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Perhaps because sport has somehow got so damn big, most people alive to drink coffee this morning know that Spain won the World Cup in South Africa last night. In the 116th minute of the final, against the Netherlands, Andrés Iniesta scored the winning goal. The diminutive Iniesta has since been called many things, including "the quiet prince of Spanish football", "the Barcelona wizard" and "the shy playmaker". He also has the distinction, rare among footballers, of having been picked out as one to watch in Intelligent Life magazine. Just before the Real Madrid v Barcelona match in April, our contributor Rob Smyth shellacked the reticent hero with praise, heralding him as "an attacking midfielder with forensic vision, geometric passing, devastating pace, serene certainty in possession, and the ability to get even better in big games." He showed that last night, sidestepping many murderous Dutch tackles to win the Man of the Match award as well as coolly delivering the coup de grace.  read more »

The Economist's books and arts editor and Asia editor discuss two books that consider the cut-throat capitalism of modern Communist rule in China:

A bracing addendum to the fawning obituaries of Robert Byrd, courtesy of The Economist's Schumpeter blog:

I missed an important organisation in last week's column on job-title inflation: the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr Byrd held the titles of Exalted Cyclops and Kleagle (recruiter) for the Klan in West Virginia. Other Klan job titles include Grand Imperial Wizard (CEO), Grand Magi (vice-president), Grand Scribe (secretary), Grand Dragon of the Realm (vice-president), Hydra (assistant to the vice-president), Grand Titan of the Dominion (regional vice-president), Grand Titan of the Province (assistant regional vice-president), Lictor (security guard) and Night Hawk (night watchman). Ordinary members were known as ghouls.

Byrd had plenty of other titles in the rest of his career, including Senate minority leader, Senate majority leader and president pro tempore of the United States Senate, but none had quite the resonance of Exalted Cyclops.

As a proper four-eyes, I dare say I'm succumbing to some real job-title envy right now. If only I wasn't weighed down by the sand-bags of racial tolerance, perhaps I could reach similarly exalted heights.

With an estimated 12m undocumented immigrants living in America, the country’s immigration policy is a model of dysfunction. In 2008 Latinos overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama two to one in the hopes he would launch a new era of border policy. But signals sent by the states and federal government have been far from encouraging. In May President Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, a month after Arizona passed a law making illegal immigration a state crime, and granting the police the power to arrest people without documents. Debate on congress's long-promised immigration-overhaul bill now looks sure to be postponed yet again until after the mid-term elections.   read more »

Why do people keep calling Elena Kagan, Barack Obama's nominee to America's Supreme Court, a "blank slate"? The term, combined with her name, gets 70,300 hits on Google. Glenn Greenwald, Paul Campos and Andrew Sullivan have all used it prominently, and AOL news gives it the number-one billing of their "top 5 metaphors for Elena Kagan." The thing about a metaphor, though, is that it's supposed to help us to understand something. The blank slate itself is meant to have no opinions or proclivities, and can be written on by others at will. It is a theory held by some about children, for example.

This is very hard to square with the reports, many supported by actual evidence, that Kagan is pro-gay, comfortable with executive power, a closet conservative, the intended Democratic counterweight to John Roberts, a liberal academic who boldly hired conservatives at Harvard, a Mets fan and, hell, let's throw in the alleged fondness for cigars. As a child she also dressed up in judge's robes. Some of these tidbits are at odds with one another, and I'm not sure they're all true, but they're all things that describe a real person with quite real proclivities. "Blank slate"? Hardly.  read more »

 The Huffington Post published this slideshow on the world's worst, weirdest man-made disasters. The pictures won't make you feel better though, only worse. 

The New York Times is reliable for its excellent reporting and keen insight, but beautiful prose is not a given. This is why Dan Barry's column, "This Land" is so refreshing. His latest story, about the way New Orleans fishermen are responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is a colourful departure from the news-reader's usual fare:

For the last several days, the Venice Marina at the bottom of Plaquemines Parish has been a fishless stew of whisper, resentment and opportunity.

Barry's story is about the men who are working overtime to lay down boom—maritime sandbags—to keep the shoreline clear of oil. Their desperate, low-tech answer to the haemorrhaging caused by an oil-rig explosion last month makes for a compelling counterbalance to BP's efforts to use "submersible robots and other futuristic technology" to contain the spill. These shrimpers, oystermen and others lay down boom, Barry writes, "because this is what you do in times of hazardous spills, to protect your livelihood, your home and the complicated ecosystem of which you are a part." His prose gives shape to the people, the rusted trucks, oily water and hurricanes that make up this textured American landscape.

At least there is boom, lots and lots of boom... They studied the dull-orange line of protection for a few minutes, then took the cut back into Southwest Pass to enter a wonderland of rippling bays and green-brown marshland, of snowy egrets floating like bits of linen above and jumping mullets announcing the abundance of larger fish below—all now relying on oil-based products to be saved from oil-based doom.  read more »

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It seems the mysteries and anxieties of  sleep and insomnia could become even more haunting. Today we learn this (via the Independent):

Sleeping less than six hours a night increases the risk of early death, it was claimed today.

Scientists arrived at the result after analysing data from 16 studies involving more than 1.5 million participants.

They found "unequivocal evidence" of a direct link between sleeping less than six hours a night and dying prematurely.

Yet smug sleepers needn't laugh too readily:

An association was also seen between sleeping more than nine hours a night and early death. This was thought to be due to long-sleeping being a marker of serious underlying illness rather than any effect of sleep itself.

Professor Francesco Cappucio, head of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the University of Warwick, said: "Whilst short sleep may represent a cause of ill-health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill-health.

Scientific studies are perversely satisfying when nearly everyone loses.

Picture credit: schani (via Flickr)

Andrew Palmer, The Economist's finance editor, has read many of those new tomes about finance (what went wrong; who was right, etc, etc), and talks about them with the paper's books and arts editor in this new podcast:

"How long can you go without sleep?" asks an article in the New Scientist. Perhaps no longer than Randy Gardner, who set the record in 1963 by staying awake for 264 hours at the gentle age of 17.

He did it on a whim, under the observation of William Dement, a sleep scientist at Stanford University. This cursory description of Gardner's symptoms in the New Scientist is a little amusing:

Gardner experienced mood swings, memory and attention lapses, loss of coordination, slurred speech and hallucinations, but was otherwise fine.

Otherwise fine. Thomas Bartlett, a contributor to All-Nighters, an inspired blog about "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life" from the New York Times, further describes Gardner as someone who "temporarily lost touch with reality. At one point, he saw a path leading to a quiet forest, even though he was indoors at the time. The white teenager also believed himself to be the black running back for the San Diego Chargers."

The brief New Scientist article offers two interesting points, before throwing away the subject entirely:

1. Sleep-deprived people slip in and out of "microsleeps", which are "seconds of sleep that occur without you noticing them, often with your eyes open."  read more »