¶ Matins: At 3 Quarks Daily, Richard Eskow posts an extremely thoughtful piece about a technogenic disease, mesothelioma, for which a vaccine appears to be in the offing. Should we congratulate ourselves for finding a cure, or scold ourselves for having unleashed the underlying disease?

¶ Lauds: Here’s why our position on artworks more than one hundred years old is firmly socialist: “Michelangelo letters up for grabs as Renaissance archive goes up for sale.” (Guardian)

¶ Prime: Robert Shiller urges us to reconsider the national preference for home-ownership, taking care to understand the preference as a cultural product, not an economic calculation. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Jeremy Dean considers the strategy of playing hard to get. (PsyBlog)

¶ Sext: At The Awl, Choire Sicha has a few words about Elinor Burkett. (Nice, linked words!)

¶ Nones: Reading Tom Downey’s report on the Chinese phenomenon of “human-flesh searching,” we can only be grateful that Mao Zedong did not live to exploit the Internet. (Times Magazine)

¶ Vespers: Silje Bekeng writes drolly about the Jante Law and contemporary Norwegian literature. (n + 1; via Three Percent)

¶ Compline: At Speakeasy (which is, after all, a blog run by the Wall Street Journal), Gerard Baker reflects, in a Tacitan undertone, on the absence of political comment during this year’s Academy Awards presentation.

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