Busty barmaids and other developments in science

by Daniel on November 16, 2007

This week in evolutionary psychology fun and games (and via Marginal Revolution), I engage in the most shameless piece of dumpster-diving yet. A commenter on last week’s post picked me up for a tendency to pluck out the most ridiculous things I can find and present them as representative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, rather in the manner of those irritating “Crazzzeeeee Postmodernists!” articles that you used to find in the National Review during the 1980s (or on “Butterflies and Wheels” now). I suspect that commenter is unlikely to be impressed with the latest find, because it comes from that world-renowned centre of evolutionary genetics research, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. On that age old question of “Do Sexy Waitresses Get More Tips?”.

Attention conservation notice / Irritation advance warning: If you think I’m going to get through this without making at least a few puerile jokes and maybe more, you’re probably wrong.
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One Day Tom Brokaw Will Seem Like Walter Lippmann and Then I’ll Really Have Something to Complain About

by Scott McLemee on November 16, 2007

In the late 1990s, Doug McLennan created Arts Journal, a comprehensive aggregator of cultural journalism; for the past couple of years has been in charge of whatever is going on with the National Arts Journalism Program, which gave out fellowships at Columbia University for a while. (Until, one day, it didn’t. I’m not really sure what happened there.) He’s had a blog at AJ, Diacritical, that has been pretty episodic, goings weeks and longer without new activity. Totally understandable, of course; the man has enough else to do.

But it looks like he’s resuming it, starting with some considerations on how badly the notion of the newspaper as part of “mass culture” serves us, especially now:
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