• Der Spiegel has a piece on Aldi supermarkets and the reclusive brothers who run them. One of the brothers, Theo Albrecht, died last week. (Aldi also owns Trader Joe’s.)
• George Packer explains how the Senate works these days. Here’s the short version: the Senate is a joke.
• I believed for a long time that many of the things that suck about America were mitigated by the fact that we led the world in income mobility. Turns out, we do not.
• You can find me on Rdio.
• New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was my hero yesterday.
• Blizzard is going to be monitoring a certain location on a certain server in World of Warcraft due to a pattern of unsavory behavior.
• If you haven’t seen the Kanye West/New Yorker cartoon mashup, go look right now.

• Former Reagan OMB director David Stockman explains the destructive incoherence of Republican budget policy. There are many things I disagree with Republicans on as a matter of principle, but their budget policy ignores their own ostensible principles. That’s a bigger problem. Barry Ritholtz has the Cliffs Notes.
• William Saletan runs down the embarrassing opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque.” Funny that the complaints are being made by groups and people that claim to stand for things like Constitutional rights and anti-discrimination.
• Slavoj Zizek argues that the good feelings induced by charity sap the desire to achieve more meaningful solutions to problems. The way this lecture is presented is amazing.
• Scott Rosenberg talks about the death of eyeball tracking as a way of selling ads.
• Girl Developer takes on the Your Code Sucks mentality. I’m still going with what I said some months ago on Twitter, “Hell is other people’s code.” Hell is also my code if it’s not fresh on my mind.
• NPR is streaming the full contents of Arcade Fire’s new album, The Suburbs.
• Edward Niedermeyer from The Truth About Cars wrote an op-ed in the New York Times panning the Chevrolet Volt.
• FlightCaster makes the economics argument that the way we purchase tickets is what’s ruining air travel. People only care about price and scheduled time of departure when buying tickets, so that’s what airlines work on. Things like customer service, comfort, and actual time of departure are sacrificed.
• Tom Chatfield explains how people build relationships through online gaming.
• Farhad Manjoo takes on WikiLeaks.
• The ACLU has an important paper on national security policy, Establishing a New Normal. By adopting and even expanding some of the powers of the security state that started in the Bush administration, the Obama administration is establishing those practices for the future. The Republicans claimed those powers and now the Democrats are laundering them.
• Federal judge Richard Posner explains why the big Washington Post piece on national security, Top Secret America, is a failure. His complaint is that it lacks analytical rigor.
• Damien Katz talks about the lessons he learned in getting CouchDB to version 1.0.
• If you, like many bloggers, never go outside, you are probably vitamin D deficient.
• Alex Payne on choosing technology with scaling in mind.

Tim Bray, on the market for mobile devices:

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

Makes me think I need to really dive into mobile development sometime in the very near future. The thing is, I face a bit of a conundrum. I am a huge iOS fan — I’ve seen Android devices, and there’s no way I’d choose to carry one in my pocket over an iPhone. But if I were going to start writing a mobile application tomorrow, it would be an Android application, not an iPhone application.

Matthew Yglesias asks this question of members of Congress who vote for deficit-funded war appropriations but vote against any domestic programs that raise the deficit:

Is the performance of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Khost Province more important to the long-term interests of American citizens than the performance of the Riverside County Public Schools?

The question becomes more pointed when you factor in the odds of success of each project. Given the same expenditure, the odds of stabilizing Afghanistan are very low while the odds of improving schools are very high.

• In a TED talk, marine toxicologist Susan Shaw talks about the likely effects of the BP oil spill. Depressing.
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounces Paul the Octopus, the cephalopod that picked the winners of World Cup games.
• Two Mad Men links: Cityscapes talks about the new offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and the Wall Street Journal provides a Don Draper hedcut.
• This American Life looks at the origins of the state secrets privilege. Unsurprisingly, its original use was to protect the government from embarrassment, not to prevent secret information from being disclosed in court.
• Joe Nocera explains how lenders are misusing credit scores.
• Niall Ferguson is a partisan hack.
• Andrew Brown discusses research that shows that monogamous cultures vastly outperform polygamous cultures.
• GM seems to be figuring out how to connect with enthusiasts.
• Teresa Nielsen-Hayden expresses the fears of end users with regard to information sharing among social sites. (More here.)
• Ars Technica runs down the rulings by the Library of Congress on how the DMCA is enforced. The big news is that jailbreaking was ruled as legal.
• Stephen O’Grady: The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?