Link roundup

Back in 08 I used to blog links I thought were cool. Then I started using Google Reader; sharing was less work than blogging but the catch is that everyone is a compulsive oversharer (I'd put myself somewhere between Emily Gould and Grobstein) so shared items tend to be more ephemeral than I'd like. I think I'm going to periodically blog a link roundup. Here's the first. (The others will, I imagine, be a lot shorter.)

[H/t as appropriate to Grobstein, Alan, and Liz Chiang.]

1. Rivers used to run straight before plants came along (SciAm)
2. What people thought about Reagan in 1982 (Bernstein)
3. Hexagonal London (Strangemaps)
4. They voted for healthcare before they voted against it (Yglesias)
5. Robert Solow on the financial crisis (TNR)
6. pourquoi michael jackson est blanc (Andrew Gelman)
7. "Orthogonal, ooh" (Volokh)
8. The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape (NYRB)
9. Auden martini (PoetryFoundation)
10. "The internet is badgering everybody" (Brendan Nyhan)
11. Quotes with and without quotes (Language Log)
12. The Samuel Beckett bridge (Crooked Timber)
13. "Eating an orange / while making love / makes for bizarre enj- / oyment thereof." (Tom Lehrer via Language Log)
14. Toy drives checking immigration status of children (Yglesias)
15. Can you guess what these maps show? (Flowing Data)
16. Power laws in chess (Physics)
17. Syllepsis gone wild (Language Log)
18. Frozen Horse, Embuggerance, etc. (Language Log)
19. 32 meters of Mao (Neatorama)
20. NYC population by borough (Yglesias)
21. X and Y: the one-track mind of Ivy Compton-Burnett (Light reading)
22. "America's secular saboteurs" (WaPo, On Faith [for the record this link is just amusingly abhorrent])
23. Who benefits from equality? (David Runciman, LRB)
24. Kay Ryan: The paw of a cat (New Yorker)
25. The Powers of Dr Johnson (Andrew O'Hagan, NYRB)
26. Why strip malls don't have empty storefronts (Yglesias)
27. The metamorphosis of Charlie Brown (Book Bench)
28. Kay Ryan: Fool's Errands (New Yorker)
29. 20 insults from P.G. Wodehouse (Cosmic Variance)
30. Sophomore optics fail (Cosmic Variance)
31. Geoff Nunberg channels Alexander Pope to mock Strunk (Language Log)
32. Evolution and the Second Law (Cosmic Variance)