Best Table Tennis Shots of 2011. Voted sport most likely to convince me that we all live in The Matrix.

Just going by the trailers, The Dark Knight Rises looks good, but I’m not so sure about The Hobbit.

A Muscular Empathy by Ta-Nehisi Coates. "This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity."

The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox. Nightmare is right.

The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists:

11. The Person Who Thinks You Were So Close. “I like all these picks, but you ranked The Descendants as your #4 and Martha Marcy May Marlene as your #5, and they should be the other way around. FAIL.”

Love this: Hero, Miguel Endara’s portrait of his father composed entirely out of 3.2 million ink dots.

Regretsy and the Insane PayPal Clusterf*ck. Not the first such story I’ve read. PayPal works great until it doesn’t, and then it really, really, really doesn’t. (sorry, posting this well after the fact)

A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage. "Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes it a unique product in the QSR world and c) it is only available sometimes, but refuses to go away entirely."

How We Were All Misled. Review of Michael Lewis’s second book on the financial crisis, Boomerang. Don’t miss the Schwarzenegger anecdote.

The Extraordinary Syllabus of David Foster Wallace. "I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace’s name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. I am suspicious generally of those sorts of hushes and enchantments, and yet I do feel in the presence of his careful crazy syllabuses something like reverence."

Talk about your data visualizations! Erik Kessels printed out all the photos uploaded to Flickr in a 24 hour period. Here’s a taste:

Brave trailer: