JAMES GLEICK ponders the shifting meanings of identity in the brave new world of global “namespace.”

OUR PAL TOM FRANK lucidly ponders the hypocrisies of “anti-elitist” conservatives proclaiming their allegiance to We The People, then, once elected, turning everything they can over to the zillionaires.

A BRITISH SOCIAL-RESEARCH GROUP details the often-ignored links among poverty and obesity.

WE’VE COMPLAINED ENOUGH here about misspelled words (and even created a few of our own). Now here’s a list of the “100 Most Often Mispronounced Words.” Yes, “libary” and “nucular” are on the list.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN takes a lot of verbiage to ask upper-middle-class feminists to do their part for womankind by paying decent wages to their own kids’ nannies.

A couple months ago, I wrote about a local young woman who posted an autobiographical date-rape story on a party-planning website. She’s now written us with more details:

hello friend,

i read the article you wrote about me, someone emailed me telling me about it.

my research shows that its only an online newspaper? also the information you have on me is incorrect because i no longer have the jlayforyou2 webpage but i do have my other webpages. the webpage about kenny from watts hotel is here:

http://www.webspawner.com/users/iloveyoukenny/index.html

here are all my webpages with all my pictures on them:

this webpage here has some recent photos and photos of me when i was in my teens.

http://sites.theplunge.com/lmfao

this webpage here has photos of me when i was a child and pictures of my family.

http://sites.theplunge.com/funship

this webpage here has all my most recent pictures

http://sites.theplunge.com/houseparty

this is my yahoo profile

http://profiles.yahoo.com/jlayforyou2

i was once on www.awfulthings.com as well they had me listed there. if people were smart they would start getting my information right. otherwise dont list me at all, is the way i see it.  i have been writing for the last 6 years, i dont work, i spend all my time writing or chatting online. i also have a webcam. i have a new cell phone also. i get money through the state along with foodstamps and medical and i do what i like to do which is focus on my writing and on my art and on the talents of wich i enjoy.

i do not make plans i go as i will as i fall into my own death. i wish that just for one second that kenny would read what i have written, is it something that may be forbidden? is what i write long to be ripped up and thrown into the next thing my eyes see, if i was not alone and with someone to make me mine in thier home? sitting in the windows at night to sleep all day to watch my whole life drownd itself deep in the waters of my own hands drifting into the pencil the spirit forces eyes glancing i hope i am never to misunderstanding.

jacqueline marie zierman

… or just another chemical addiction?

Slavoj Zizek suggests you read Freud.

…play nice with your free Wi-Fi.

…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.

Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!

…behind Wonder Woman. Really.

SEATTLE RANKS #8 on somebody’s list of America’s “best-mannered” cities. NYC was #7.

A FEDERALLY-FUNDED STUDY claims conservative politics rises from a psychology of “fear and aggression, dogmatism, and the intolerance of ambiguity.”

LET’S TRY to figure this one out: A 19-year-old woman claims to have been date-raped at the “Watts Motel” in north Everett. (There’s a “Waite’s Motel” in north Everett, but not a “Watts Motel;” but let’s continue.) She puts up a few web pages of semi-incoherent poetry and prose about her violent ordeal, and about her still-ambiguous feelings toward her assailant.

But here comes the weird part. She puts all this material on ThePlunge.com, a party-planning website. She adds bikini pix, supposedly of herself, and invites her readers to sign up for a gangbang orgy party (billed on her main page as “hot wild passionate sex”), in the same motel room, on the one-year anniversary of her date-from-hell. (She writes, “i am interested in men, women, sex, pleasure, sex toys, getting naked, walking around naked, touching you, feeling you…”)

Part of me wants to think, or to hope, it’s all a hoax. I want to reach out to either the victim or the hoax-writer, whichever is real, and tell her/him/them/whoever that life isn’t really so totally bleak/sick as to require either really planning such a “party” or joking about one.

But another part of me wants to go to the party.

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.