Are Smart People Grumpier? They gave a bunch of people some personality tests and now they've concluded that smart people are either young and friendly or old and grumpy. But I don't know--don't people generally get grumpier when they get older anyway?
Harry Potter and the mystery of an academic obsession. I think the author is a little bit too clueless in regards to Harry Potter fan culture (or fan culture in general), but I do think she's right in that academic discussions about it are over the top. J.K. Rowling wrote the books for entertainment, not for pushing literati boundaries.
State of the Blogosphere, August 2006. (via Alembic) Like some commenters, I would like to know how many of those 50 million blogs are really active blogs. And what percentage of those blogs are people who are going to stick around for a while? Maybe a majority of the spikes are just people who fiddle around with a blog for a couple months or so and then drop it--like a fad.
