Most insightful analysis of marijuana

• How marijuana became legal by Roger Parloff at Fortune

Over the years the government's position has become progressively more embattled, if not untenable. It potentially leads to exactly the same endpoint as the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the federal prohibition on alcoholic beverage sales. When states make a legal loophole allowing medical use of marijuana, they must grapple with the messy question of what precisely constitutes medical use. After all, doctors regularly prescribe powerful drugs like Valium, Viagra, Prozac, and -- give us a break -- Botox to patients who are hardly at death's door.

One thing that I've always found puzzling in the Chinese, or indeed, worldwide, media was the demonization of pot. It is usually presumed to belong in the same class of dangerous narcotics like heroin and cocaine, whereas in fact marijuana is clearly less harmful and affects users in varied ways. Obama's first online town hall was dominated by pot questions, but they were dismissed as just another demonstration of netizens' sleaziness. Through careful mapping, Parloff points out that the legalization of marijuana may be closer than we thought.

Most brain dead op-ed from a mainstream writer

• Our One-Party Democracy by Thomas Friedman at New York Times

China’s one-party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. Is this a political advantage?

There are so many extremely elementary flaws in this op-ed piece that it can serve as an example of how NOT to argue for kindergarten students.

Most insightful discussion of newspapers' predicament

• The Value of Information by Information Architects Japan

The plight of print newspapers and magazines are not news. Many have attempted to explain and solve the issue by pointing fingers at greedy capitalists, who load newspapers with excessive debt and then sack newspapers staff indiscriminately, resulting in compromised journalistic standards, or ungrateful web surfers who free-ride on an infrastructure that's paid for by subscribers to printed media. Others try to explore new distribution channels or to clumsily imitate their online competition.

To anyone who reads online extensively, it is clear that we value certain content more than others and, when possible, we would be more than happy to help sustain the provider of such content (e.g. iTune's $.99 apps). Also, as individuals, we instinctively treat different kinds of information with a different attitude. So how can a publisher exploit these tendencies? This article breaks content down to four categories - art, scientific, practical, and financial - and analyzes the appeal of each. Regrettably, it offers only a vague suggestion on monetization ("The trick is to connect both editions and try to bridge the transitional survival phase in which news currently is"), so I await further analysis down this promising path.

Sexiest song from a boy band

• Suga Lumps, from Season 2 of Flight of the Conchords