Here's Chris Briem at nullspace2.blogspot.com:

"No, not hockey; Wi-Fi.

"News is that the Philadelphia experiment with city Wi-Fi service is on the verge of collapse. Given that general trend across the country, and given the circuitous route of Pittsburgh's Downtown Wi-Fi, you have to give some credit where due. However they have done it, the free Downtown Wi-Fi was still working pretty well.

"Does that count as something else we are beating Philly at these days?"

Yes, about hockey; we found this pittgirl item on theburghblog.com about a certain Penguins player:

"Gary Roberts can hit you so hard that he can actually alter your DNA. Decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell, 'What the hell was that?' "

Katha Pollitt at thenation.com says the backlash against feminism is "crackling up a storm." It seems, she writes, that "we're truly going backward, as Republican hegemony, conservative Christianity and anti-feminist media propaganda take their cumulative toll." Just two of the recent developments that have got under her skin:

• Media treatment of Hillary Clinton's run for president, with Chris Matthews of MSNBC coming in for a special lashing as one of the "media clowns" who "basically call her a crazy castrating bitch on a daily basis."

• Washington University's granting of an honorary doctorate to Phyllis Schlafly -- "archfoe of the Equal Rights Amendment, the United Nations, Darwinism and other newfangled notions, and the promoter of innumerable crackpot far-right conspiracy theories who called the Bomb 'a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God' and who has "advocated banning women from traditionally male occupations like construction, firefighting and the military."

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents (pghlesbian.com) takes a hard line on the Justin Jackson shooting, which involved Pittsburgh police officers killing Mr. Jackson after he pulled a gun and shot a police dog. PLC figures the police had no choice because they can't risk their own lives or those of others by aiming to hit a moving someone in the leg, like in the movies, if that someone is spraying bullets. Bottom line:

"Justin Jackson was a messed up kid who came from God knows what kind of background. His family lost their son. The police were doing their damn job. The dog was doing his. It is a complicated, social nightmare and yet no one seems to talk about it in rational terms -- they just want to get the juicy details and point the finger."

The New York Times Sunday Magazine (nytimes.com) recently featured an excellent piece by Alex Kotlowit on the persistent violence in U.S. cities that seems impervious to solution. "For 25 years," he notes, "murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34."

Mr. Kotlowit reports on an organization named CeaseFire (ceasefirepa.org), whose founder, Gary Slutkin, points out that contagious urban violence mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS. Mr. Slutkin suggests the treatment "ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases, too: 'Go after the most infected and stop the infection at its source.' Mr. Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior)."

To many Americans, no government agency better exemplifies the can-do spirit and selfless nature of the United States than the Peace Corps. But according to former Peace Corps country director Robert L. Strauss, it has never lived up to its purpose or principles.

Mr. Strauss scorches the corps at foreignpolicy.com for, among other things, bureaucratic inertia, failing to send volunteers where they are needed most, neglecting the corps' potential to engage other countries diplomatically and accepting a lot of relatively useless young people who join the corps because they can't make up their minds about what they want to do in life.

Needless to say, a lot of past and present volunteers have fired back, and their responses are posted with Mr. Strauss' critique.