In High-wire Act:

Before agreeing to work on the opera, Albarn and Hewlett made two trips to China with Shi-Zheng. While visiting the city of Yinchuan, in Ninzxia Province, Albarn spent an afternoon lying on the floor of his hotel room recording the sound of horns in the street.

There is no "Ninzxia province." Yinchuan is the capital of Ningxia. Or Níngxià or Ning-hsia or Ningsia. Google turns out 5 results for "Ninzxia," one of which is the article in The New Yorker (the others look like purposeful hidden misspellings so that search engines will catch the sites).

Not a big deal, but if you are going to mock the errors of other publications you better be above reproach. And secondly, China is not some obscure country. It would be kind of embarrassing if a Chinese publiction misspelled North Dakota as "North Dakoto." Of course, that publication wouldn't be The New Yorker.

(this is in the print edition, so if they fix it online that'll always be there)

I mentioned earlier that Google News had kicked ScienceBlogs off their news feed, but left the Discovery Institute's blog. Well, look at what showed up today in my "Google Alerts" for the query "human evolution":

A few weeks ago the study about obesity being socially contagious was all the rage. For anyone interested in human behavior this shouldn't be surprising, we are a social creature and our peer group is an essential part of our 'extended phenotype'. The psychologist Judith Rich Harris has famously argued that the 40% of unattributed component of variation of personality is due to our peer groups (10% is parents and 50% is genes). In Harris' model the best thing that parents can do is choose a particular peer group with values which reflect their own priorities. In other words, buying a house in a "good community" with "good schools" is paramount. Your peers are the measure which you take into account and help shape your values, priorities, and goals in life. So with that, I was interested in a new study which tracks male twins and shows the importance of genetic variation in the choices which they later made in terms of assorting into distinct peer groups. From the conclusion:

TNR has a piece by one of the writers for Buffy and the Vampire Slayer (and an assorted other sci-fi shows) about the appeal of some stories (e.g., Harry Potter) and the lack of others. Her basic thesis is that the story needs a "Chosen One" central spoke to anchor the axis of the narrative. That sounds fine, though I have to wonder why David Lynch's Dune tanked so much (just a bad film?). I don't have any grand theory for why sci-fi and science fiction are ghettoized in the norm but occasionally break out to become cultural phenomena. It seems like one of those stochastic "Tipping Point" dynamics which you know will happen, but don't know when. I will offer that in literary science fiction the boundary is pretty clear: any science fiction work which has widespread acclaim in the broader society isn't "really" science fiction. I've talked to people who have read Brave New World and Slaughter House Five and simply not understood what I was saying when I referred to those novels as science fiction. My high school English teacher told me that Brave New World was more a "dystopian classic." Yeah.