Being tasered isn’t a pleasant experience. Darts are launched into your skin, penetrating the flesh; they’re followed by a 50,000 volt shock, enough to make your muscles contract uncontrollably, causing you to collapse. The result is extremely painful—as one victim told the Associated Press, “It’s the most profound pain I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s complete submission. You can’t move. You can’t even blink.” It can be lethal as well. As Amnesty International reported in their 2007 Annual Report, “More than 70 people died after being shocked with tasers…bringing to more than 230 the number of such deaths since 2001.”

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Sherlock Holmes would be tumbling beneath his waterfall! Malcolm Gladwell has an article in the most recent New Yorker detailing how the supposed science of criminal profilers is pretty much a collection of the carny tricks favored by fortunetellers and “douche of the universe” John Edward.

Ambiguous statements (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you”) and “Fuzzy Facts” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) paint a uselessly broad picture of rapists and serial killers. It’s only after the criminal is caught that profilers highlight their hits, or, as is often the case, ignore their misses.

Perhaps this article can stem the eruption of network TV shows that get off on bloodstain patterns and hazy flashbacks. If not, though, let me pitch a new twist—an FBI profiler profiles rogue profilers whose past profiling has made them go crazy and, well, you know.

Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic provides an effective rebuttal to the idea that the United States adopting a universal healthcare system would stifle innovation. Universal coverage would also cost less and insure everyone…but haven’t you heard about the lines?

In the Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue, they asked a variety of authors, inventors, intellectuals and cultural figures to comment on “the future of the American Idea and the greatest challenges to it.” The responses are interesting to read, even as many of the respondents struggle to define the American Idea, much less predict its future.

John Updike, George Will, Google Founder and CEO Eric Schmidt, Edward O. Wilson, Nancy Pelosi, Greil Marcus, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Pinsky, Sam Harris, Frank Gehry, Judith Martin and many others participated. Many of the reactions align the state of the American Idea with our country’s current direction, rendering it bleak, while others are more hopeful. Some are creepy (Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind screeds), some are shallow (Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, whose piece could be a tourist brochure), and some are outright pricks (Tom Wolfe, whose patronizing essay makes me relieved I never bothered to pick up I Am Charlotte Simmons).

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