THE ECONOMIST RANKS COLLEGES based on whether post-college earnings overperform or underperform relative to expectations. The winners and losers may surprise you. They certainly should make Yale nervous.

ADVICE TO “REPUTATION MANAGEMENT” FIRMS: Don’t threaten lawyers. Especially lawyers with strong social-media presences. . . .

HARVEY WEINSTEIN FURIOUS AT QUENTIN TARANTINO FOR ANTI-COP RALLY:

Harvey Weinstein is said to be furious at Quentin Tarantino for going to an anti-police rally on Oct. 24 and calling cops “murderers.”

With police groups now calling for a boycott of the director’s “The Hateful Eight,” sources say Weinstein wants Tarantino to apologize, or at least walk back his comments.

“The last thing Harvey needs is a boycott that will scare off Oscar voters and hurt the box office,” said one insider.

But last year, talking with anti-Second Amendment zealot Piers Morgan, Weinstein promised that “I have to choose [to produce and distribute] movies that aren’t violent or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know, I can’t continue to do that.” So unless Tarantino’s Hateful Eight contains the elegiac tone of say, Woody Allen’s Interiors, wouldn’t be for the best if its box office was greatly reduced as a result of Tarantino’s spectacularly poor decision?

HAVE SEXY HALLOWEEN COSTUMES REACHED PEAK ANNOYING YET?

Related: How Did Halloween Go From Being a Holiday for Kids to A Celebration of Adulthood?

JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN, PERHAPS THE SCARIEST THREE MINUTES AND 19 SECONDS EVER FILMED.

GO FIGURE: Oddly enough, illegals caught at the border under mistaken impression that they can stay legally in the U.S. And collect welfare benefits.

SOLVING LIFE’S GREATEST MYSTERIES: What Are the Fundamental Qualities of James Bond Movies?

REASON TV: Three Ways Parents are Ruining Halloween.

Speaking of which, I know what costume I’m wearing tonight.

THE ECONOMICS BEHIND GRANDMA’S TUNA CASSEROLES: Megan McArdle writes, “I’m always a bit bemused when I read articles pondering why our grandparents cooked such dreadful food:”

The foods of today’s lower middle class are the foods of yesterday’s tycoons. Before the 1890s, gelatin was a food that only rich people could regularly have. It had to be laboriously made from irish moss, or calf’s foot jelly (a disgusting process), or primitive gelatin products that were hard to use. The invention of modern powdered gelatin made these things not merely easy, but also cheap. Around 1900, people were suddenly given the tools to make luxury foods. As with modern Americans sticking a flat panel television in every room, they went a bit wild. As they did again when refrigerators made frozen delights possible. As they did with jarred mayonnaise, canned pineapple, and every other luxury item that moved down-market. Of course, they still didn’t have a trained hired cook at home, so the versions that made their way into average homes were not as good as the versions that had been served at J. P. Morgan’s table in 1890. But it was still exciting to be able to have a tomato aspic for lunch, in the same way modern foodies would be excited if they found a way to pull together Nobu’s menu in a few minutes, for a few cents a serving.

Over time, the ubiquity of these foods made them déclassé. Just as rich people stopped installing wall-to-wall carpeting when it became a standard option in tract homes, they stopped eating so many jello molds and mayonnaise salads when they became the mainstay of every church potluck and school cafeteria. That’s why eating those items now has a strong class connotation.

In his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray had a fascinating couple of paragraphs on the early 1960s life of wealthy socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973), in which he mentioned what she served her guests when entertaining:

Heiress to the founder of the company that became General Foods, one of the wealthiest women in America, she owned palatial homes in Washington, Palm Beach, and on Long Island, furnished with antiques and objets from the castles of Europe. She summered in the Adirondacks, at Camp Topridge, surrounded by her private 207 acres of forest and lakes. She took her sailing vacations on Sea Cloud, the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world, and flew in her own Vickers Viscount airliner, with a passenger cabin decorated as a living room, probably the largest privately owned aircraft in the world.

Hers was not a life familiar to many other Americans. But, with trivial exceptions, it was different only in the things that money could buy. When her guests assembled for dinner, the men wore black tie, a footman stood behind every chair, the silver was sterling, and the china had gold leaf. But the soup was likely to be beef consommé, the main course was almost always roast beef, steak, lamb chops, or broiled chicken, the starch was almost certainly potato, and the vegetable was likely to be broccoli au gratin.

In her article, McArdle writes that midcentury “photographers hadn’t yet figured out how to make food look appetizing on camera. Nor were the Technicolor hues then in fashion very kind to their culinary subjects.” In the early naughts, after discovering James Lileks via Instapundit, my wife and I had lots of laughs over the hideous-looking fare presented throughout Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. We frequently told ourselves, there’s no way we could give this as a Christmas gift to my mother, who was then in her early 80s — she simply wouldn’t get the humor and would either find the book insulting — or use it as a cookbook! After she passed away in 2012 while cleaning out her house in southern New Jersey, we came across one of the giveaway books from Jell-O printed in the early 1970s, which Lileks had featured. 

As long as I could return to the 21st century world of PCs, ubiquitous broadband streaming media — and good chow! — I would love to spend some time in the swank Mad Men era of the JFK/Rat Pack pre-Beatles early 1960s. But I wouldn’t go for the food.

POOR WIRED. First they run a low, dishonest piece by Amy Wallace smearing Gamergate as racist rape fans on the way to writing about the Hugos. But worse, it’s basically the same piece that Entertainment Weekly ran, and retracted, months ago, though with extra dollops of pretentiousness.

So Wired isn’t just running with a bogus establishment narrative. It’s running with a behind the curve bogus establishment narrative, with extra dollops of pretentiousness.

I remember when Wired was a bunch of rebels ahead of the curve, but that was a decade or more ago.

ED ROGERS: CNBC has probably changed GOP presidential campaign debates forever. “You can bet the old paradigm of turning over management of the debates to a specific media organization — especially one with a reputation for an anti-Republican bias — is going to end.”

They should have learned this lesson after Candy Crowley’s egregious behavior in 2012, and they should have made her radioactive after that happened. (In fact when Crowley started saying, on the day of the debate, that she wouldn’t follow the rules, Romney’s campaign should have announced that they’d pull out unless someone else moderated.) But better late than never. Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain, and even the Stupid Party learns eventually.

VIDEO: Jeremy Clarkson’s first trailer for his new Amazon show is here – and it takes a cheeky swipe at the BBC.

WHY COMPROMISE WHEN YOU’RE ALWAYS RIGHT? Jonah Goldberg On Obama’s Inability To Compromise.

THE APPALLING REASON WHY SAN FRANCISCO’S LAST GUN SHOP CLOSED: High Bridge Arms, founded in the mid-1950s by Olympic shooter Bob Chow, shuts down rather than give local police its customer list.

JOE PAPPALARDO: 5 Reasons ‘Star Wars’ Tanks Make Absolutely No Sense: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, war machines were stupidly designed.

POLITICAL THEORY FROM the latest Jim Butcher book:

“We’re a civilized society, are we not?”

Esterbook blinked. “Since when,miss? We’re a democracy.”

“Just what I mean. We have dispensed with violence as a means of governing ourselves, have we not?”

“The heart of democracy is violence, Miss Tagwynn,” Esterbrook said. “In order to decide what to do, we take a count of everyone for and against it, and then do whatever the larger side wishes to do. We’re having a symbolic battle, its outcome decided by simple numbers. It saves us time and no end of trouble counting actual bodies — but don’t mistake it for anything but ritualized violence.”

I remember my dad — who was teaching Aristotle and Plato at Heidelberg at the time — explaining democracy to me exactly this way when I was eight years old.

WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE? S.E. Cupp: Clinton shrugs off the deaths of 300,000 veterans.

Related: Hillary Clinton accused of flip flopping, waffling, by… Eliot Spitzer.

Plus: Hmmm: White House will block release of Hillary e-mails to … Barack Obama. Nothing to hide, I’m sure.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Senators From Both Parties Take On Law Schools For Failing Students. “Now that we’ve taken the cap off what you can borrow for graduate courses, they have decided they are going to just charge to the heavens in terms of tuition for worthless, worthless law school degrees.”

When you’re hearing that sort of thing from Democrats like Dick Durbin, you’re in trouble.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 905.

THE ULTIMATE DIRTY JOB: Mike Rowe responds to MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s rant equating the phrase “hard work” with — what else? — racism and slavery:

I suspect this is because Melissa believes — as do many others — that success today is mostly a function of what she calls, “relative privilege.” This is fancy talk for the simple fact that life is unfair, and some people are born with more advantages than others. It’s also a fine way to prepare the unsuspecting viewer for the extraordinary suggestion that slavery is proof-positive that hard work doesn’t pay off.

Obviously, I don’t see the world the same way as Melissa, but we do have something in common. Like her, I keep a picture on my office wall.

That’s me, squatting next to the most disappointing toilet I’ve ever encountered, preparing to clean it out with a garden trowel. I keep it there to remind me of what happens when you need a plumber but can’t find one.

It’s also a nice reminder that a good plumber these days has a hell of a lot more job security than the average news anchor. (With respect.)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN — with this spooky flashback to 2004.

HILLARY HECKLED, CNN HARDEST HIT: Suzanne Malveaux Acts Shocked that BLM Protesters Interrupted Hillary.

Hillary’s lame response? “‘I’m actually going to get to some point that prove that black lives do matter,’ is the best improvisation [Hillary] could come up with,” Steve Hayward adds at Power Line.

EXPIRATION DATE, REACHED: OOPS: Watch Obama Promise That He’d Never Send Troops To Syria.