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Less than two weeks’ worth of this rather understated September remain, and only a few days until the Autumnal Equinox. Here are some things I’ve been reading, and thinking about, when I haven’t been reading and thinking about epic stories with elves, dwarves and dragons.

I think the link of the week must be, without a doubt, Timothy Noah’s 10-part series on the growth of income inequality in America at Slate. One of The Economist bloggers immediately pounced on it for basically, so far as I can tell, a failure to be some other paper that he(?) likes better. I realize that I’m veering toward the realm of truthiness here, but I feel like attempting to number-crunch growing income inequality out of existence (e.g. “may be an artefact of insufficiently sophisticated methods for building the price indices used to calculate rates of inflation”) is by contrast veering even closer to missing the forest for the trees.

Unfortunately, the real problem with Mr. Noah’s effort is that it’s probably, like so many other thoughtful, intelligent, nuanced ideas, absolutely DOA in modern America. Our politics and journalism are incapable of pursuing mature conversations, let alone rational solutions, to these things… and instead of fixing our politics or our journalism, we go right on producing useless, execrable non-issue issues such as “Is President Obama too rational to be likable?”

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First, everything not fairly closely-related to environmental issues:

• “Krugs” throws old, familiar charges of alienating his primary base of support, in a futile quest for “postpartisanship,” at President Obama. Charges still stick.
• While subjecting Facebook and its pimple-faced kid billionaire to growing scrutiny, let us not forget about that other Great Cyber-Satan.
• Optimistic (or worried?) that Americans have learned a new and lasting sense of thrift? Rejoice (or despair).
• Flipboard: I wonder if this is anything like how John Henry felt while watching technicians set up the version 1.0 steam drill.

This one is borderline: A Times op-ed calls the much-ballyhooed, and much taxpayer-subsidized, Chevy Volt an overpriced flop. (“W” encouraged talk of the “hydrogen highway,” and now electric cars are having their moment… bets on whether the next administration will raise flywheel technology to the rank of automotive savior?)

And the rest:

• The Economist arrives about a week late with coverage of the fizzling out of climate change legislation, apparently hoping to make up for the delay by publishing two largely interchangeable articles. The picture is, of course, bleak, but hey! Schadenfreude: “a patchwork of different rules in different states… may leave big energy firms regretting their opposition to cap and trade.” (Though we’ll probably just end up bailing them out, as we do with everything else that big businesses have cause to regret.)
• NPR’s science blog seems to spend a lot of time indulging in elliptical ruminations on the authors’ personal unresolved issues about science and non-secular philosophy. But this item was one of the rare breaks, and remarkably poignant; I thought about posting some sort of commentary, but there’s probably no just no real need.