From the front of the New York Times Magazine

Jim Holt examines the perils of psychoanalyzing our Intelligent Designer by reverse engineering His Creation.

While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

To be fair, this sounds no more kludgy than the semi-intelligently designed Windows 95.

Later in the Magazine, Rob Walker writes about hyperrealistic "reborn dolls."

But why do people want to buy an extremely realistic baby doll? For some, Gernand speculates, it's a means of reminiscing -- perhaps they have saved their actual children's clothes and enjoy dressing up the reborn doll to recapture a happy time. Garma says she thinks some others might want the dolls to ''fill a void,'' perhaps because they could not or did not have children. And there is probably the simple aesthetic attraction, heightened by the fact that many people just plain love babies. ''Some collectors have whole rooms set aside as a nursery,'' says Mitchell, the Doll Crafter editor.

"Once you get past the creepier aspects of all this," Walker writes, and I never did. It's even weirder when you read it with the misconception that these dolls were being commissioned, the motivation of cloning applied to the Cabbage Patch. However, Walker does not mention that the makers of these dolls are, in fact, taking orders to match actual specific babies. Yet.