Our Distant Cousin.

“‘We know of just one planet where life exists — Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth,’ said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute…’Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward.'”

New planets have been discovered at a pretty decent clip of late. But, in a milestone, NASA’s Kepler Telescope finds in Kepler 186f, 500 light years away, “the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the ‘habitable zone’ — the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.” (“Earth-size” being the key word here — Kepler has previously found larger planets in the habitable zone.) To put it all down and start again, from the top to the bottom and then…

Update: Interesting speculation: Does Kepler 186f bode ill for our future? “This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct.”

The Very Air You Breathe.

“400 ppm was long considered a very serious measurement but it isn’t the end — it’s just a marker on the road to ever-increasing carbon pollution levels…’It is a milestone, marking the fact that humans have caused carbon dioxide concentrations to rise 120 ppm since pre-industrial times, with over 90 percent of that in the past century alone. We don’t know where the tipping points are.'”

Kepler 186f or bust? After flirting with 400ppm last May, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reach 402 parts-per-million, the highest levels in at least 800,000 years. “When asked if the 400 ppm will be reached even earlier next year, Butler responded simply, “‘Yes. Every year going forward for a long time.'”

Rogers for Roosevelt | Cap v. NSA.

“Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930’s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding about the 4th of July) to a working-class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side. This biographical detail has political meaning: given the era he was born in and his class and religious/ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that, complete with a picture of FDR on the wall.”

At Lawyers, Guns, & Money, Steven Attewell reminds us that Captain America has always been an FDR progressive. “[U]nlike other patriotic superheroes (like Superman, for example), Captain America is meant to represent the America of the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, and the Second Bill of Rights – a particular progressive ideal.”

Which reminds me, I was glad to see Cap so obviously take arms against the post-9/11 GWOT surveillance/preemption apparatus in Captain America: The Winter Soldier a few weeks ago. CA:TWS is top-tier Marvel, right next to The Avengers and Iron Man, and an even better film than the quality first installment. I particularly enjoyed the second-act twists involving Operation Paperclip and a UNIVAC, and if nothing else, the movie has furnished us with another very funny meme in “Hail Hydra.”

That being said, the third act slips off the rails some — state-of-the-art aircraft carriers with easily penetrable overrides, ho-hum — and the death count here, while not as egregious as in Man of Steel, still veers well into the absurd. When it comes time to face Ultron, how ’bout going easy with those grenades, Cap.

Keep Your Two Dollars.

“So we’re all watching the Better Off Dead screening that night, and John walked out of the movie. About 20 minutes into it, he walked out, and he never came back. The next morning, he basically walked up to me and was like, ‘You know, you tricked me. Better Off Dead was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me.’..And I said, ‘What happened?! What’s wrong?!’ And he just said that I sucked, and it was the worst thing he had ever seen, and that I had used him, and made a fool out of him, and all this other stuff.”

Upon the news that “Savage” Steve Holland is returning to filmmaking, this sad interview, in which Holland chronicles John Cusack’s bizarre reaction to Better Off Dead, has been making the rounds. Weird and frankly kinda depressing: Cusack is a guy who, for every High Fidelity or Being John Malkovich, has made a lot of crap over the years, and Better Off Dead is not at all a black mark on his resume.

His Body is a Cage.

“Since the turn of the century, Cage has made more good movies (and more interesting bad ones) than Johnny Depp, but somehow Depp remains One of Our Finest Actors and Cage is Grumpy Cat. He’s always been a fascinating actor whose greatest performances were riven with fascinating faults; now he’s been reduced to just those faults by a degraded cultural marketplace that can increasingly do nothing but point and say, LOL, fail. Cage deserves better.”

After reviewing the tapes from the last decade — I’d say Bad Lieutenant and The Wicker Man remain underrated and indefensible respectively — Grantland‘s Alex Pappedamas makes a case for the much-maligned Nicolas Cage. “As Ethan Hawke, who costarred with Cage in 2005’s Lord of War, put it…’He’s the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting; he’s successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours.'”

Now Matters are Worse.

“Really, it’s weird. The man takes the Metro to work, and yet he handily dismisses what every human American knows to be true: That if dollars are speech, and billions are more speech, then billionaires who spend money don’t do so for the mere joy of making themselves heard, but because it offers them a return on their investment. We. All. Know. This…[But] since the chief can find no evidence of silky burlap sacks lying around with the Koch brothers’ monogram on them, it must follow that there is no corruption — or appearance of corruption — afoot.”

Here we go again. Dahlia Lithwick looks over the Court’s disastrous 5-4 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC [opinion] — a.k.a. Citizens United all over again — and the corrosive effect it will have on public confidence in government. “[I]n a kind of ever-worsening judicial Groundhog Day of election reform…the Roberts Five has overturned 40 years of policy and case law, under an earnest plea about the rights of the beleaguered donors who simply want to spend $3.6 million on every election cycle.”

The New Gilded Age.

“[This] is, as I hope I’ve made clear, an awesome work. At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame.”

In the NYRB, and in very related news, Paul Krugman sings the praises of Thomas Piketty’s new magnum opus, Capital in the 21st Century. “This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics…Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”

As a counterpoint of sorts, CEPR’s Dean Baker — neither a Pollyanna nor a conservative — argues Piketty has picked up some of Marx’s bad habits, and finds the book too deterministic and despairing by far:

“[T]here are serious grounds for challenging Piketty’s vision of the future…the book [suffers from a] lack of attentiveness to institutional detail…In the past, progressive change advanced by getting some segment of capitalists to side with progressives against retrograde sectors. In the current context this likely means getting large segments of the business community to beat up on financial capital…[T]he point is that capitalism is far more dynamic and flexible than the way Piketty presents it in this book. Given that we will likely be stuck with it long into the future, that is good news.”

Update: Galbraith weighs in. “[This] is a weighty book, replete with good information on the flows of income, transfers of wealth, and the distribution of financial resources in some of the world’s wealthiest countries…Yet he does not provide a very sound guide to policy. And despite its great ambitions, his book is not the accomplished work of high theory that its title, length, and reception (so far) suggest.”

“Too Fast to Fail.”

“The issue here is that people are earning large amounts of money by using sophisticated computers to beat the market. This is effectively a form of insider trading…[T]he front-running high speed trader, like the inside trader, is providing no information to the market. They are causing the price of stocks to adjust milliseconds more quickly than would otherwise be the case. It is implausible that this can provide any benefit to the economy. This is simply siphoning off money at the expense of other actors in the market.”

In the wake of Michael Lewis’ publicity blitz for Flash Boys, and per his “let’s focus on solutions” argument to Piketty above, CEPR’s Dean Baker explains how to easily fix the problem of high-frequency trading. “[O]ne simple method…would virtually destroy the practice. A modest tax on financial transactions would make this sort of rapid trading unprofitable since it depends on extremely small margins.”

Pirates v. Papal.

“‘Dreadstar is one of the most important comics on the 1980s, paving the way for creators to control their own creations,’ said Gilmore. “‘After decades of Jim exercising that control and turning away countless Hollywood suitors, I’m excited he’s trusting me and J.C. to do it right.'”

Proving yet again that we live in the Golden Age of fanboydom, there’s apparently movement afoot to make a film out of Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar(!) Dreadstar — one-part Blake’s 7, one-part Conan, two-parts Star Wars — was one of my favorite comics as a kid, and the only one I remember writing a letter to, explaining my (wrong) theory about who the traitor on the team was.)

To be honest, even now in the midst of the comic-film invasion, it’s hard to imagine a Dreadstar movie making any bank — Hopefully Oedi brings in the kitteh-minded folk. But I would’ve said the same about Guardians of the Galaxy, so what do I know.

Tolkien Geek Makes Good | Sayonara Davey.

“‘I learned more from watching Dave than I did from going to my classes — especially the ones I did not go to because I had stayed up until 1:30 watching Dave,’ Colbert said.” Old news by now, but worth noting for posterity nonetheless: The inimitable Stephen Colbert — not “Stephen Colbert” — will be replacing David Letterman as the host of Late Show, and while I’ll be sad to see “Colbert” go, I can’t think of a better choice. Onward and upward.

“Letterman’s deconstructionist, at times borderline Cubist style made you laugh by mocking the very idea of a stranger needing to make you laugh…[his] sensibility had its roots in a post-World War II school of university-educated smartass comedy, which also birthed such institutions as Mad magazine, Monty Python, Second City, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, the 1970s meta-comedy movement that gave us Andy Kaufman and Albert Brooks, and pretty much every moment of Bill Murray’s early career.”

In very related news, Matt Zoller Seitz looks over Letterman’s long and storied late-night tenure. I don’t watch talk shows much anymore, but I’m just old enough to remember how formative Letterman’s NBC run was for the rest of late-night television back in the day. (It helped that I had a well-worn copy of Late Night with David Letterman: The Book as a kid, which re-printed classic gags like Dave’s Voyagers after-school special.)

Also, an excellent point made in the comments of Seitz’s article: “One thing I’ve always respected Dave for is the fact that he really loves music, and when the show is presenting a variety of lesser-known bands, he honestly seems to enjoy them. It kind of offsets the ‘grumpy curmudgeon’ vibe at which he excels, and it feels genuine and enthusiastic to me.” True, that: Take, for example, his many visits with Tom Waits, who’s given some amazing and indelible performances on Dave’s show over the years.