[The Verge]

Lewis Lapham, “the famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine” — we much preferred the previous proto-Spy Michael Kinsley version — asks what we think is supposed to be a profoundly impertinent question:

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

Personally, we don’t recall collecting any data from Google, YouTube, and Facebook, although we tend to visit all three in the course of our blogging and professional day. (What was that damn PHP lowercase function? Ah. Right.) We do collect data from — wait for it — databases, but that tends to be data we had a hand in storing to begin with. And, mirabile dictu, we do know what it means. It means the database is functioning.

But this, of course, is not what Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is getting at. After all, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham would not blow 3,318 words just to confirm that our programming works the way we intend it to. No, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is making a point.

And God help us if we can’t figure out what it is.

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The Video:

Santa Fe police have released a video of a man they say shot up one of two mobile photo-enforcement speed-monitoring SUVs earlier this month.

The Aftermath:

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Title: “The Duckling Gets a Cookie!?”

Author: Mo Willems

Rank: 63

Blurb: “The Pigeon is back (hooray!) and this time the drama centers on an adorable little duckling who gets a cookie just by asking — politely. Just by asking?! Politely reminds the duckling, but the Pigeon is already off on a hilarious rant about all the things he asks for — many of which readers of the earlier Pigeon books will remember — ending with the all-too-familiar refrain, ‘It’s not fair.'”

Review: “The book is low on plot and low on words in general.”

Customers Also Bought: “Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed” by Mo Willems

Footnote: Can we have Medicare for All and hang government torturers by their thumbs? Please?

The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Our guest columnist is a third-rate Internet preacher who can’t afford a second-rate cable show, but he amuses us nonetheless.

Bill Keller, the world’s leading Internet Evangelist and the founder of LivePrayer.com, with over 2.4 million subscribers worldwide reading the daily devotional he has written every morning for 13 years on the issues of the day from a Biblical worldview, states that a vote for Mormon cult member Mitt Romney will insure at least 1 million souls will end up in hell!!!

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Paul Ryan, 2003: “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it.”

Paul Ryan, 2005: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

Paul Ryan, 2012: “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas.”

What happened? The bishops got to him.

[via ThinkProgress]

Miss Travel [via Know Your Meme]