Here’s a sample, on his passage on using children to one-up your social betters, or, when needed, one-upping children.

If an opponent has managed to get inside your home and all other gambits have failed, Potter suggests training your child to walk in, look at the man, appear taken aback say something worriedly like, “Mummy, I don’t like that man.” The thinking is that children’s snap judgment is unerring, and that they can spot moral failings like dogs can spot ghosts. If you find yourself on the receiving end of such a maneuver, Potter recommends that revenge can be gotten at Christmas by buying the child a gift just a little bit too young for them (“Christmas Giftsmanship”). This is the only thing known to consistently offend children. “If the child is continuously burying itself in the corner with Lord Jim, give it a book about a wild wolf dog which saves a baby from an eagle,” Potter advises.

Beyond being an object of fascination for people all over, the topic is also responsible for one of the most memorable lines I’ve ever heard. When I lived in Ireland, I worked as a waiter. The restaurant I terrorized with ineptitude in this capacity had some outdoor seating that was continually preyed upon by Roma thieves. They were about as brazen as you could be without resorting to violence, often using their children as stalls in elaborately staged pickpocketing attempts. One fabled scheme involved a woman coming up to you ad pressing her baby to your chest; you’d grab it to keep it from falling, and while your arms were engaged, someone would sweep past and pick your pocket. I never saw this, but a friend I met over there warned me very gravely about it. “There’s only one thing you can do: Swat the baby,” he said gesturing a swat. “You’ve got to swat that baby.”

The other two are for Hemispheres magazine. One on Domino’s bonkers, and hugely effective, self-flagellating ad campaign of 2010, and another on the efforts to build a series of huge, moveable dams around Venice to protect it from flooding. Fascinating.

Sorry, kids, life of the mercenary.

Let me also take this opportunity to promote the upcoming show by The Steamboat Disasters, my country band. Thursday, August 5, around 9pm, at Hank’s (glorious) Saloon, in Brooklyn. This shitty economy has made good, rowdy, somewhat boozy honky-tonk more relevant than it’s been in years. The Disasters are your source for the best of it.

Update: This one turned out to have some legs on it. The Times, Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, the Encyclopedia Britannica blog, Brendan Nyhan (whose research lies at the heart of the piece), The Monkey Cage (a great economics blog), MediaMatters, NPR, and others have weighed in.  Also, Matt Yglesias pointed out that this isn’t new because Americans have never been an informed citizenry when it comes to their government–and as I pointed out in the story, this is whoppingly true–however, you need to make a distinction between uninformed and misinformed. Uninformed people will listen, misinformed people probably won’t. This is why this research is so interesting. It works from the premise that the problem in America isn’t uninformed voters, but misinformed ones.