Timothy Geithner is having trouble selling his house. The Daily Show calls upon “legendary housing economist” Bob Shiller, author of The Subprime Solution and Animal Spirits for advice… on Geithner’s bathroom tiles. Enjoy the clip below.

What we need now is a debate about how to break up the Fed—and some of the sprawling financial institutions it supervises—in order to make both the regulator and the regulated more manageable and accountable,” writes Amar Bhide in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Read the piece and then click over to Fox Business to watch Amar on today’s Opening Bell talking about the article and the future of the Fed.

Phillip Lopate talks about his new book and Susan Sontag at the Barnes and Noble blog Unabashedly Bookish.

Join the discussion here.

Christopher Beckwith has recently published a new book on the history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present titled EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD. He recently penned an op-ed on the situation in Urumqi, providing insight into the past and present of the Uighur people. Chinese Repression in Urumqi and World Appeasement [...]

Mark Kleiman‘s new book WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment officially publishes in September, but that hasn’t stopped the information contained within the book from generating interest and debate in the news in the past week or so. Kleiman is professor at UCLA and main blogger on the Reality-Based Community site, and in the new book proposes a real solution to the vicious cycle of crime and punishment in our country.

Kleiman recently weighed in on a New York Times article about the newly reported dangers of marijuana use in the Times‘s blog “Room for Debate.” In addition, Ezra Klein mentions the book on his Washington Post blog. Matthew Yglesias discusses the data on crime decline in major U.S. cities, and mentions the book on his Think Progress blog. And finally Patrick Appel, who blogs on The Atlantic Daily Dish site, has mentioned the book twice.

Another “DeSio Pick” from Mariana Cooks’s new book MATHEMATICIANS: An Outher View of the Inner World Princeton University mathematician JÁNOS KOLLÁR poses here amongst the ivy, probably somewhere on the Princeton campus.  This photograph captures what I envision many mathematicians to be–perfectly happy sitting alone with their thoughts, thinking of new equations (and in Janos’s case, algebraic geometry!)

Princeton author and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos gives his expert opinion on the politics of racial profiling and the arrest last week of prominent Harvard history scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside of his home in Cambridge, Mass., on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog.

Read the entire discussion here.

“The heart of The Next Justice is its effort to clarify the idea of a judicial philosophy. It does that by describing what the Supreme Court actually does when it confronts hard cases. Drawing on both historical research and personal observation, the book takes readers behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to show how the justices reach conclusions and assemble majorities.

“What happens at the Court is both genuinely political and genuinely principled. Values matter, as they do in the legislature, but the justices honor procedural constraints very different from those that apply in Congress. They do not trade votes across cases, for example. They also recognize that their role sometimes requires them to defer to other branches even when they disagree with what those branches have done. At the end of the day, though, they often end up disagreeing along recognizably political lines. For that reason, the appointments process—in the White House and in the Senate—needs to focus on nominees’ values, not just their professional credentials.”

Read the rest at Rorotoko.

Just getting in the spirit over the publication of Mariana Cook’s moving new book MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World, a remarkable collection of 92 black-and-white photographic portraits of some of the most renowned mathematicians of our time.  Our friends at SEEDMagazine.com have posted a multimedia slideshow featuring text to accompany each portrait and 5 audio interviews with select mathematicians.  Great stuff!

I also wanted to post a few of my personal favorites from MATHEMATICIANS (which, by the way, would make a great gift for any budding math enthusiast!)  Today’s selection is a portrait of Shing-Tung Yau, Fields Medal winner and professor of mathematics at Harvard University.

Stefan Szymanski, author of PLAYBOOKS AND CHECKBOOKS: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports writes a compelling article in England’s Telegraph discussing how the U.K. football leagues could learn a lesson from U.S. pro sports:

“Many fans are in denial, but the reality of professional sport is that money buys success: spend enough and the balance will tip in your favour. Of course, there are no guarantees, but year after year the teams that spend the most on player salaries tend to end up at the top of the league and those that spend the least end up at the bottom. This is not only true for football. The New York Yankees have won baseball’s World Series 26 times (the nearest rival has won it only 10 times) and no one doubts that the financial muscle of the Big Apple lies behind this feat.”

Read the entire article here.

In another realm of the online world, David M. Gordon, reviews the book on The Deipnosophist, remarking after including a quote from the book:

“And with that last quotation, you have the first glimmerings of what elevates this book above others — the economics of sport (and, I dare add, all economics) does not rise from a vacuum, but is of a piece with the prevailing social, spiritual, financial, and moral zeitgeist. Szymanski’s non-elaborated notion places his book with the best art history, for art also is a creature of its time.”

Read David Gordon’s review here.

Click here to watch and listen to this wonderful conversation on the nature of brotherhood and the cultural impact of Susan Sontag.

For the last week or so, John Postill has been carefully examining Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life – an ethnographical work that takes the world of Second Life as its subject. Postill provides a useful summary, though if you backtrack through his posts you can read about each chapter in greater detail.

The book is also winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2009 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture and received an honorable mention for the 2008 PROSE Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Media and Cultural Studies from the Association of American Publishers.