For the past week, we've had dreams every night about Sarah Palin and her family. We were dating Levi. We were trapped at a tedious keg party with Bristol. Sarah confronted us and we got in a fight with her.

Why has Sarah Palin burrowed into our subconscious and how do we get her out?

David Plotz at Slate dreams about her too, and so do his colleagues, and he's collecting others' dreams. You can send them to IDreamofSarah@gmail.com.

For the past few days I've been blogging on racial differences in the short and long distance Olympic races. I noted Jon Entine's argument that such differences may have a biological origin, a taboo subject because once we start talking about physical differences, perhaps some people might then begin to suspect differences of intelligence between the races.

In my book The End of Racism I argued against such differences, noting instead that culture is a far better explanation of ethnic differences in intellectual achievement and economic performance. But when we turn to the issue of men and women, I note an anomaly.

No one denies that men are taller and stronger than women on average. This explains of course why competitive sports is based on the "separate but equal" principle. Men play against men, and women play against women. Segregation on the basis of gender appears to have an obvious rational basis in physical contests of speed and strength.

Yet one of my favorite games, namely chess, is not such a contest. Rather, chess is entirely based on intellectual capacity. It involves planning, calculation, strategy. One would assume that since men and women are equally intelligent, therefore women should be fully competive with men in chess. But it is not so. Consider: of the top 100 players in the USA currently, only two are women. Even more startling, of the top 100 chess players in the world today, only one is a woman.

So embarrassing is male over-representation at the top level that most chess competitions today are divided into two categories. There is a general category that is almost inevitably won by a man, and then there is a separate women's championship obviously designed to give women a chance to succeed as well. Currently there is a World Chess Champion and a World Women's Champion. Somehow the chess world seem to have adjusted to the reality that int his particular mental contest, women simply aren't as good as men.

Can culture account for the difference between the sexes? Actually no. Culture can help to explain why certain countries like Russia are more dominant in chess. They simply play a lot more chess over there. But culture doesn't explain why Russian males are so much better than Russian females in chess. I am not aware of an historical exclusion of women from chess, and even if there was some past discrimination, how come women still fare so poorly in an age of equality? Of the top 20 junior chess players in the world, there isn't a single woman. So in these respects the cultural explanation falters.

Are we forced to conclude then that men are smarter than women, at least when it comes to chess? Not really. The average IQ of both groups is 100. But when it comes to the bell curve distribution, an interesting difference emerges. The female bell curve is taller and narrower, with the vast majority of women bunched in the middle. The male bell curve is shorter and flatter, with more men at both ends of the distribution. What this means is that there are more male geniuses and more male morons. And this would effectively account for why at the very top level of an intellectual contest like chess, we find far more men than women.

Strollerderby links to this funny Current video by Sarah Haskins about how absurd birth control ads are. She's right: those ads never mention the fact that the pill prevents pregnancy. Instead, they advertise the pill's amazing "period control" and mood-enhancing properties.

Why is birth control's ability to limit unwanted pregnancies for women and families (and so to decrease the abortion rate), still so controversial? Clearly it is, as you can see in this video featuring a leading abstinence activist explaining that she opposes the pill. She wants "more babies." And not just for herself. More babies for everyone!

Check out this list of the 15 Most Sexist Daytime TV Commercials of the past fifty years. This ad showing men terrified of their PMSing wives is a classic, and it only ranks 13th!

Rebecca Traister has a great piece up on Salon.com about the real reasons Clinton supporters are mad that Obama won.

Sour grapes? Yes, but there's more to these voters, some of whom Traister says are calling themselves "'PUMAs' (as in, 'Party Unity My Ass')" than simple sore loserdom.

Among the insights: "They are mad at Mark Penn." (#9) and "They are mad at everyone who believes them to be old, white and racist." (#11)

Buzzfeed has a wacky story up (taglines: "crazy craigslist ads, milfs") about a woman named Deven Trabosh who is selling her Florida home for $344,000 and offering to stick around as a companion for an extra $500,000.

A single mother, she decided she was tired of dating sites and figured she'd just go the old-fashioned route and sell herself to the highest bidder.

The American Medical Association recently issued a controversial position essentially opposing home birth:

"That our AMA support state legislation that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital . . ."

Women's Health News has a good analysis of the statement and on what it might mean for the regulation of birth, which is done on a state-by-state basis.

Madeline Holler has an amazing article up now on Babble.com about her illegal Missouri home birth (of an 11-pound girl!), which her midwife could have been charged with a felony for attending.

Feministing has an alarming post up about the rising number of pro-life pharmacies and what their refusal to stock birth control means for women. According to the Washington Post:

The pharmacies are emerging at a time when a variety of health-care workers are refusing to perform medical procedures they find objectionable. Fertility doctors have refused to inseminate gay women. Ambulance drivers have refused to transport patients for abortions. Anesthesiologists have refused to assist in sterilizations.

Are we tired yet of psychoanalyzing Hillary's disgruntled supporters?

No? Okay.

Today Slate has two major headlines about Hillary-supporter-courting and Salon has big stories on whether or not Hillary should be Obama's VP.

Author Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker (The Color Purple), has recently been quoted saying lots of awful things about her mother in an interview in The Daily Mail.

In what she's since called a tabloid-ization of her comments, she chronicled her mother's many failings and concluded that the fault for her childhood's dysfunction lay with anti-family feminism:

Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities. It's helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?

Specifically, the piece suggests, Boomers' high divorce rate, their stress on career over family and their narcissism has led Generation Xers to be neurotic, and to wait too long to have babies.

MSN today has an item on its homepage that appears to be vying for the Guinness World Record for Most Clichés in a Lifestyle Post. It's called the Wife's Bill of Rights, and here's a sample:

Amendment I
We have the right to dislike your buddies.
We know it's important for you to have your guy friends, but you should know by now that we're not turned on by your stories of the good old days at college, your sexual exploits, or which relief pitcher the Red Sox should trade. Disappear for a while and be boys-it's OK, go chug beer and high-five-but please don't expect us to be happy when your friends come over and put their feet on our coffee tables or leave their beer cans on the floor.

Writer and activist Jennifer Baumgardner has created a new T-shirt (with the guy who invented the '90s staple "Vinnie's Tampon Case").

The shirt reads: "I was raped."

In a New York Times story about the shirts, journalist Susan Dominus writes: What was she going for? A shirt that would let rape victims "own the experience," [Baumgardner] says, and would help chip away the cone of silence that surrounds a crime with humiliation at its core.

On Friday night, Helen Thomas gave a rousing keynote speech for the Women, Action and the Media conference at MIT. We were too far in the back to get good video or photos (we'll post those when we find some), but here are a few things she said that we jotted down:

On media bias:
"Hillary is getting a bad rap with the media. Obama is walking on water with the media . . . Being racist is more verboten than being anti-woman."

On the nine presidents she's covered as a member of the press corps:
JFK: "My favorite."
LBJ: "Bigger than life."
Nixon: "When he had two roads to go down, he always took the wrong one."
Ford: "Wanted to be Speaker of the House."

During a speech this weekend described in a shocking article in The Observer, Gloria Steinem said some terrible things on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign:

"Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], 'What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?'" . . . "I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don't think so."

Steinem got even more anti-military from there: