A study called “Booksthatmakeyoudumb” has been making the rounds, and I finally took the time to check it out. Created by one Virgil Griffith, it claims to map the correlation between one’s favorite books and one’s intelligence. According to “Booksthatmakeyoudumb,” the “smartest” book out there is Nabokov’s Lolita (it’s about white people), and the “dumbest” is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (it’s about black people).

A closer look shows that of the “stupidest” 10 books, 8 are written by African-Americans. Naturally, this raises some serious questions about race and intelligence. It’s unfortunate that Griffith refuses to address them. But it’s unforgivable that his method actually invents them…

(more…)

Open the DP today to find an article about Jews, Arabs, and Muslims coming together through music. Like so many other initiatives on and around Penn campus, it’s sweet, a little sappy, and very PC. That’s the way we do it at Penn, and that’s the way we do it — for the most part — in the US at large.

But in Brazil, where the nation is celebrating 100 years of Japanese immigration, samba celebrity Angela Bismarchi is doing things a little differently. She’s going to bridge the gap between Brazil and Japan not through art, sport, or faith, but through… plastic surgery.

That’s right. As Fox News reports, Bismarchi is “having nylon wires implanted in her eyes to give them an oriental slant.” What better way to celebrate the Japanese than by superficially mutilating one’s face to look like them? (Video after the jump.)

(more…)