It's Just a Plant: A Children's Story of Marijuana. Free .pdf available until Valentine's Day. In French and German as well as English, in case you're teaching your kids and want to work on some, uh, state-dependent learning. more inside

Arthead. "Each feature is written entirely by the artist, revealing only what they feel and want you to know about the featured piece."

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field. Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park. “There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.” more inside

Iranians' love affair with America

Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them ... Too many Americans are going to college ... Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise. Ah, the Wall Street Journal. Ah, the American Enterprise Institute.

Why you procrastinate.

Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying

New books about Satan. And, what the hell, here's a bit more on the horned, cloven-hoofed fella. And some testimonials telling what happens when you go to visit him.

Schizoaffective disorder sufferer speaks. “You’re such a fool, a loser, idiot! They know your every move.” The voices I hear are abusive and critical. They can also be bizarre: “We are stoplights”, “You’re just cheap chocolate”, “Crazy lazy point-blank bicycle”... I once sewed nine buttons on to my sleeve because someone said “nine or so” in conversation. It seemed terribly important to do so. It is not uncommon for people with schizophrenia like me to make up new words. More about the diagnosis. [Via]

Maury Povich helps a guest overcome her fear of pickles. [ifilm video I found via this]

Soldiers Say Army Ignores, Punishes Mental Anguish. more inside

A dearth of female A&R types. "Women buy roughly half of all CDs sold...and most radio formats target women as their primary audience. Yet...no woman runs the mainstream music A&R department at any major record label. Over the last decade, only two women have helmed A&R pop departments at major labels."

Econ 101 at the U. of Chicago. Conservatives have long critiqued academia for the ways professors use their position to indoctrinate students with left-wing ideology, but the left has largely ignored the political impact of the way people learn economics, though its influence is likely far more profound. So in order to find out just what students learn when they learn economics, I headed down to Hyde Park, where the University generously let me enroll in “Principles of Macroeconomics” for a quarter. Good article. more inside

The Myth of Thomas Szasz. “Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases,” Szasz wrote. “I submit that this definition, which is still widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company of alchemy and astrology and commits it to the category of pseudoscience. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as ‘mental illness.’”

Curious George: Where's the funny stuff? What's the funniest online video clip you know of? Here's mine.

Respect. Respect. Respect. Just a little bit?

Kofi Annan at Princeton. "Almost everyone in today’s world feels insecure, but not everyone feels insecure about the same thing... Probably the largest number would give priority to economic and social threats, including poverty, environmental degradation and infectious disease. Others might stress inter-State conflict; yet others internal conflict, including civil war. Many people – especially but not only in the developed world –- would now put terrorism at the top of their list... We need common global strategies to deal with all of them... The one area where there is a total lack of any common strategy is the one that may well present the greatest danger of all: the area of nuclear weapons."

What were the Americas like before Columbus arrived? According to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a recent book (itself an expanded version of the Atlantic article in the first link), they had a much bigger Native American population than the standard story tells us, they had been populated for way longer than the 12,000 years the standard story holds is the case, and those people had developed cultures that were way more advanced than the standard story says. Here is an interview with the author, Charles C. Mann. Here is a review of the book.

Aging: These days, we're bigger, smarter, and living longer. Aging isn't just about your genes. It's also about things like diet. And as the cliche goes, You're only as old as you think you are. Take a quiz to determine your life expectancy. If you're unhappy with the result, get some tips from 100-year-olds on how to live longer.

On terrorism. New York Review of Books piece on teh terra. Good reading. One of the books cited in the piece, on the response of Iraqis to the war in Iraq: "They find the claims that the United States is occupying Iraq to defend New York and deploying an army to import democracy to be so implausible that they do not believe them. Instead, they believe the claims of those who say the US Army is a self-interested army of occupation interested only in dominating the region and exploiting its oil wealth... In effect, they find al-Qaeda's propaganda more credible than ours." more inside