Photographer Walker Evans collected picture postcards, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting them.  Here’s one:

Evidently Calvin Trillin reads Los Thunderlads.  Here’s the first half of this week’s doggerel:

Republicans had hoped they might rekindle
Their party’s prospects through one Bobby Jindal.
But Jindal proved an easy man to mock
(He’s like the dorky page on 30 Rock).

Below find an excerpt from an article headlined “America is #… 15?” by Dalton Conley.  The article is about the Human Development Index, or HDI, a statistic that has since 1990 been used to gauge the relative well-being of people in various countries.  The American HDI was released for the first time last year.  As the article puts it, “The score consists of three dimensions: health, as measured by life expectancy at birth; access to knowledge, captured by educational enrollment and attainment; and income, as reflected by median earnings for the working-age population.”  The HDI was first developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq to enable humanitarian aid groups and development economists to gauge the relative well-being of people in poor countries.  “With some slight adjustments, the index was retrofitted to work for rich countries,” and the results for the USA are quite disturbing. 

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