Jonathan Cohn at TNR finds one: Need a reason to believe the Affordable Care Act is starting to work? The Census Bureau just gave you a half million of them. That’s how many young adults had health insurance in 2010, as compared to 2009, according to the official estimates. Or, to put it another way, the proportion of 18- to 24-year olds without health insurance fell, by roughly two percentage points, last year. It’s pretty remarkable, given what was happening in the rest of the population....

For making iOS accessible to all. At a nightclub appearance in LA last weekend, said Stevie: There is nothing that you can do on the iPhone or iPad that I can’t do. Watch: Via.

“A swirl of fame swept down a dirt road to find Bobby Kirk and his country wisdom,” says the NYTimes in a Most Emailed article from late July. Stephen Colbert parses the piece in a deliciously sarcastic joke that appears at first to be a skewering of small town journalism. The action (or lack thereof) takes place a few miles up the road from me, in Athens, GA, so it got local tongues a-waggin’. Be sure to watch to the end…

NY-9 sure looks bad for Democrats. Retired cable TV executive Bob Turner (R) (he launched the failed Rush Limbaugh TV show after huge success with Jerry Springer) defeated state Assemblyman David Weprin (D) in the special election for the House seat held by former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner (D). The last time a Republican won there was in the 1920′s. But… consider this: Since 2008, New York has had four five special elections, in NY-20, NY-23 NY-29, NY-26 and NY-9. In every all but...

Did you notice that ABC called its coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which includes those candid audio recordings from early 1964, an ABC News exclusive? But NBC aired portions of the tapes starting on Friday: A spokesperson for Hyperion said the company reached out to NBC News: “We made NBC aware of the copyright and ABC News’ exclusive rights to that material and we urged NBC to respect those rights. We are confident that viewers who...

After quoting Doug Mataconis and citing the LATimes and Brad Plumer on Michele Bachmann and other conservatives skeptical about the payroll tax cut, Steven L. Taylor at Outside the Beltway concludes: First, opposing cuts to payroll taxes undercuts several key Republican claims in regards to fiscal policy, including the notion that it’s “the people’s money, not the governments” and therefore any time you can let the people keep their money it is an unvarnished good. Second, this then raises...

Best not make decisions late in the day: …decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it. Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily...

The final video version of the presentation I did last month at Florida State University’s Future of the Book conference held at Turnbull Conference Center in Talahassee, FL. Its central idea is that we are in the process of moving from a literal tradition of sharing and passing on culture to a social tradition. I used Prezi, the zooming online presentation program. Thanks to all who contributed with suggestions and comments. It was very well received. Let me know what you think.

AP, via the AJC of all places, ‘What am I going to do?’ NYC subways ordered shut. The subways are shutting down??? This has never happened before. (For a storm, that is. The subway system did shut down after 9/11 and for a 2005 strike.) But that’s not all. John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty International and LaGuardia airports are shutting down and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the first ever mandatory evacuation of low-lying waterfront areas of the city. All...

AdWeek broke the story; Politico follows up: “We did a small reduction in our fulltime staff and in our contractors, and we are, like everybody in the business, constantly looking at the competitive landscape and trying to be as responsive and agile as we can,” David Plotz, Slate’s editor, told POLITICO. The others: associate editor Juliet Lapidos, foreign editor June Thomas and Timothy Noah, the “Chatterbox” columnist on leave for a book about income inequality. Noah...

3 hours ago, the letter from the man himself: To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community: I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee. As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession...

Where’s Ron Paul in all the Iowa straw poll coverage? You’ll remember he came in a close second. John Stewart asks, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the [political equivalent of] the 13th floor in a hotel?” Watch… Politico’s Roger Simon agrees Paul got shafted. But Kevin Drum says no, Ron Paul doesn’t deserve any more attention: Ron Paul isn’t getting any attention because he doesn’t deserve any attention, and Simon knows it. Paul has a small...

The ad parodies the National Organization for Marriage’s “Gathering Storm” ad, which has been ridiculed repeatedly since its 2009 debut. Colbert asks voters to write-in Rick Parry — not a typo, “That’s with an ‘A’ for America and Iowa” — at the Ames straw poll on Saturday. More here. Memeorandum discussion.

No, not “mad” as in Tea Party anger. Instead, we’re talking “mad” as in A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness. Stephen Colbert did an excellent interview with its author, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, professor of psychiatry and director of the Mood Disorders program at Tufts University Medical Center. Ghaemi says strong conviction, enormous creativity and deep empathy are necessary qualities for good leadership in times of crisis. Further,...

As my Maine vacation winds down, a friend from sweltering Georgia sent me this wonderful stop-motion animation… It was shot on a beach in South Wales using 3 Nokia N8s mounted on a 118 ft crane to showcase the camera’s 12 megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss lens. Everything in it is life-size. The making of…

Huh? Americans’ political ideology at the midyear point of 2011 looks similar to 2009 and 2010, with 41% self-identifying as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. I’ll make you a bet: Political identification will swing in this country between 2015 and 2020 at about the same rate as we’ve seen the swing on same-sex marriage. I’ve got no data to back that opinion up. I just believe it takes a while to let go of long-held labels.

Today Al Jazeera English will be carried on cable systems in New York City for the first time. In good NYC tradition, only by subletting space from another channel owner. That’s how the network got carriage in DC, too. In the U.S. we get our censorship by other means; public interest be damned: Al Jazeera English was lauded by the United States government and even by a few competitors for its broadcasts from Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries earlier this year. But it is finding out...

Doubting the rumor that Apple will buy Barnes & Noble, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken runs through a brief history of Apple not buying Universal Music, Pixar, TiVo, Palm, Sun Disney, Nintendo, AMD, Sony, Yahoo, EA, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, and Hulu: For years, Apple has confounded the rest of us by not buying things that it should clearly be buying. Not purchasing other well-known companies is so core to Apple’s strategy that it must have a whole department devoted to non-mergers...

The Massachusetts economy grew at an annual rate 4.3 percent from April to June. That’s more than three times faster than the national growth rate: The UMass report showed that Massachusetts added 41,300 jobs in the first half of 2011. The state’s unemployment rate fell in June to 7.6 percent, down from 8.3 percent late last year…. The report, published by the UMass Donahue Institute in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, predicted the state’s economy would continue...

MG Siegler comments: 15 years ago, Apple was on the verge of default. Today, the United States government is. Let’s hope that in 15 years, our government will have been able to turn it around the way Apple has. Not if the Republicans have anything to do with it! Not with their government can’t mentality and smaller government credo. Apple has $75.876 billion. The U.S. government has $73.768 billion. More here. Apple stock topped $400 per share on Tuesday.

For Such A Time As This, my documentary profile of the openly lesbian rural Georgia Baptist preacher, Genie Hargrove, premieres tonight at 9 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. My partner, Doug Keith, and I interviewed Genie for StoryCorps last February. That interview (scroll down) became the basis for the video profile. In it, Genie tells the story of her 2004 ordination as the minister of her Southern Baptist church. The church, at the end of a winding dirt road in the poorest county in...

Talk about smiling at something sweet! This Steven Thrasher photo comes from the Village Voice: Steve Landis and Julie Irwin…brought their 4-year-old twins Emily and Sophie to Brooklyn Borough Hall this morning to be flower girls for whoever might need them. They don’t even know anyone getting married today! Aw. Via.

So concludes Sean Parnell, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, as he fails to recite the full text of the First Amendment in a Stephen Colbert interview last night: Colbert has managed to keep all sides of the campaign finance debate worried by setting up his own Super PAC. What’s a Super PAC? Super PACs are a new breed created after several 2010 Supreme Court decisions that struck down some restrictions. They’re “super” because there is no limit to how much money they...

I need your help… You might remember that last fall I did a presentation titled, “Is Book A Verb? The Social Future of the Book.” The big idea in it is that we are in the midst of moving from a Literal Tradition of sharing and passing on culture to a Social Tradition. This weekend I will be updating and expanding that presentation to deliver it again on Friday at The Future of the Book Conference sponsored by Florida State University and Florida’s Panhandle Library Access...

South California, a conservative’s utopia: Accusing Sacramento of pillaging local governments to feed its runaway spending and left-wing policies, a Riverside County politician is proposing a solution: He wants 13 mostly inland, conservative counties to break away to form a separate state of “South California.” Supervisor Jeff Stone, a Republican pharmacist from Temecula, called California an “ungovernable” financial catastrophe from which businesses are fleeing and...