Sunday Papers #4

Sundays are for waking up unusually early after having extremely vivid dreams about visiting Mexico. In Dreamexico (see what I did there...), everything is made out of lego blocks...Anyways, after a traumatic experience such as this, it's good to sit back, relax, drink some tea, and have a look at the fine bounty of links that the Internet gods have offered up to us this week. As for why the Internet gods are making offerings to us - instead of vice-versa - I cannot say...

• Americans are horribly misinformed about who has money. This has been bouncing around the web for at least two weeks now. Don't know why I haven't posted it yet. What's fascinating is how much agreement there is between voters of all stripes on what an "ideal" wealth distribution would be. Incidentally, that ideal is very different from the reality.
• Maxine Udall has written a great and (more importantly) fair piece on the foreclosure crisis and, more generally, about the relationship between banks and people. The article is titled, "The Death of Capitalism?" which was almost enough to keep me from reading it. I hate when people do those speculative "end/death of ______?" titles. Fortunately, the rest of the article is much higher quality than the title.
• Mr. Yglesias has found a cool study on Soviet urban development. Interesting case study of the kind of economic distortion that resulted from Soviet centralized planning.
• 1 in 600 women don't know they're pregnant immediately prior to giving birth. But seriously, how could you not know?
• This man is very lucky to be alive.
• Those of you who read the RPS Sunday Papers will have already seen this. Seen it already or not, the strong female character flowchart remains fabulous.
• I don't think a week has passed without the fine fellows at the Incidental Economist showing up somewhere in these posts. IMO they are the finest policy blog on the internet right now. This time, however, I am not linking to something about policy, because this time Aaron Carroll is writing about state fair food.
• And finally, how not to write a media relations email. The concise final sentence really pulls the whole email together.