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity May Not Exist.

PUSHBACK WORKS: SunTrust Reverses Decision On Conservative Benham Brothers. This time the pushback worked so fast that it was over by the time I noticed. “SunTrust supports the rights of all Americans to fully exercise their freedoms granted under the Constitution, including those with respect to free speech and freedom of religion.”

IMAGES: THE MYSTERIOUS NEW YORK CITY ISLAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF. “Between the 1880s and the 1930s, North Brother Island was the site of Riverside Hospital, where those suffering from infectious disease were treated in isolation. After World War II, it served as a housing community for returning veterans and their families. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it became a juvenile drug treatment center.”

THE FEMALE SOCIOPATH: “Amy Dunne of Gone Girl, Lisbeth Salander of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones. If there’s one thing these cold, calculating ladies can teach us, it’s that we’re captivated by the female sociopath. But how did she rise to such prominence in our cultural imagination? The answer has everything to do with corporate ‘feminists’ and the way they teach women to ‘have it all.’ . . . Despite its uncanny resemblance to a book like Lean In, which was released two months before, Confessions of A Sociopath debuted to mixed reviews.”

REVIEW: BMW’s New Hybrid Supercar Is Thrilling—And Somehow Practical.

WELL, THEY’RE NOT BETTER OFF THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO. OR SIX. To hold Senate, Democrats look to black voters. Will enough be there? “In a handful of states, including Georgia, Democratic Senate candidates are counting on black voters to turn out big time to help them win. But signs are that enthusiasm for Democrats has been slipping among African-Americans.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: It Makes Economic Sense to Attend Only 48 Law Schools at Full Sticker Price.

Some related thoughts from Jennifer Bard. Interesting discussion in the comments, too.

REGULATORY BLOWBACK: FDA Drives Medical Innovation Overseas.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCLA prof says stats prove school’s admissions illegally favor blacks. “While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the ‘maybe’ pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, ‘Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.’”

FALSE RAPE FALLOUT: Durham settles with wrongly accused Duke lacrosse players.

DO PLANETS KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE? Great Red Spot Not Doing So Great: A long-term shrinking appears to be accelerating. “Observations made from Earth in the 1800s suggest that the Red Spot was once over 40,000 km across. By the time the Voyagers visited and provided an accurate measure, the Spot was down to 23,000 km. Hubble has been taking images regularly, but NASA credits amateur astronomers for noticing that the rate of the storm’s dissipation picked up in 2012, with the feature losing 900 km of diameter (559 miles) a year since then.” Amateur astronomers notice a lot.

SO I WROTE A WHILE BACK about a friend whose car was struck by lightning, leaving her trapped. In this story, another woman was trapped in her SUV after a lightning strike, only in this case her car also caught fire. Yet another reason to carry a Lifehammer or ResQMe tool.

DEREK LOWE ON WHAT JON STEWART DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT ANTIBIOTICS:

There’s a persistent explanation for the state of antibiotic therapy that blames drug companies for supposedly walking away from the field. This has the cause and effect turned around. It’s true that some of them have given up working in the area (along with quite a few other areas), but they left because nothing was working. The companies that stayed the course have explored, in great detail and at great expense, the problem that nothing much is working. If there ever was a field of drug discovery where the low-hanging fruit has been picked clean, it is antibiotic research. You have to use binoculars to convince yourself that there’s any more fruit up there at all. I wish that weren’t so, very much. But it is. Bacteria are hard to kill.

So the talk later on in the interview of spending some tax dollars and getting a bunch of great new antibiotics in ten years is, unfortunately, a happy fantasy. For one thing, getting a single new drug onto the market in only ten years from the starting pistol is very close to impossible, in any therapeutic area. The drug industry would be in much better shape if that weren’t so, but here we are. In that section, Jon Stewart actually brings to life one of the reasons I have this blog: he doesn’t know where drugs come from, and that’s no disgrace, because hardly anyone else knows, either.

Lots of things are harder than people who don’t understand them think.

SPACE: How Badly Can Russia Put The Squeeze On NASA? “On the manned spaceflight front, NASA is now completely reliant on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft and rockets to get its astronauts to the International Space Station. . . . On the unmanned front, United Launch Alliance (ULA), the near-monopoly created by Boeing and Lockheed Martin for launching satellites for the Pentagon, depends on the Russian-built RD-180 to power the first stage of its Atlas V satellite launcher.”

WHY ARE WOMEN JOURNALISTS WRITING ABOUT THE ABRAMSON AFFAIR all writing the same thing? “All the female columnists doing pretty much the same thing, and I feel some pressure to do it too. And I suspect Jill Abramson herself is working on a screed — something that doesn’t violate whatever secrecy agreement she has with the NYT. A year from now, Abramson will have some book, some variation on ‘Lean In’ about the heights and pitfalls of female leadership. . . . I feel pushed to talk about pushiness. And I feel irked to accept Jill Abramson as the face of the topic of The Problem of Female Leadership. I don’t particularly like her, and I suspect she did not do a good job for The New York Times, and they had every reason to oust her.”

From the comments: “Men are fired from Executive Positions all the time. This is not news. It shouldn’t be for women either.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 372.

SO, HE’S JUST ANOTHER CELEBRITY WHO TALKS A GOOD GAME WHILE QUIETLY PERFORMING FOR DICTATORS’ BIRTHDAYS OR SOMETHING: Joseph Stiglitz’s Curious ‘Outside Activities;’ The self-styled champion of the poor is not eager to disclose his ties with foreign leaders.

JUSTICE: Innocent man cleared after serving 10 years as ‘Bronx rapist.’