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This weekend marks the end of summer, and therefore the end of white-bucks season Unless you’re Pat Boone, who, like college men in the ’30s, wore his year-round. His above collection is from 1959. Go here for a CBS News slideshow on the clean cut idol, who in mid-life made a heavy metal album.

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Yeah, if you say so.

Become an Orthodox Christian. That way you can fast on Wednesdays and Fridays and get points that can be traded for valuable prizes later.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, has some bad news.

There is a new culture war in America, between the ordinary and the transcendent. And the ordinary is winning.

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The largest recipient of Patreon funds is the Chapo Trap House podcast, whose 31,000-plus donors send in more than $138,000 per month. This podcast is a leading voice of what one of its hosts has dubbed “the dirtbag left,” which Wikipedia calls “a style of left-wing politics that eschews civility-for-its-own-sake in favor of subversive, populist vulgarity.” Not my cup of tea, I thought, but OK; 49 more entries to go.

Alas, reassurance was not forthcoming. Eight of the top 50 are marked “NSFW” (not safe for work). Podcasts are the most common kind of project on the list, but too many are along the lines of the Timesuck podcast of Dan Cummins, which describes its subjects as “serial killers, historical events, enduring mysteries, paranormal encounters, conspiracy theories, cryptozoology and more — nothing is off limits if it’s interesting.”

And,  of course, a sign of the times:

Joel Kotkin survey’s the scene.

For the past 125 years, Labor Day has been a time to celebrate the relevance, and political power, of the American working class. As recently as the 1990s, organized labor’s big day was an important milestone on the political calendar, particularly for Democrats..

But in recent decades, America’s working class has had precious little celebrate. In contrast to the conditions that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the incomes of lower quintiles surged by roughly 40%, five times faster than the top echelon, during the past four decades, those in the bottom 80% have enjoyed no consistent gains. Meanwhile union membership — the key to working class political power — has plunged from 28% in 1954 to 11% today.

ZMan is uncompromising.

I’ll take it further and say I vehemently oppose adding girls to sportsball. In fact, I’m OK with ending girls sports entirely. Girls should not be playing sports. They should be learning how to be proper women. Exercise is fine, but teaching girls to compete like men is as dumb as trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. Sure, a bear playing piano, a monkey drinking a beer and girls playing basketball can be amusing. Building a society around freak show attractions, however, is barbaric madness.

I don’t do sports — never have — so I don’t have a blog in this fight. But some people take it seriously.

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“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct.

Every time she makes news, I get a surge of traffic because of that concise biographical summary, and this week the cause of the traffic surge was that Zoe had accused an ex-boyfriend, Alec Holowka, of abusing her when they lived together briefly in Winnipeg in 2009. As a result of her accusation, Holowka was fired from the game-development company he had co-founded and then Saturday, Holowka committed suicide.

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Some ‘tech advances’ can profitably be skipped altogether, like Twitter and Facebook.

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Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” are well-known; they’ve been written about in Fast Company and the WSJ. But almost everyone misses the point. They aren’t about team size—they’re about autonomy and accountability.

Two pizzas works out to about eight people, by an amazing coincidence [not really] the pretty-standard size of a squad in most military services.

Ken Mondschein takes to the woods.

For the past 48 years, around 10,000 people have been gathering every summer for a festival that’s been described as “medieval Burning Man.”

My first Pennsic was Pennsic X, and it was already too big for comfort. Parts of it were fun, though, including hearing Duke Talymar’s Gargoyle Cycle of stories. And watching Lady Maureen of the Spicewoods put ice cream in Duke Moonwulf’s helmet was entertaining. Go, Rangers.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio has aggressively pushed a bike-friendly agenda, adding about 100 miles of dedicated lanes for cyclists amid a spike in rider collisions, but he’s done little to address the danger that bikers themselves pose.

Since 2011, bicyclists have injured more than 2,250 pedestrians — including at least seven who died — according to stats from the city Department of Transportation and published reports.

Can’t touch the Holy Bicycle.

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Ceuta is one of two Spanish enclaves (the other being Melilla) on the coast of North Africa, bordering on Morocco. Migrants from further south in Africa are particularly drawn to these enclaves, since they offer a land border with the EU, and obviate the dangerous sea journey across the Mediterranean. A culture-enricher who successfully breaches the border at Ceuta or Melilla gains access to the Schengen Zone, and can thereby hope to make his way to the Promised Land in Germany or Sweden.

Why Spain maintains these ‘enclaves’ has always puzzled me. It’s not as if they were like Gibraltar, strategic military locations.

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To many people, including myself, the most infuriating thing about the GOP is that they don’t try to win elections. I mean, sometimes it even seems that they are actively trying not to win elections.

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The structure of ultra-white beetle scales could hold the key to making bright-white sustainable paint using recycled plastic waste, scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered.

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Scientists say they’ve found artifacts in Idaho that indicate people were living there around 16,000 years ago, providing new evidence that the first Americans arrived here by following the Pacific Coast.

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Nuclear scientists and engineers have not been idle over the last decade in designing new small nuclear reactors that can’t melt down, and that will be essential to address our environmental and industrial needs in the coming decades.