James Fallow at the Atlantic discovers that he is 5% Neanderthal: This evening, after a discussion between the Atlantic's editor James Bennet and the geneticist Craig Venter, Spencer Wells of the National Geographic's Genographic project described his ongoing effort to map ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from the BBC ): Researchers studying fossils from northern Kenya have identified a new species of human that lived two million years ago. The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa. The ...read more

Quite often, it takes me hours to settle into writing a fairly straight forward piece for The Daily Banter. A blog post like this one should take 15 minute at the most, but I often find myself distracted by the dozens of other articles I have open on my web browser. This post ...read more

Andrew Sullivan analyzes Mitt Romney's very weird laugh: One gets the sense that Mormons, perhaps because they remain deeply insecure about their religion, make an extra effort to seem utterly great, happy, nice, genial human beings. Hence what's been called "The Mormon Mask." ...read more

By Ben Cohen: Those who define themselves as Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and Free Market Capitalists have one primary objective: To get rid of government and let markets reign supreme. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have thought through the consequences of a country with ...read more