Thank you Nicholas Kristof for articulating so beautifully why the most intelligent people can still come up lacking for me:

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals ... appreciate ...that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

Dingdingdingding: it's not raw intelligence, but rather it's that need to discover and pursue ideas that does me in. Partially because this belies a sense of humility in admitting to not commanding all the facts, and knowing that there is more that always lies beyond the grasp of the knower....

Talk To Me!!

And to my beloved interventionists concerned with my priorities: have no fear. I remain promiscuous in my infatuations! Latest exhibit: Nate Silver, who not only embodies all of the above (as do O and Rahmbo), but took it one step further:

Baseball!!

And he also gets the bonus credit of rescuing my home state back from the clutches of obsolescence.

Go Tigers.