It was nice to know how many comments there are (I generally don't look at comments that are too long to read in toto) 
 
It would be nice if there were a way to go back to the original post when you don't already know what it is (Haloscan offered that option, supposedly, but it never worked for me).

Virginia Heffernan is not a news reporter; she's a columnist. Columnists often write about the implications of their personal experiences, and if they are very lucky they find that they saw early signs of what does turn out to be a statistically important trend. (I was an editorial writer and columnist for nearly 20 years, and I was lucky once or twice.) 
 
Journalism has many genres, and it's bootless to criticize someone for writing in the wrong genre. 
 
If she'd pretended her friends were random selections, and you'd found they weren't (which happens fairly frequently in MSM coverage of political events) you'd have a point. But she didn't.

Note another significant consistency since 1994: When Obama disagrees with someone, he doesn't even attempt to address their arguments; he proceeds directly to attacking their motives. Murray's views, he assumes, are those of a "racial supremacist" pushing an agenda of an end to affirmative action and of welfare to the poor, and "with a finger to the wind," as if Murray ever gave a hoot which way the prevailing wind was blowing, except perhaps to tack into it.

We live *above* the Malthusian limit? You mean we have more people than we can feed? 
 
Fortunately, we're well below it (and it would help us to stay there if we stopped subsidizing the conversion of food for fuel in the form of ethanol).

Might I just inquire politely why the legend reads "0 > 2" (and so on)? 
 
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper started as an oil geologist but when that industry tanked in the 1980s he started a very successful brew pub. He did so well he attracted lots of imitators. And then there's Coors, so plenty of local pride tied into beer.

Figlio wrote a very interesting paper 
NAMES, EXPECTATIONS AND THE BLACK-WHITE TEST SCORE GAP 
David N. Figlio 
Working Paper 11195 
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11195 
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 
1050 Massachusetts Avenue 
Cambridge, MA 02138 
March 2005 
 
Figlio said, "Comparing pairs of siblings, I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores."

I (female, late 60s, sci-fi fan since forever, not into gaming, once an (ABD) math professor but since around 1990 a journalist) tend to favor blogs that offer a favorable signal-to-noise ratio, and if I find a lot worth reading I don't much care about the parts that don't interest me (though persistently not-work-safe would be a problem). 
 
What I value about GNXP is that the people here will tackle the great IQ taboo without fear or favor. And then I get to write about stuff like the Ashkinazim or the Neanderthal D paper that I would never have seen otherwise. 
 
As for "frat boys," the ones I knew in college, including the one I married, were all bucking to make Phi Beta Kappa their junior year. YMMV.

The three pieces linked above are NOT editorials. An editorial is the institutional view of the institution that publishes it, identified as such. These are op-eds, that is, the personal views of the people who write (and sign) them. 
 
Since most papers publish op-eds opposing their own views, it is simply incorrect to assume any given op-ed opinion is that of the paper. 
 
I know this is a term-of-art controversy. But so is the fact that the CPA who prepares your tax return gets really squirrelly when you don't seem to understand the distinction between a tax credit and a tax deduction. It's arcane, but it is not a trifle. The IRS certainly does not think so.

Michael Shermer has observed that smart people often believe stupid things, and he speculates that it is because they are good at thinking up plausible reasons to believe things they already believe for non-rational reasons. 
 
He's added a chapter on that subject to the new edition of his book "Why People Believe Stupid Things," according to blogger Andrew Olmstead, 
http://andrewolmsted.com/archives/001236.html but I haven't read it

The most striking sentence in this post is: 
 
"I did not expect to find this result when I started digging, so I am obliged to draw attention to it." 
 
because it exemplifies how scientists think but seldom make explicit, which helps to explain why non-scientists so frequently misunderstand them.