Matins

¶ At Salon, Michael Lind writs about the faux upper middle class, saddled with “worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.” Cui bono? The left and the right are pretty much in pari delicto. (via The Awl)

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody assesses The Kids Are All Right as a serious women’s film that updates, without substantially revising, our idea of the American family.

¶ Noting an interesting paradox about Christopher Nolan (“he’s fascinated by identity but not much good with character”), The Owls (Ben Walters and JM Tyree) air their disappointment with Inception.

In their utterly different ways, these are the big movies of Summer 2010 — the shows that anyone interested in film must see. We’ve had our say here and here.

Prime

¶ At the Boston Globe, Michael Fitzgerald talks to Mark Valeri about Heavenly Merchandize, his intriguing reconsideration of the relationship between Puritanism and capitalism in Colonial America. How did the austere Puritans become energetic businessmen? It seems to have something to do with settling down and discovering home in exile.

Tierce

¶ At Not Science Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick considers how handy an AI Physician X Prize-winning tricorder would be at solving the problem that too many doctors are poor diagnosticians.

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha has fun with the strangely overlapping interviews of highbrow actresses in the Sunday Times. Laura Linney’s alabaster complexion graced the Magazine, while, in a much pithier Arts & Leisure piece, Michelle Orange interviewed Patricia Clarkson. Choire wants to know if you can attribute fifteen snips correctly. Of course Choire picks the most generically puffy bits. Here they are on the subject of family life. First Linney — then Clarkson.

Nones

If we weren’t ticked off at The Economist ourselves (all that tendentious reporting!), we probably wouldn’t link to this story, in which Edward Hugh, of A Fistful of Dollars, is ticked off at The Economist, for its anti-Catalonian approach to the bullfighting ban in the region. (And the age of unsigned articles is so over!)

Vespers

¶ We’ll read anything by or about Jennifer Egan, and Patricia Z0hn’s intereview at The Huffington Post is a nice “addition to the literature.” But in answer to a question about the Sixties, Ms Egan deftly binds the overtly Sixties-era themes that have freckled her fiction with the covert activities, also beginning in the Sixties, that have inspired her technique.

Compline

¶ Ann Jones, seneior citizen and embedded journalist, tootles around an American operation in Afghanistan that makes Men Who Stare At Goats look like a documentary. On top of all the surreal weirdness, she plops the following sundae cherry, which might explain why COIN isn’t working as well as we might like. (Asia Times; via MetaFilter)

Have a Look

¶ Clandestine grilled cheese sandwiches. Should this be “Anywhere But New York”? Or is it a hoax? (New York Post; via The Awl)

¶ Design Disasters of the Past 25 Years. (The Infrastructurist) Our favorite is the top-rated Lotus Riverside Complex.

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