Tuesday link-dump

I seem to be piling up things that I mean to blog, but then not getting back to them. So, no great unifying post, just an assortment of things worth noting:

• I greatly enjoyed the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer dust-up and interview, but it certainly seems like many of the criticisms there could be applied to the entire media in recent years. Just letting liers say their piece unchallenged is a huge disservice to our public discourse and undermines our chances of making any good national decisions.
  (via rc3.org)
  
  
• In the category of Alarming Economic Developments is that of renters stranded by their landlords' foreclosures -- talk about downstream effects you don't see coming! eesh.
  
  
• There are ways that the ubiquity of Google creeps me, but I have to say that this phone system seems like it solves a lot of pesky and widespread communications problems. Are there really enough phone numbers for all these layers, if it takes off?
  (via Medley)
  
  
• Amazing: an article debunking many of the claimed benefits of breastfeeding. Its benefits are trumpeted so widely and insistantly that this feels like heresy, but the piece is just unpacking the science to show that there's not much statistical robustness there, and revealing the heavy social forces arranged to control maternal choices. When you know the lengths of mental and logistical hardship that moms go through to give their babies this supposed elixir, such info makes it feel like a cruel, repressive prank has been played on a whole generation! (Maybe it's just one thing that women can concretely battle when so much of motherhood feels completely out of control? Lemonade at best.)
  (via a local breastfeeding group)
  Edit: It's worth noting the response here. In particular, the original author's dismissal of scientific results is based on outdated analysis...
  
  
• Grim: images of Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline. Such grandeur in ruin is rare in large cities -- what's novel here is that things aren't getting torn down and replaced. Still, quite a sad collection, a sense of a lost civilization.
  (via rc3.org)