BuzzMachine

What is it with…
: Malcolm Gladwell’s hair (on Tina Brown’s show)? There’s just so much of it. You’d think it would all tip over. But it doesn’t. It hasn’t reached that point yet.

SARS scoop
: I should have linked to this scoop on BWG’s blog from China a few days ago. He noted that there apparent relapses of SARS — which was reported here just today — but he also wondered whether this was just because the Chinese hospitals were releasing people too soon.

Dumb and dumber
: I’m of the mind that it’s dumb to run boycotts for all the reasons you already know. But it’s even dumber, much dumber, to react to a threatened boycott with big legal muscle. As Glenn Reynolds reports, that’s what has happened: Boycott-Hollywood.us is shutting down because of a threat from William Morris, who would have been far smarter just to let this fade and let free speech flourish. But, hey, that’s Hollywood. I spent many years covering the fools and control freaks there. As my mentor said to me often as we sat up late rewriting stories about those fools, “We hate the stars, Jeff.”

Uh, nevermind
: So the NY Times reports today that the plunder of Iraqi museums was nowhere near as severe as we’ve heard in all the wailing:

Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items