Served Raw

Forbes Life - March, 2009

2009-07-24T13:24:00.001-07:00

Saveur - February, 2009

2009-07-18T22:53:00.001-07:00

Time - June 15, 2009

2009-06-14T22:34:00.001-07:00

Newsweek - June 8, 2009

2009-06-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

Saveur - July, 2009

2009-06-14T22:30:00.001-07:00

Businessweek - June 15, 2009

2009-06-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Wired - May, 2009

2009-06-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. "People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple."

For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

Now that on-the-job experimentation has taken an academic turn. A couple of years ago, Teller joined a coterie of illusionists and tricksters recruited by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, to look at the neuroscience of magic. Last summer, that work culminated in an article for the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic." Teller was one of the coauthors, and its publication was a signal event in a field some researchers are calling magicology, the mining of stage illusions for insights into brain function.

"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.

Penn and Teller are an n of 1 in American culture: avant-garde artists who perform for the Vegas masses, skeptical philosophers who somehow got a cable TV show. For the past 25 years, they've played the same characters onstage. Teller is the silent, impish illusionist—"People are always surprised that I can speak," he says—while Penn is the hyperkinetic impresario, juggling knives, teasing the audience, and swallowing fire. These personae reflect the men's offstage personalities. Penn Jillette is 6'7", with a mane of curly black hair. When he walks, he pounds the floor like a clown in oversize shoes—not surprising, since he graduated from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. Teller is nearly a foot shorter and dresses in dapper three-piece suits. He has an eerie grace, as if he can move without displacing air.

The two started performing together in 1975, playing Philadelphia street corners and Renaissance festivals. Along with a third artist, they called themselves the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, an absurdist act that mixed knife-juggling with "unusual and disgusting" classical music. They were not especially popular. "I always assumed I'd spend my life happily performing in artsy-fartsy little theaters," Teller says.

After their first Renaissance gig, where Teller performed in tights and Penn in leather, they were headed back to New Jersey. To kill some time in a diner, Teller was practicing his version of Cups and Balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick popularized by ancient Roman conjurers. It involves a series of "vanishes" and "transpositions" as the balls appear and disappear underneath the cups. Teller hadn't brought any props, so he used wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses.

Somehow, this made the trick even better. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins as Teller variously palmed them, squished them, and moved them from cup to cup, the illusion persisted. "The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them," he says. "Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn't grasp it." They eventually worked this version of Cups and Balls into their show, and audiences loved it. But the magic community—whose cardinal rule is "Don't tell 'em how it's done"—reacted with outrage and even threats of physical violence. Penn and Teller were exposing an ancient secret! Two arty geeks were destroying the mystery!

All that criticism got press attention, which made people want to see Penn and Teller even more. Before long, they were performing Cups and Balls on Letterman. The trick became a centerpiece of their first off-Broadway show. "It was so liberating to be able to treat the audience like intelligent adults," Teller says. Instead of engaging in the "usual hocus-pocus clichés," the clear cups forced the crowd to confront the real source of the illusion: the hard-wired limitations of their own brains. Because people were literally incapable of perceiving the sleight of hand—Teller's fingers just moved too fast—it didn't matter that the glasses were transparent.

Penn and Teller still perform Cups and Balls—it's one of the few old bits in their current Vegas show. Several of their other pieces take a more direct cue from research on perception. In the Cowboy trick, an individual from the crowd is given a video camera; Penn says he's going to make a tiny plastic cow disappear from his hand, and he asks the audience member to film the vanish as the feed is projected onto a large screen for the rest of the room. While the mark focuses on Penn's flamboyant hand gestures—and the impertinently nonvanishing cow—Teller rearranges the entire stage in plain view. The audience cracks up; even when the poor sap looks up from the viewfinder, he fails to notice that anything is different.

"The idea for this trick came straight from science," Teller says. "We thought it would be fun to show people how bad they are at noticing stuff." Called change blindness, the phenomenon is illustrated in a video (on YouTube) that inspired the duo. Shot in 2007 by British psychologist Richard Wiseman, it ostensibly documents a simple card trick—the backs of the cards in a deck are magically transformed from blue to red. But during the course of the video, Wiseman's shirt, his assistant's shirt, the tablecloth, and the backdrop all change color, too. Most viewers watch the card trick unspool and miss the other alterations. Attention, it turns out, is like a spotlight. When it's focused on something, we become oblivious to even obvious changes outside its narrow beam. What magicians do, essentially, is misdirect—pivot that spotlight toward the wrong place at the right time.

During Penn and Teller's show, the audience laughs at the patsy onstage. But that part of the act is clearly intended as an indictment of human perception. "The irony," Teller says, "is that what we're doing to the volunteer is the same thing we've been doing to the crowd all night."

Teller designed his own house in the Las Vegas foothills, and he delights in showing first-time visitors around. He starts the tour by pointing down a hallway at a window, through which I see a beautiful view of the sprawling neon city below.

"Go take a look," Teller says. I amble down the hall and—just before reaching the end—smack into something hard, leaving a wet mouth-print on polished glass. The "window" is merely a reflection; the hallway ends in a precisely angled, mirrored door. "You didn't see the illusion because you weren't expecting one," Teller says. "You assumed I wasn't fucking with your head and that this hallway is actually a normal hallway. Those assumptions work great until you walk into a wall."

The fake window is only the beginning. The house also has a bookcase that's actually a door, lightbulbs that appear to change color mysteriously, and a bronze bear statue that tells you what card you're thinking of. After demonstrating that last prank, Teller watches as I try in vain to figure out how it's done. He relishes the confusion of his audience—and even fellow illusionists: "I had Criss Angel over here; he couldn't figure out how the bear worked, either." Unless Teller sees the symptoms of astonishment—mouth agape, eyes widened, pupils dilated—he doesn't consider the trick a success. "The magic show is a competition," he says. "The audience is trying to figure you out. They aren't suspending their disbelief—they're trying to expose you as a scam artist." This is what makes magic so difficult: The magician must sell people a lie even as they know they're being lied to. Unless the illusion feels more real than the truth, there is no magic.

What's surprising is just how limited the repertoire of magical illusions actually is. The Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper lists nine fundamental "conjuring effects" of modern magic, from the vanish and the restoration to telekinesis and ESP. While these basic tricks have been varied endlessly—you can "restore" a cut rope, a sawed-in-half assistant, a shredded piece of paper—each of the effects relies on a specific perceptual phenomenon. This may be why exposing the "secret" of a magic trick is so often deflating. Most of the time, the secret is that we're gullible and our brains are riddled with blind spots.

This isn't just the stuff of magic shows; those perceptual phenomena also allow us to make sense of reality, as we translate the blur of photons hitting our retinas into a coherent world of three-dimensional forms.

Consider a technique used by the legendary pickpocket Apollo Robbins, another coauthor of the Nature article spearheaded by Macknik and Martinez-Conde. When the researchers asked him about his devious methods—how he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked—they learned something surprising: Robbins said the trick worked only when he moved his free hand in an arc instead of a straight line. According to the thief, these arcs distract the eyes of his victims for a matter of milliseconds, just enough time for his other hand to pilfer their belongings.

At first, the scientists couldn't explain this phenomenon. Why would arcs keep us from looking at the right place? But then they began to think about saccades, movements of the eye that can precede conscious decisions about where to turn one's gaze. Saccades are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, which is why a pickpocket has to trick them: The eyes are in fact quicker than the hands. "This is an idea scientists had never contemplated before," Macknik says. "It turns out, though, that the pickpocket was onto something." When we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point—this is called the pursuit system. A hand moving in a semicircle, however, seems to short-circuit our saccades. The arc doesn't tell our eyes where the hand is going, so we fixate on the hand itself—and fail to notice the other hand reaching into our pocket. "The pickpocket has found a weakness in the way we perceive motion," Macknik says. "Show the eyes an arc and they move differently."

While the magicians are educating the scientists, so far the scientists haven't offered much in return. Cowboy trick aside, Teller says, "this is an example of entertainers getting there first." And he wishes it weren't so. Teller hopes that laboratory insights will offer ways to break free of the stale tricks that have defined magic for decades—much as new technologies made possible the illusions of David Abbott in the early 20th century. A loan shark in Omaha, Nebraska, Abbott performed innovative, late-night shows in his living room. (Harry Houdini was one of many magicians who made the pilgrimage.) "Abbott used to say he wasn't satisfied with a trick unless people began to weep," Teller says. "He was that good."

Abbott's audiences were practically preindustrial—all it took to fool them into thinking that spirits move among us was a radio receiver wired into a papier-màché teakettle. Today's consumers of illusion are both hungrier for deception and savvier about its practice, a dichotomy due in no small part to Penn and Teller's own acts over the years. Teller has spent enough time with researchers to think they might be the key to an entirely new category of stage magic—that the quirks and flaws of perception uncovered in the lab can be commercialized, essentially, into illusions for an ever more sophisticated audience. "Maybe I'll learn something from these scientists," he says with a wry smile. "Maybe one of their discoveries will inspire a new kind of illusion. Maybe that's how I'll make people cry." Until he shows them how it's done.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_neuroscienceofmagic

Mystery Spots: Places Where Bizarre Forces Obscure Reality

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-05/ff_mysteryspots?currentPage=all

American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like "Death to the new world order." This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones' history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don't understand at least as much as what they do.

The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet.

Joe Fendley, Elberton Granite's president, nodded absently, distracted by the rush to complete his weekly payroll. But when Christian began to describe the monument he had in mind, Fendley stopped what he was doing. Not only was the man asking for stones larger than any that had been quarried in the county, he also wanted them cut, finished, and assembled into some kind of enormous astronomical instrument.

What in the world would it be for? Fendley asked. Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself.

Fendley is now deceased, but shortly after the Guidestones went up, an Atlanta television reporter asked what he was thinking when he first heard Christian's plan. "I was thinking, 'I got a nut in here now. How am I going get him out?'" Fendley said. He attempted to discourage the man by quoting him a price several times higher than for any project commissioned there before. The job would require special tools, heavy equipment, and paid consultants, Fendley explained. But Christian merely nodded and asked how long it would take. Fendley didn't rightly know—six months, at least. He wouldn't be able to even consider such an undertaking, he added, until he knew it could be paid for. When Christian asked whether there was a banker in town he considered trustworthy, Fendley saw his chance to unload the strange man and sent him to look for Wyatt Martin, president of the Granite City Bank.

The tall and courtly Martin—the only man in Elberton besides Fendley known to have met R. C. Christian face-to-face—is now 78. "Fendley called me and said, 'A kook over here wants some kind of crazy monument,'" Martin says. "But when this fella showed up he was wearing a very nice, expensive suit, which made me take him a little more seriously. And he was well-spoken, obviously an educated person." Martin was naturally taken aback when the man told him straight out that R. C. Christian was a pseudonym. He added that his group had been planning this secretly for 20 years and wanted to remain anonymous forever. "And when he told me what it was he and this group wanted to do, I just about fell over," Martin says. "I told him, 'I believe you'd be just as well off to take the money and throw it out in the street into the gutters.' He just sort of looked at me and shook his head, like he felt kinda sorry for me, and said, 'You don't understand.'"

Martin led Christian down the street to the town square, where the city had commissioned a towering Bicentennial Memorial Fountain, which included a ring of 13 granite panels, each roughly 2 by 3 feet, signifying the original colonies. "I told him that was about the biggest project ever undertaken around here, and it was nothing compared to what he was talking about," Martin says. "That didn't seem to bother him at all." Promising to return on Monday, the man went off to charter a plane and spend the weekend scouting locations from the air. "By then I half believed him," Martin says.

When Christian came back to the bank Monday, Martin explained that he could not proceed unless he could verify the man's true identity and "get some assurance you can pay for this thing." Eventually, the two negotiated an agreement: Christian would reveal his real name on the condition that Martin promise to serve as his sole intermediary, sign a confidentiality agreement pledging never to disclose the information to another living soul, and agree to destroy all documents and records related to the project when it was finished. "He said he was going to send the money from different banks across the country," Martin says, "because he wanted to make sure it couldn't be traced. He made it clear that he was very serious about secrecy."

Before leaving town, Christian met again with Fendley and presented the contractor with a shoe box containing a wooden model of the monument he wanted, plus 10 or so pages of detailed specifications. Fendley accepted the model and instructions but remained skeptical until Martin phoned the following Friday to say he had just received a $10,000 deposit. After that, Fendley stopped questioning and started working. "My daddy loved a challenge," says Fendley's daughter, Melissa Fendley Caruso, "and he said this was the most challenging project in the history of Elbert County."

Construction of the Guidestones got under way later that summer. Fendley's company lovingly documented the progress of the work in hundreds of photographs. Jackhammers were used to gouge 114 feet into the rock at Pyramid Quarry, searching for hunks of granite big enough to yield the final stones. Fendley and his crew held their breath when the first 28-ton slab was lifted to the surface, wondering if their derricks would buckle under the weight. A special burner (essentially a narrowly focused rocket motor used to cut and finish large blocks of granite) was trucked to Elberton to clean and size the stones, and a pair of master stonecutters was hired to smooth them.

Fendley and Martin helped Christian find a suitable site for the Guidestones in Elbert County: a flat-topped hill rising above the pastures of the Double 7 Farms, with vistas in all directions. For $5,000, owner Wayne Mullinex signed over a 5-acre plot. In addition to the payment, Christian granted lifetime cattle-grazing rights to Mullinex and his children, and Mullinex's construction company got to lay the foundation for the Guidestones.

With the purchase of the land, the Guidestones' future was set. Christian said good-bye to Fendley at the granite company office, adding, "You'll never see me again." Christian then turned and walked out the door—without so much as a handshake.

From then on, Christian communicated solely through Martin, writing a few weeks later to ask that ownership of the land and monument be transferred to Elbert County, which still holds it. Christian reasoned that civic pride would protect it over time. "All of Mr. Christian's correspondence came from different cities around the country," Martin says. "He never sent anything from the same place twice."

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun's yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (let these be guidestones to an age of reason) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

By early 1980, a bulldozer was scraping the Double 7 hilltop to bedrock, where five granite slabs serving as a foundation were laid out in a paddle-wheel design. A 100-foot-tall crane was used to lift the stones into place. Each of the outer rocks was 16 feet 4 inches high, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. The center column was the same (except only half the width), and the capstone measured 9 feet 8 inches long, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Covered with sheets of black plastic in preparation for an unveiling on the vernal equinox, the Guidestones towered over the cattle that continued to graze beneath it at the approach of winter's end.

The monument ignited controversy before it was even finished. The first rumor began among members of the Elberton Granite Association, jealous of the attention being showered on one of their own: Fendley was behind the whole thing, they said, aided by his friend Martin, the banker. The gossip became so poisonous that the two men agreed to take a lie detector test at the Elberton Civic Center. The scandal withered when The Elberton Star reported that they had both passed convincingly, but the publicity brought a new wave of complaints. As word of what was being inscribed spread, Martin recalls, even people he considered friends asked him why he was doing the devil's work. A local minister, James Travenstead, predicted that "occult groups" would flock to the Guidestones, warning that "someday a sacrifice will take place here." Those inclined to agree were hardly discouraged by Charlie Clamp, the sandblaster charged with carving each of the 4,000-plus characters on the stones: During the hundreds of hours he spent etching the guides, Clamp said, he had been constantly distracted by "strange music and disjointed voices."

The unveiling on March 22, 1980, was a community celebration. Congressmember Doug Barnard, whose district contained Elberton, addressed a crowd of 400 that flowed down the hillside and included television news crews from Atlanta. Soon Joe Fendley was the most famous Elbertonian since Daniel Tucker, the 18th-century minister memorialized in the folk song "Old Dan Tucker." Bounded by the Savannah and Broad rivers but miles from the nearest interstate—"as rural as rural can be," in the words of current Star publisher Gary Jones—Elberton was suddenly a tourist destination, with visitors from all over the world showing up to see the Guidestones. "We'd have people from Japan and China and India and everywhere wanting to go up and see the monument," Martin says. And Fendley's boast that he had "put Elberton on the map" was affirmed literally in spring 2005, when National Geographic Traveler listed the Guidestones as a feature in its Geotourism MapGuide to Appalachia.

But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature.

Even as locals debated the relative merits of these commandments, the dire predictions of Travenstead seemed to be coming true. Within a few months, a coven of witches from Atlanta adopted the Guidestones as their home away from home, making weekend pilgrimages to Elberton to stage various pagan rites ("dancing and chanting and all that kind of thing," Martin says) and at least one warlock-witch marriage ceremony. No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded. A 1981 article in the monthly magazine UFO Report cited Naunie Batchelder (identified in the story as "a noted Atlanta psychic") as predicting that the true purpose of the guides would be revealed "within the next 30 years." Viewed from directly overhead, the Guidestones formed an X, the piece in UFO Report observed, making for a perfect landing site.

Visitors kept coming, but after several failed investigations into the identity of R. C. Christian, the media lost interest. Curiosity flared again briefly in 1993, when Yoko Ono contributed a track called "Georgia Stone" to a tribute album for avant-garde composer John Cage, with Ono chanting the 10th and final guide nearly verbatim: "Be not a cancer on Earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature." A decade later, however, when comedienne Roseanne Barr tried to work a bit on the Guidestones into her comeback tour, nobody seemed to care.

Christian kept in touch with Martin, writing the banker so regularly that they became pen pals. Occasionally, Christian would call from a pay phone at the Atlanta airport to say he was in the area, and the two would rendezvous for dinner in the college town of Athens, a 40-mile drive west of Elberton. By this time, Martin no longer questioned Christian's secrecy. The older man had successfully deflected Martin's curiosity when the two first met, by quoting Henry James' observations of Stonehenge: "You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions, but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them." Christian "never would tell me a thing about this group he belonged to," Martin says. The banker received his last letter from Christian right around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and assumes the man—who would have been in his mid-eighties—has since passed away.

The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators" of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations.

Among them is an activist named Mark Dice, author of a book called The Resistance Manifesto. In 2005, Dice (who was using a pseudonym of his own—"John Conner"—appropriated from the Terminator franchise's main character) began to demand that the Guidestones be "smashed into a million pieces." He claims that the monument has "a deep Satanic origin," a stance that has earned him plenty of coverage, both in print and on the Web. According to Dice, Christian was a high-ranking member of "a Luciferian secret society" at the forefront of the New World Order. "The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process," Dice says, "and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves. The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it."

Ironically, Dice's message has mainly produced greater publicity for the Guidestones. This, in turn, has brought fresh visitors to the monument and made Elbert County officials even less inclined to remove the area's only major tourist attraction.

Phyllis Brooks, who runs the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce, pronounced herself aghast last November when the Guidestones were attacked by vandals for the first time ever. While Dice denies any involvement in the assault, he seems to have inspired it: Spray-painted on the stones were messages like "Jesus will beat u satanist" and "No one world government." Other defacements asserted that the Council on Foreign Relations is "ran by the devil," that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that President Obama is a Muslim. The vandals also splashed the Guidestones with polyurethane, which is much more difficult to remove than paint. Despite the graffiti's alignment with his views, Dice says he disapproves of the acts. "A lot of people were glad such a thing happened and saw it as standing up against the New World Order," Dice says, "while others who are unhappy with the stones saw the actions as counterproductive and inappropriate."

Martin winces every time he hears Dice's "Luciferian secret society" take on the Guidestones. But while he disagrees, he also admits that he doesn't know for sure. "All I can tell you is that Mr. Christian always seemed a very decent and sincere fella to me."

Dice, of course, is far from the only person with a theory about the Guidestones. Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature.

Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a "planetary chaos," Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. "They want to get the population down," Weidner says, "and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors."

On hearing Weidner's ideas, Martin shakes his head and says it's "the sort of thing that makes me want to tell people everything I know." Martin has long since retired from banking and no longer lives in Elberton, yet he's still the Guidestones' official—and only—secret-keeper. "But I can't tell," the old man quickly adds. "I made a promise." Martin also made a promise to destroy all the records of his dealings with Christian, though he hasn't kept that one—at least not yet. In the back of his garage is a large plastic bin (actually, the hard-sided case of an IBM computer he bought back in 1983) stuffed with every document connected to the Guidestones that ever came into his possession, including the letters from Christian.

For years Martin thought he might write a book, but now he knows he probably won't. What he also won't do is allow me to look through the papers. When I ask whether he's prepared to take what he knows to his grave, Martin replies that Christian would want him to do just that: "All along, he said that who he was and where he came from had to be kept a secret. He said mysteries work that way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much." The rest is enshrouded in the vast sunny stillness.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_guidestones

Robb Report - May, 2009

2009-05-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

Forbes - May 25, 2009

2009-05-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

Doctor Data
healthgrades.com
abms.org
consumerhealthratings.com
hospitalcompare.hhs.gov
health.state.ny/statistics

Thoughts On The Business of Life
"Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed." Anthony Powell.

"You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned." Fay Weldon.

"Death, the terror of the rich, the desire of the poor." Joseph Zabara.

Businessweek - June 1, 2009

2009-05-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

Wired - June, 2009

2009-05-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

wolframalpha.com: search engine

theauteurs.com: VoD for film buffs, from obscure international releases to up-and-coming flicks from the festival circuit

http://www.modulariscreen.com/: cool screen system for your home

Forbes Life - June, 2009

2009-05-30T13:04:00.001-07:00

Newsweek - June 1, 2009

2009-05-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

Forbes - June, 2009

2009-05-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

DIY Sleuthing - Keeping your money safe.
- finra.org: Financial Industry Regulatory Authority > for full data, contact state securities regulators and ask for all disciplinary material > cross-check with Google search results and newspaper databases
- CFP Board of Standards
- Chartered Financial Consultants

The Health Tests You Need
- Blood Pressure:
-- Optimal: 120/80 mm Hg or lower
-- Borderline: 120/80 to 140/90 mm Hg
-- High: Ablove 140/90 mm Hg
-- Fact: Every 20-point increase in blood pressure doubles your risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke.

- Bad Cholestrol (Low-desnity lipoprotein, LDL)
-- Optimal: < 100 mg per deciliter of blood
-- Normal: 100-129 mg/dL
-- Borderline: 130-159 mg/dL
-- High: 160-190 mg/dL
-- Very High: Over 190 mg/dL

- Overall Heart Risk
-- Low: less than 10% chance of developing or dying from heart disease in 10 years
-- Medium: 10%-20% chance
-- High: more than 20% chance
-- Risk depends on factors like LDL, age, gender, blood pressure, and smoking.

- Body Mass Index
-- Obese: 30kg or more of weight per meter squared of height
-- Overweight: 25-30 kg/m2
-- Normal weight: 18.5-25 kg/m2
-- Fact: Obese people have a higher mortality rate especially from cardiovascular disease.

- Waist Circumference
-- Men: risky if at or above 40 inches
-- Women: risky if at or above 35 inches

- Osteoporosis (bone mineral density (T-Score)
-- Normal: 0 to -1
-- Low bone density: -1 to -2.5
-- Osteoporosis: -2.5 or lower

- Blood Sugar
-- Normal: under 100 mg/dL
-- Prediabetes: 100-125 mg/dL
-- Diabetes: 126 or higher mg/dL

- Cancer Screening
-- 3 to get: pap smears for cervical cancer, colonoscopy or other screening tests for colon cancer starting at age 50, and mammograms in women starting at 40.
-- avoide blood-in-urine tests for bladder cancer (too many false positives), tests to spot ovarian cancer (many false positives), testicular cancer (unlikely to provide venefit), ultrasound to spot pancreatic cancer (no supporting evidence), prostate-specific antigen tests for men 75+

Fast Company - May, 2009

2009-05-26T18:15:00.001-07:00

Saveur - April, 2009

2009-05-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

Saveur - May, 2009

2009-05-25T19:26:00.001-07:00

Time - May 25, 2009

2009-05-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Website Magazine - June, 2009

2009-05-14T19:15:00.001-07:00

CRM - May, 2009

2009-05-14T19:09:00.001-07:00

Website Magazine - February, 2009

2009-05-14T19:05:00.001-07:00

Time - February 23, 2009

2009-05-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

Computer Shopper - March, 2009

2009-05-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

Audacity.sourceforge.net

Esquire - March, 2009

2009-05-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.esquire.com/features/food-drink/breakfast-guide-0309

Business Week - April 6, 2009

2009-05-03T11:38:00.001-07:00

Innovation-Friendly Countries
1. Singapore
2. South Korea
3. Switzerland
4. Iceland
5. Ireland
6. Hong Kong
7. Finland
8. US
9. Japan
10. Sweden

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/09_14/B4125bw50.htm

Business Week - February 23, 2009

2009-04-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

Website Magazine - May, 2009

2009-04-29T22:14:00.001-07:00

Business Week - April 20, 2009

2009-04-26T17:44:00.001-07:00

Forbes, April 27, 2009

2009-04-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0427/066-marketing-seth-godin-the-apprentices.html

http://www.forbes.com/2002/04/08/0408alist.html

Fast Company - December 08, January 09

2009-04-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/the-motorola-sparrow.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/multimedia/slideshows/content/jets-training-facility.html

Time - April 20, 2009

2009-04-13T20:29:00.001-07:00

Saveur - March, 2009

2009-04-13T17:06:00.000-07:00

Sports Illustrated - April 6, 2009

2009-04-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Newsweek - March 30, 2009

2009-04-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

Time - April 6, 2009

2009-04-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

Wired - March, 2009

2009-04-05T17:41:00.001-07:00

Businessweek - February 9, 2009

2009-04-05T14:23:00.001-07:00

Time - January 26, 2009

2009-03-12T17:13:00.001-07:00

Sports Illustrated - March 2, 2009

2009-03-12T16:56:00.001-07:00

Computer Shopper - January, 2009

2009-03-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Best Free Software

Office Productivity: you could buy MS Office for $399, or try...
-Google Docs (www.google.com): available anywhere there's Internet, no download, easy to use, easy to share with other Gmail users
-Lotus Symphony 1.1 (www.lotus.com): most closely resembles MS Office, packed with features, good help menus
-OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org): excellent bullet and numbering schemes, PDF button, very similar to MS Office, easy to use

OS for free: but you sacrifice tech support
-Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com): among the most popular and easiest to use, Linux flavor most like Windows
-OpenSUSE (www.opensuse.org): courtesy of Novell, especially robust hardware and software support
-Slackware (www.slackware.com): one of the oldest Linux flavors, renowned for its stability and simplicity

Site with applications and information to get the most out of Linux:
-www.mythtv.org: turn your computer into a home theater PC for free
-www.winehq.org: provides an environment to run Windows software. Not compatible with everything, but an astonishingly wide scope.
-www.linux-drivers.org: when you're looking for drivers and compatibility lists
-www.linuxjournal.com: latest news about linux, as well as blogs, help, and other resources
-www.slashdot.org: tech-news site with an open-source and Linux-friendly spin

PDF Creation: you could buy Adobe Acrobat for $299 to $449, or try...
-CutePDF Writer (www.cutepdf.com): print-menu-based PDF creation, minimal footprint
-Online PDF-creation services (online.primopdf.com): no software install required, handy for use on public PCs
-PDF ReDirect (www.pdfredirect.com): print-menu-based PDF creation, PDF encryption, merge function

Photo Editing: you could buy Adobe Photoshop Elements ($99), or try...
-Picasa (www.picasa.com): quickly scans PC for pictures, large thumbnails and easy scrolling lets you find any picture quickly, comprehensive photo-editing download
-Picnik (www.picnik.com): offers advanced features that are easy to apply, red-eye fix works for both humans and animals, allows adjustment of all special effects
-Photoscape (www.photoscape.com): good auto levels

Photo Management: you could buy Adobe Photoshop Elements ($99), or try...
-Photobucket (www.photobucket.com): easy online sharing, simple access to embed codes for images, lots of editing options
-Flickr (www.flickr.com): easy-to-use, multifeatured organization tools, allows for social-networking, useful editing tool
-Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com): lots of products to choose from, easy to share albums with family and friends

Top 10 Free Games
-Rails: micromanage cargo delivery, train upgrades, and track building as you grow a railroad empire
-Rumble Box: beat the stuffing out of impassive humanoid agressors made of cubes and spheres
-Trackmania Nations Forever: auto-racing
-N: propel stick-figure ninja trhough perilous levels in pursuit of gold
-War Rock: Counter-Strike-style first-person shooter
-Synaesthete: control a futuristic Gumby lookalike through a vector-style music world
-Kingdom of Loathing: control stick-figure warriors as they bludgeon monsters like Candied Yam Golems
-Sauerbraten CTF Edition: lightning-fast first person shooter like Unreal Tournament
-Crayon Physics: use mouse as pen to draw tumbling boxes, planks and lines that collide with a little red ball you're trying to move to an objective
-Command and Conqure: Red Alert: this original hit is available for free online

Security: you could buy Norton 360 ($79.99), or try...
-Avast Home Edition (www.avast.com): full of features including antirootkit detection, email and IM message scanning
-AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition (free.avg.com): no-nonsense detection and protection, spyware fighting
-Avira AntiVir Personal (www.free-av.com): antiphishing features, thwarts dialers

Five Must-Have Utilities
-3DMark06 Basic Edition: 3D benchmarking software will put your video card through a workout to help you decide if it's time for an upgrade
-Belarc Advisor: great way to get to know your PC's insides
-Free RAM Optimizer: sits in your system tray monitoring memory use and forcing unruly apps to return your resources
-SpeedFan: displays system temperatures from your internal sensors
-WinDirStat: scan your drives and show what's taking up space

Scientific American - January, 2009

2009-03-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

Why is this not surprising?

Newsweek - February 16, 2009

2009-03-08T11:17:00.001-07:00

Not necessarily a bad investment...

Canada does some things right, like...

Time - December 22, 2008

2009-03-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

Just awesome...

Just another reason to be nice: it's contagious!

Magazine Scans

2009-02-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

Time - October 27, 2008

2009-01-18T08:59:00.000-08:00

Sustainable Sushi
Best to eat farmed bay scallops, farmed striped bass, and Canadian sea-urchin roe.
OK to eat Japanese squid, US king crab, and Washington State wild salmon.
Stay away from Australian and Japanese yellowtail, octopus, and bigeye tuna caught with longlines.

Newsweek - January 12, 2009

2009-01-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

Listen to: Q-Tip, "The Renaissance"
Watch: "Children's Hospital", web series from Rob Corddry.
Surf: Mother Nature Network (mnn.com), environmental news site.
Shop: Dealnews.com
Read: Joachim Fest, "Plotting Hitler's Death"

Newsweek - October 13, 2008

2009-01-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

Beat Back The Bugs
Do: wear a hat, drink your OK, get a flu shot
Maybe: eat chicken soup
Don't: starve a cold/feed a fever, curl up by the fire, bother with zinc nor echinacea

Best Organics For The Buck
Get: milk (if not, get skim), beef (if not, get a lean cut), produce, especially cranberries, nectarines, peaches, strawberries, pears, apples, sweet bell peppers, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, lettuce
Not necessary: pork, chicken, eggs, bananas, citrus fruits, pineapple, mango, avocado (fruits with removable skins)

Education, The Song of Hope (Shakira): http://www.newsweek.com/id/162264

New York - November 17, 2008

2009-01-04T10:30:00.000-08:00

Read: Malcolm Gladwell

Car and Driver - February, 2009

2009-01-01T20:08:00.000-08:00

High Fives: Cars For Drivers, Editors Choice

Performance Compacts:
1. Mazdaspeed 3 ($23,410) - although it's due to be replaced soon, the Mazdaspeed 3 offers explosive performance, good handling, and a composed ride. It is also spacious and practical, with a well-executed interior.
2. Volkswagen GTI ($23,640) - it's not the fastest car in its class or the best handling, but the GTI is an appealing all-around package. It has the best interior in this group, and the dual-clutch transmission is superb.
3. Chevrolet Cobalt SS ($24,095) - a stunningly capable chassis collaborates well with a powerful, turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Its only weakness is being a Cobalt, which means it's let down by a chintzy interior.
4. Subaru Impreza WRX ($25,660) - we were disappointed with the latest-generation WRX when it debuted in 2007, but changes to the suspension and engine - up from 224 to 265 hp - have transformed it.
5. Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR ($38,985) - it's fast and fabulous (except for the interior), but the Evo is pricey in the superior MR guise. Then again, it's one of the quickest ways we know to travel from point to point.

Sports Sedans:
1. BMW M3 - practical and blindingly fast, quite possibly the best car in the world.
2. Cadillac CTS-V - zero to 60mph in 4.3 seconds, comfy ride, 60 grand. Smokin'!
3. Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG - truly wonderful but awfully expensive.
4. Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG - good enough to give the M3 a fright.
One to watch - Pontiac G8 GXP - promises to be the bargain of the decade.

Sports Cars:
1. Porsche Boxster - it's hard to think of a car that involves and indulges its driver so much. It is also surprisingly practical for a two-seat roadster.
2. Chevrolet Corvette - for less than $50,000, the base car offers more performance than most drivers will ever be able to use.
3. Mazda MX-5 Miata - it's simple, light on its feet, and easy to live with. We especially like the folding-hardtop version.
4. Mazda RX-8 - we love the unique sound of the rotary engine and the car's sweet handling, but gas mileage is poor.
One to watch - Nissan 370Z - smaller all around and more powerful, the 370Z promises to be even more entertaining than the outgoing 350Z.

Small SUVs:
1. Toyota RAV4 - the available third-row seat and an optional 269hp V6 give it the edge over the CR-V.
2. Honda CR-V - for anyone who doesn't have to carry more than five people, this is the rational all-weather hauler.
3. Nissan Rogue - the most entertaining cute ute on the road, let down only by a somber interior and a noisy transmission.
4. Subaru Forester - less quirky than the old Forester, the 09 model is still fast and useful. We favor the nonturbo model equipped with a stick shift.
One to watch - Volkswagen Tiguan - good to look at, great to sit in, and pleasing to drive. The only downside is that VW thinks it can charge a premium for this class.

Mid-size SUVs:
1. Honda Pilot - this redesigned crossover is solid, nicely appointed, spacious, and a good value. Its only weakness is an engine that's 20hp shy of the competition.
2. Nissan Murano - with excellent real-world gas mileage, a punchy V6, good steering, and a roomy cabin, it's the best two-row SUV out there.
3. Mazda CX-9 - aside from its slightly flinty ride, this is a great highway cruiser - and fun to drive on back roads, too. But it lacks the Pilot's rock-solid feel.
4. Hyundai Santa Fe - somewhat numb and inert to drive, the Santa Fe scores on interior quality and amenities, as well as value and livability.
5. Nissan Xterra - the choice for people who feel the need to go rock crawling but don't want to sacrifice everyday utility or on-road drivability.

Entry Luxury Cars:
1. BMW 3-series - it's hard to argue with the sheer brilliance of the 3-series sedans and coupes. The new 335d turbo-diesel only increases this appeal.
2. Infiniti G37 - sporting newly refined powertrains, the G37 comes close to toppling the 3-series. And the coupe and sedan are better values, too.
3. Cadillac CTS - beautifully styled inside and out, the CTS suffers only minor refinement issues and a notchy manual transmission.
4. Audi A4 - lacking a little personality, the elegant and luxurious A4 is worth a look, especially in 2.0-liter form.
5. Acura TSX - it has grown and lost some charm, but it still drives beautifully and is the bargain in this class.

Luxury Sedans:
1. Mercedes-Benz S-Class - the "base" S550 is our favoirte, combining class-leading presence, spaciousness, driver appeal, and the full gamut of luxury amenities.
2. Jaguar XF - undoubtedly the best Jaguar ever made, the gorgeous XF mates a superb ride with sharp handling.
3. Infiniti M35/M45 - competitive in every respect, the M45 blows the 5-series away because of its price advantage.
4. BMW 5-series - now available with the superb 3.0-liter turbo engine, the 5-series is a terrific, if pricey, option.
One to watch - BMW 7-series - more high-tech but more user-friendly, the revamped 750i will give stern opposition to the S550.

Small Cars:
1. Honda Fit - with EPA ratings of 27 mpg in the city and 33 on the highway (for the manual), a ton of interior room, and enjoyable handling, it's a standout.
2. Volkswagen Rabbit - a two-time comparison test winner, the Rabbit is high on driving pleasure and exudes quality.
3. Honda Civic - the space-age exterior and interior styling polarizes. But the Civic drives nicely and gets good gas mileage: 26mpg city and 34mpg highway for the manual models.
4. Nissan Versa - commodious and capable, the Versa is a great value: A new 1.6 model comes in under $11,000.

Supercars:
1. Ferrari F430/430 Scuderia - whether you choose a coupe or a spider, the F430 is a glorious device. And the lightweight Scuderia is the best of them all.
2. Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 - a $105,000 Corvette might seem like a stretch, but the ZR1 is fabulous and easier to drive at the limit than the less powerful Z06.
3. Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 - recent upgrades have turned the 552hp baby Lambo into a car that's as quick as the Ferrari Enzo.
4. Ferrari 599GTB Fiorano - the perfect expression of what a two-seat gran turismo should be.
5. Bugatti Veyron 16.4 - stupid expensive, but it rewrites the book on street-car performance.

Family Sedans:
1. Honda Accord - a perennial 10Best winner, the Accord is the most complete family sedan on the market. Our pick is the EX 4-cylinder, which gains 13hp over the 177hp LX base model. Dislikes? A needlessly complex center stack.
2. Mazda 6 - all-new for 2009, the 6 has grown bigger over time, like every car in this class. It isn't as much fun to drive as the previous model, but is more refined. It looks distinctive too.
3. Nissan Altima - we're not sold on the gloomy cockpit, but the Altima is the most enjoyable family sedan on back roads. With cars in this class, stick with the 4-cylinder models.
4. Chevrolet Malibu - now a serious player, the Malibu has looks, refinement, and a classy interior. A 6-speed automatic option further improves the 4-cylinder models.
5. Hyundai Sonata - we wouldn't recommend the Sonata to any budding Lewis Hamiltons out there, but it's a good deal for anyone who wants a quiet, luxurious, well-equipped cruiser.

New York - November 10, 2008

2009-01-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Live Cheap Without Giving Up Much

Drink only at dives: annual savings = $3,467
-Nancy Whiskey, Lucy's, Port 41, Alibi Club

Get a $14 haircut: annual savings = $540
-Neighborhood Barbers

Swap clothes: annual savings = $1,000
-hold a clothing swap at home

Clear your bookshelves: annual savings = $299.40
-read every volume that's currently collecting dust on your shelves before you buy a new book

Slash your bills: annual savings = $416
-cell phone (find a lower-price plan given minutes needed), cable/internet/home phone, electric (ESCO instead of ConEd).

Public schools for kids: annual savings = $23,625
-Insideschools.org

Repair, don't replace: annual savings = $1,229
-restore a dresser at All Furniture Services, rewire an old lamp at Lexington Hardware and Electric, de-stain a rug at Flat Rate Carpet, fix a digital camera at Marty's Camera Repair, make boots look new at Cesar's Shoe Repair, replace coat linings at Nelson Tailor Shop, repaire a snagged dress at Orchard Express

Surf the first wave of panic-selling: total savings = $394,463
-property markdowns at streeteasy.com or trulia.com

Recycle your romances: annual savings = $2,400
-bootycalling an ex you're on good terms with is a low-rish, high-yield investment

Cancel DVDs by mail: annual savings = $204
-use the public library's DVD stack instead

Go generic: annual savings: $92.16
-ShopRite Ibuprofen instead of Advil, CVS anti-itch cream instead of Cortaid itch cream, Bravo market's Krasdale Ultra laundry detergent instead of double-strength Tide, Hanes boxer shorts instead of Gap boxers, Duane Reade Nourishing formula nail-polish remover and cotton balls instead of Cutex nail-polish remover and Johnson & Johnson cotton balls, and Duane Reade Naproxen Sodium instead of Aleve

Kick your cab habit: annual savings = $5,000
-take the subway

Paint your own damn nails: annual savings = $2,000
-forget expensive hand and foot creams. Body moisturizers or anti-aging lotions are plenty good for hands and feet.
-nail files and buffing blocks can be bought in bulk at a beauty supply store like Sally's. Better yet, cut the files in half and the blocs in quarters to make them last longer.
-the proper way to file is at a 45 degree angle underneath the nail. If your nails are weak, gently file in one direction.
-don't overcolor. Wipe polish off one side of the brush, put one dot in the middle of the nail, and fan out until the polish reaches your cuticles.
-be patient when drying, 15 minutes minimum. To speed up drying time, go for a walk in the cold air. It shrinks the molecules in the lacquer.

Become your own super: annual savings = $1,200
-take care of the trash, the boiler, the keys and the lightbulbs for less rent

Caffeinate efficiently: annual savings = $1,565
-switch from Starbucks to Dunkin Donuts
-brew it yourself

Take the free water taxi to the Red Hook Ikea: annual savings = $48

Negotiate everything: annual savings = $2,028
-queen-size Simmons Hamlet pillow-top mattress at Sleepy's (method: War of Attrition, lie down on a bed, get up, say nothing until salesman blew up, "Are you going to buy a bed or just play with me?"), Ermenegildo Zegna suede-and-calf sneakers at Saks Fifth Avenue (method: Soft Plea, "Are they going to be on sale shortly? If no, are there any other discounts that would apply?"), all-access membership at Union Square Equinox fitness club (method: Growing Uninterest, super-eager during the tour but testy once fees brought up, "It doesn't seem worth it"), mint-condition Door Store dining table off Craigslist (method: To and Fro, start low, meet somewhere in the middle), basic Time Warner cable (method: Cable Guy, wait until cable guys was installing Internet, asked him "Any chance you can hook me up with free cable? Twenty dollars okay?"), Eaemes lounge chair and ottoman by Herman Miller at Design Within Reach (method: Team Player, appeared with notebook, asked lots of questions, appear like their dream customer, only ask about the price at the end, "Is there something we can do about the price?"), street knish at 5th Ave and 54th St. (method: You Can't Do Any Better For That Knish?, "I'll give you X. C'mon, man, tough times.")

Knock off your favorite suit: annual savings = $2,594
-Biemonte Wong's Tailor, from Hong Kong, camps at the Hilton New York in midtown, make an appointment to drop off your favorite pieces and choose from their wide range of materials. The clothes will be made in Hong Kong and shipped in 3 weeks.

Eat like a prince at pauper's prices: annual savings = $605
-Chicken for two: Pio Pio, Peruvian chicken specialist, $30 for whole rotisserie chicken, rice, beans, tostones, avocado salad, and fries and sliced hot dog.
-Bowl of pasta: Pepe Rosso to Go, hole in the wall hits the spot with $6.95 spaghetti with tomato and basil.
-The fancy lunch: Jean Georges, two-course lunch that some consider the best $28 you can spend on food today.
-Peking duck: Corner 28, steamed bun stuffed with roast duck goes for $1 and is delivered from a takeout window.
-Regular slice: 99cent Fresh Pizza, quick and satisfying lunch.
-Indian feast: Chennai Garden, $14.95 Gujarathi combo dinner arrives on a round tray containing kachori (dal fritter), batata vada (spicy potato fritters), kadi (chickpea flour and yogurt soup), a vegetable curry, rice pilaf, poori, date chutney, and sweetened cheese dessert called rasmali.
-The brush with three-Michelin-star greatness: Benoit, nibble on $1 "egg mayo", a fancy Frenchified take on a deviled egg, served with toasted length of ficelle and springy leaf of lettuce.
-Steak for two: General Greene, Niman Ranch flap steak (remarkably beefy, seldom seen but up-and-coming cut) for $12.
-Ice-cream cone: Dessert Club, ChikaLicious, vanilla-bean soft-serve for $2.90.

De-stress for less: annual savings = $780
-Keisy Oriental Nature Center, 60-minute shiatsu and acupressure massage for $45.

Trade babysitting: annual savings = $3,120

Whittle down your mortgage: annual savings = $9,086
-refinance into a new 30-year-fixed, take on an adjustable rate, or make a thirteenth payment every year

Embrace low fashion: annual savings = $1,462 for women, $2,193 for men
-women: vintage frames at Fabulous Fanny's, cashmere at J. Crew, lingerie at Macy's, party shoes at Guess by Marciano, date dresses at Forever 21, parkas at Uniqlo
-men: winter boots at Eddie Bauer, denim at Levi's, work shoes at Florsheim, button-downs at H&M, peacoats at American Eagle, business suits at DKNY (at Rothman's)

Drink good cheap wine: annual savings = $2,205
-instead of Krug Brut Champagne Collection 1985, try Gruet Brut
-instead of Terlano Chardonnay 1995, try Lamoreaux Landing Chardonnay 2006
-instead of Braida Barbera d'Asti Bricco dell'Uccellone 2004, try Daniel Bouland Morgon Vielles Vignes 2007

Be your own restaurant: annual savings = $1,248

Dodge the (rental) broker's fee: annual savings = $6,597
-work the streets: chat up every doorman and buzz every super in the area you want to live
-tell everyone your sob story
-dig deeper into the web: craigslist, streeteasy.com, online Times and Voice classifieds, RDNY, and listingsquare.com
-go straight to the source: management companies usually only charge for background checks. Try Stonehenge Management, Jakobson Properties, Solow Leasing, Glenwood, Rudin Management, and Rose Associates
-call a broker: ask for an agent that handles OP (owner pays) listings

Go to museums only on Friday nights: annual savings = $79
-MoMA, free 4 to 8
-Bronx Museum of the Arts, free all day
-Guggenheim, pay what you wish 5:45 to 7:45
-Morgan Library, free 7 to 9
-American Folk Art Museum, free 5:30 to 7:30
-New York Historical Society, free 6 to 8

Rent a dress: annual savings = $5,580
-Ilus, a "luxury for lease" boutique that offers 3-day rentals for $60 to $400

Business Week - November 10, 2008

2009-01-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Ranking Free-Market Economies (Global Competitiveness Report, 08-09)

Openness to Capital Flows:
1. Hong Kong
2. Mauritius
3. Sweden
4. Iceland
5. Finland
6. Singapore
7. Estonia
8. Germany
9. Switzerland
10. Denmark
19. Canada
20. U.S.

Low Trade Barriers:
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Chile
5. Finland
6. Slovak Republic
7. Sweden
8. Ireland
9. Czech Republic
10. Denmark
21. U.S.
24. Canada

Absence of Distortions from Taxes and Subsidies:
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Chile
4. Iceland
5. South Africa
6. New Zealand
7. Norway
8. Estonia
9. Ireland
10. Netherlands
34. Canada
35. U.S.

Percentage of 25 to 34 year olds with higher degrees (OECD, 2006)
1. Russia
2. Canada
3. Japan
4. Korea
5. Israel
6. New Zealand
7. Ireland
8. Belgium
9. Norway
10. France
12. U.S.

How Apple Does It (Apple's former director of industrial design, Robert Brunner)
Support design at senior levels; design for more than decoration; be original; and launch products quickly and often.

Stocks
Stocks have been the top-performing asset worldwide since 1900. The Australian and Swedish markets have led the way, with annualized real returns of nearly 8% each through 2007, compared with a 5.8% average for world stock markets. In recent years, though, bonds have beaten equities in 10 out of 17 countries, including all the largest markets, according to Global Investment Returns Yearbook. A team at London Business School found that the annualized real return on a world index of stock markets from 2000 to 2007, in US dollars, was just 1.3%.

Where Cash-Rich Funds Are Placing Their Bets
David Winters, Wintergreen:
-"the trifecta" is buying really good companies at a really good price with good management
-likes Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's holding company) and Schindler Group (Swiss maker and servicer of elevators and escalators)

Bruce Berkowitz, Fairholme:
-looking at companies with strong cash flows, particularly in health care and defense
-likes United Healthcare and WellPoint (HMOs), Pfizer and Forest Laboratories (big pharmaceuticals)

Matt McLennan, First Eagle Global
-buying in Asia, particularly Japan
-likes Fanuc (leader in robotics), SMC (make of pneumatic components), Aioi Insurance

Maxim Beer Reference

2008-12-31T22:04:00.000-08:00

The Big Boys: Macros

Michelob Ultra / Pale Lager / St. Louis - Rainwater light.
Heineken / Pale Lager / The Netherlands - Crisp bite.
Miller Lite / Light Lager / Milwaukee - Sugary and clean.
Michelob / Lager / St. Louis - Woody taste, dry classic beer goes down easy without any aftertaste.
Miller Genuine Draft / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Light with a touch of hops.
Bud Light (aluminum bottle) / Pale Lager / St. Louis - low-cal brew for dieting.
Amstel Light / Pale Lager / Amsterdam - Hoppy lager can be downed for hours.
Stella Artois / Pale Lager / Belgium - Glass-smooth beer.
Harp / Pale Lager / Ireland - Milder in taste than cousins Guinness and Smithwick's.
Michelob Light / Lager / St. Louis - Hints of caramel.
Blue Moon / Belgian Wheat / Toronto - Hints of Bazooka gum.
Miller High Life / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Champagne of beers, starts mild but ends crisp and sweet.
Budweiser (aluminum bottle) / Pale Lager / St. Louis - Essential beer with snappy bite.

The Crisp Crew: Quenching, Bold Beauties

Peroni / Lager / Italy - Robust Roman.
Carlsberg / Pale Lager / Denmark - Fine, grassy brew with tart finish.
Tennent's of Scotland / Pale Lager / Scotland - Tastes like Miller High Life with a brogue.
Lowenbrau Original / Lager / Germany - Sweet, tangy lager.
Beck's / Pilsner / Germany - Light, bold, and cures the thirsties fast.
St. Pauli Girl / Lager / Germany - Mild and malty with a clean finish.
Warsteiner Light / German Pilsner / Germany - Harsh start, chuggable finish.
Pilsner Urquell / Pilsner / Czech Republic - Refreshingly bitter.
Kirin Ichiban / Pale Lager / Japan - Dry beer.
Fischer Amber / Amber Ale / France - Leaves a sweet taste on the lips.
Modelo Especial / Lager / Mexico - Light, uncomplicated, and goes down easy.
Tiger / Lager / Singapore - Clean and smooth, with a sugary finish.
Staropramen / Pilsner / Czech Republic - Peppery.
Duvel / Pale Ale / Belgium - Citrus notes and smooth despite 8.5% alcohol.

Fun Punch From Paradise: Climb Into A Bottle Instead of Taking a Week Off

Gordon Biersch Blonde Bock / Auburn Lager / San Jose, CA - Malty beer, not for the wimpy of tongue.
Sierra Nevada / Pale Ale / Chico, CA - High notes of citrus and floral, baseline is a hoppy boom.
Carta Blanca / Pale Lager / Mexico - Light and crisp.
Sol / Pale Lager / Mexico - Sweet, lemony brew with wet-hay finish.
Brahma / Pale Lager / Brazil - Thirst-quenching.
Pacifico Clara / Pale Lager / Mexico - Bubbly and bright.
Primo Island Lager / Lager / Lihue, HI - Hints of berry and salt.
Presidente / Pale Lager / Dominican Republic - Tastes limed and salted without adding either.
Red Stripe / Lager / Jamaica - Sweet lager has pleasantly skunky smell.
Corona Extra / Pale Lager / Mexico - Limes are optional but preferred.
Blue Star / Wheat Ale / Mendocino County, CA - Starts with a huge nose of roasted nuts and blueberry, then gives nice bitter finish.

The Redheads: Wild and Mysterious, Will Stalk Your Palate

St. Pauli Girl Special Dark / Dark Lager / Germany - More complex and naughtier than her blonde sibling. Eminently drinkable.
Samuel Adams Boston Lager / Lager / Boston - Mild enough to quell the fire yet hoppy enough to add nuance to the party in your moth.
Brooklyn Lager / Lager / Brooklyn - Loaded with malty, hoppy, slightly spicy flavor.
Newcastle / Brown Ale / UK - Evoking nutty flavors, surprisingly light.
Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Pale Ale / English Pale Ale / UK - Superdrinkable brew with peaty hints of deliciousness.
Michelob Ultra Amber Light / Lager / St. Louis - Light with a rye-toast flavor.
Bass Pale Ale / Pale Ale / UK - Rich, hoppy flavor.
Dos Equis Ambar / Dark Lager / Mexico - Easy, smoky stuff has more guts than most big American beers.
Yuengling Traditional Lager / Pale Lager / Pottsville, PA - Frothier than an Amish beard, complex flavor with hints of caramel.
Michelob Pale Ale / Pale Ale / St. Louis - Mildly bitter.
Great Lakes Eliot Ness / Vienna / Cleveland - Smoth and sexy amber.
Budweiser American Ale / Amber Ale / St. Louis - Malty taste.

Canned Heat: Embraced By Elite Brewers For Its Preservation Power

Busch Light / Lager / St. Louis - Tasty lager whose nose evokes late fall, rotting leaves and all.
Sapporo / Pale Lager / Japan - Light, wispy head, strong finish.
Rainier / Light Lager / Irwindale, CA - Malty minx goes down fast.
Gordon Ale (Oskar Blues) / Ale / Lyons, CO - Lighter and cleaner than its cousin, Dale, drinkable spicy powerhouse.
Kokanee / Pale Lager / BC - Full-flavored light beer.
Dale's Pale Ale (Oskar Blues) / Pale Ale / Lyons, CO - Bitter, fun punch to the palate.
Coors Light / Lager / Golden, CO - Easy-to-drink, low-cal.
Old Milwaukee / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Malt flavor.
Milwaukee's Best / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Musty cereal nose, smoky taste, yet still superlight.
Lucky / Lager / Toronto - Smooth with a heavy blast of sour grain.
Natural Light / Pilsner / St. Louis - Mild brew is ideal for el cheapo partying.
King Cobra / Malt Liquor / St. Louis - Grainy, light-beer-like taste but finishes harshly in the back of your throat.
Genesee Cream Ale / Cream Ale / Rochester, NY - Creamy, dry-like-gasoline beer is supper slammable.
Blatz Light / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Diet drink has tinges of white toast and butter.
Pabst Blue Ribbon / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Hipster cachet, peaty finish, chain-saw hangover.
Stroh's / Macro Lager / Milwaukee - Hints of mesquite.
Budweiser Tallboys / Pale Lager / St. Louis - Perfectly oversize cans.
Schaefer / Pale Lager / San Antonio - Beer to have when you are broke and need a mind vacation from your nagging wife.
OB Lager / Pale Lager / South Korea - Crisp beer is Korean Bud.
Guinness Draught / Stout / Dublin - Black, smoky brew, sometimes knocked for being too dense or too bitter, but it's actually remarkably light and superdrinkable despite its color and breadbasket head.
Foster's (oil can) / Pale Lager / Australia - Evokes Bud, but with more alcohol-infused aftertaste.
Foster's Premium Ale (oil can) / Ale / Australia - Just as smooth as the regular (blue can), but with more roasted nose and nutty body.
Tecate / Pale Lager / Mexico - Goes down quick.
Boddingtons / Ale / UK - One-pint can comes with nitrogen widget and pours beautiful, long-lasting head. Has butter mouthfeel and is slightly bitter.

Best of the Bottom Shelf: Remove Shame and Drink These

Labatt Blue / Pilsner / Ontario - Rich and nuanced, smoother than many of its skunkier Great White North brethren.
Rolling Rock / Pale Lager / St. Louis - Watery with a subtle bite.
Ballantine Ale / Ale / Milwaukee - Fruity bouquet.
St. Ides / Malt Liquor / Eden, NC - Watered-down anti-freeze.
Old Style Light / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - Golden brew tastes a little like heaven.
Olde English 800 / Malt Liquor / Milwaukee - One of the greatest cheap buzzes in the world.
Colt 45 / Malt Liquor / Milwaukee - Grainy flavor. After a 40 of this, it's fightin' time.
Dixie / Pale Lager / New Orleans - Tasty blend of leather, smoke, and cantaloupe notes.
Kronenbourg 1664 / Pale Lager / France - Cheap, spry, pleasantly bitter beer.
Schlitz / Pale Lager / Milwaukee - The new-old beer, bitter and watery.
Lone Star / Pale Lager / San Antonio - Light, no-frills beer.

Bad Name, Good Beer

Leffe Blond / Pale Ale / Belgium - Like a wheat beer without that annoying wax-paper aftertaste. Hay-hued ale is super-fruity.
Scrimshaw / Pilsner / Mendocino County, CA - Crisp beer with buttery notes.
Tsingtao / Pale Lager / China - China's #1 export, thin-headed, light beer with slightly hoppy floral character.
Bohemia / Pilsner / Mexico - Melon-tinged.
Harbin / Pale Lager / China - Sweet.
Smithwick's / Red Ale / Ireland - Called "Smiddicks" in Ireland. Nutty, silky.
Asahi / Lager / Tokyo - Sharp on the tongue.
Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat / Wheat Ale / Chippewa Falls, WI - Citrussy.
Kingfisher / Lager / India - Mellow.
McSorley's Ale / Ale / Wilkes-Barre, PA - Gulpable amber ale.
Hoegaarden / Belgian White / Belgium - Velvety with hints of corlander and orange.
Chimay Rouge / Pilsner / Belgium - Reddish body and honey-sweet aroma.
Saison Dupont / Farmhouse Ale / Belgium - Bursting with notes of almond and grapefruit.

PC Magazine, December, 2008

2008-12-31T21:25:00.000-08:00

www.printwhatyoulike.com - slice and dice any web page before printing it to make sure you get only the parts that you need before you sent it to the printer. Just paste the URL you want to format for printing into the text box.

www.wholetravel.com - find the eco-vacation that you want.

Esquire - September, 2008

2008-09-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

Book
"The Forever War", Dexter Filkins

Can We Stop Acting So Childish?

It is possible that as you read these words one of the great works of art of our time is being destroyed. The film version of "Where the Wild Things Are"--with a screenplay cowritten by the Coolest Writer in America (Dave Eggers), directed by the Coolest Director Alive (Spike Jonze), and starring the Coolest Actors Ever (Forest Whitaker and Catherine Keener)--has had its release date set back a year, apparently after disastrous test screenings, to undergo massive reshooting. The original "Where the Wild Things Are," the children's story by Maurice Sendak, is one of the most beloved tellings of one of the dominant narratives of our era: the child who suffers the perils of adulthood. It's a story that has to be told without wavering.

Surely the timing couldn't be better for such a film. The figure of the boy-man or girl-woman negotiating the space between adulthood and childhood consumes us as never before. Every week, in every tabloid, we watch famous kids enduring their rites of passage into adulthood through acts of self-destruction and sometimes self-mutilation. That's what most of celebrity gossip is--bearing witness to initiation rituals that never end.

The half-child, half-adult has become the dominant persona of American popular culture. Child celebrity, once considered a career killer, is today nearly a prerequisite to genuine icon status. In 1993, Britney Spears, the madwoman who is also the biggest celebrity alive, was presented to the world on a children's program, the "Mickey Mouse Club," where Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera appeared as well. She was, from the beginning, a girl making a woman's moves. No matter how much she ages or how many kids she whelps, she is, and will always be, the child confronting adulthood too soon and suffering for it. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen serve the same function today that Saint Agnes and Saint Sebastian served in their cults in medieval Europe. They exist to be beautiful and young, and to suffer visibly. Their tormented bodies--half-ecstasy, half-destruction--peer down from the public places, no longer the piazza and cathedral but TMZ.com and the airport magazine rack. They are omnipresent yet near to us, personal, almost familial. They are in our hearts; their clothing sells as precious artifacts; we cry for them; we laugh with them; we carry their images with us always.

They are the lacunal girl-women, stuck forever between childhood and adulthood, embodying the irreconcilable tension between nostalgia for childhood and the desire to escape it. They truly are where the wild things are.

As in medieval hagiography, our tormented children are the subject of much-devoured writings as well as an endless series of public spectacles. Eggers is the perfect writer to bring "Where the Wild Things Are" to film, because his principal theme--from "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" to "What Is the What"--has been the child forced to deal with adulthood and suffering. The genre is now as well established as the police procedural or political thriller, with a basic formula for character: whimsy x suffering ÷ distance from adulthood = sympathy. Hopefully now that Junot Díaz has won a Pulitzer for "Oscar Wao," we can put the business to rest. If you happen to be a novelist working on a draft of a book about a child who suffers in one way or another, I bring you good news: You don't have to work on that manuscript anymore. Somebody else has already written it.

The source of the new ubiquity of the child-adult centaur may be the extended adolescence in which we all find ourselves. If you believe the conservative commentators, every urban American under the age of 40 rides a skateboard to work, and the criteria that once defined adulthood--giving up bands, getting a steady job, normal sex--no longer apply. Hipster parents are the new children raising children: Put the kid down for a nap, check the BlackBerry to see if the Shanghai office has sent the proofs, then take the videocam into the bedroom, and afterward maybe listen to Vampire Weekend with a joint while playing Halo 3 together. That's the new happy marriage, the new happy adulthood: the desires of adolescence empowered by money and confidence.

Nostalgia for childhood has infiltrated music, too, traditionally the locus of rebellion. The Greatest Band on Earth--you can ask Bono if you don't believe me--is Arcade Fire; their first album, "Funeral," an era-defining work, was devoted principally to images of childhood and pain, like so much of the most interesting music being made now. Just look at a band like the Decemberists: Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll have been replaced by children, suffering, and whimsy. Warm milk for bourbon.

The overblown Miley Cyrus scandal accidentally revealed the depth of our societal confusion. Reasonable people were shocked--shocked!--by the image of a 15-year-old girl's back. Had none of them visited a schoolyard in the past decade? Had they never heard of La Senza Girl? The line between childhood and adulthood has never been so blurry or so smudged.

The photo itself, while offering no insight into the subject, was in its way a perfect encapsulation of the impossible position of the present-day half-child, half-adult. In Caravaggio's pedophiliac masterpiece "Saint John the Baptist," the boy's back ripples with a discomforting sensuality, his smile infused with mischief. There's a gush of personality glinting coyly behind the half-veil of his arched shoulders. Annie Leibovitz's sexy child is a blank, the flesh of her back a gray plastic shield, the look in her eyes elusive, possibly absent. We don't know who she is, and she probably doesn't know either.

Young men are no longer circumcised as a mark of entry into manhood. We no longer, like the members of many Native American tribes, wander alone into the wilderness to confront the fragility of ourselves so we can return to an established place in society. No, we have to make a way for ourselves. Most of us have not the faintest idea how to proceed or whether we've succeeded. In place of the missing ritual, we watch and rewatch the story of the child who suffers while earning his adulthood, our need for the story as boundless as the ambiguity within us that we cannot assuage.

Rules
-Fonts, in descending order of earnestness: New York, Chicago, Monaco, Geneva
-Locations, in descending order of earnestness: New York, Chicago, Geneva, Monaco
-The special sauce is always Thousand Island

The 20 Best Steaks in America

1. Palm, New York City, 16-oz. Prime New York Strip with cottage fries
2. Jess and Jim's, Kansas City, Missouri, KC Playboy Strip with twice-baked one-and-a-half-pound Idaho potato
3. The Prime Rib, Baltimore, Prime Rib with fried potato skins
4. Andrea's, Metairie, Louisiana, Bistecca Alla Pizzaiola with Angel's half spaghetti with garlic and olive oil
5. Peter Luger, Brooklyn, Porterhouse with German fried potatoes
6. Sammy's Roumanian, NYC, Roumanian Tenderloin with potato pancakes
7. Macelleria, NYC, T-Bone with cannellini beans
8. El Raigon, SF, Skirt Steak with calabaza pisada (mashed squash)
9. Steak Frites, NYC, Steak Frites with grilled asparagus
10. Churrascos, Houston, Churrascos with yuca fries
11. Smith & Wollensky, NYC, Filet Mignon with creamed spinach
12. Fleur de Lys, SF, Tournedos Rossini with pommes dauphinois (potatoes with cream, garlic, and a crust of baked cheese)
13. One if by Land Two if by Sea, NYC, Beef Wellington with morels, asparagus, and baby leeks
14. Paris Coffee Shop, Ft. Worth, Texas, Chicken-Fried Steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy
15. Benihana, Las Vegas, Teppanyaki Steak with vegetable tempura
16. Lawry's the Prime Rib, Beverly Hills, English Cut with baked potato
17. Kobe Club, NYC, Japanese Wagyu Beef with hash browns with lobster, chorizo, and creme fraiche
18. Oak Steakhouse, Charleston, Cajun-Blackened New York Strip with gorgonzola cottage fries
19. Cut, Beverly Hills, Steak Tartare with soft polenta with Parmesan
20. Pat's, Philadelphia, Philly Cheesesteak with cheese fries

Newsweek - August 18/25, 2008

2008-08-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

A Life in Books: Jonathan Kozol, author, "Letters to a Young Teacher"

Five most important books
-The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
-The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
-The Souls of Black Folk, WEB Du Bois
-The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
-Collected Poems, William Butler Yeats

A book to which you will always return: The House at Pooh Corner, AA Milne

A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed: The Four Quartets, TS Eliot

Written on the City, Albin and Kamler

What Bush Got Right

Compared with the flutters and flurries of the near-daily polls in the presidential race, one set of numbers has stayed fixed for months, even years. President George W. Bush now enters his 23rd consecutive month with an approval rating under 40 percent. (It currently stands at 32 percent.) No matter what he does, or what happens in the world, the public seems to have decided that Bush has been a failure. As a result, both candidates are promising a change from the Bush presidency. Barack Obama, of course, promises a wholly different approach to the world. But even Bush's fellow Republican, John McCain, has on several issues suggested that he would depart from the administration's policies. McCain was last seen with the president at a fund-raiser more than two months ago at which no reporters or photographers were allowed.

A broad shift in America's approach to the world is justified and overdue. Bush's basic conception of a "global War on Terror," to take but the most obvious example, has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades. But blanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality. The administration that became the target of so much passion and anger—from Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone—is not quite the one in place today. The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them.

Consider as a symbol of this shift Bush's appointment of the World Bank's president. His first choice for the job was Paul Wolfowitz, an arch neoconservative with little background in economics. But by the time Wolfowitz was forced to resign and the post opened up again, Bush realized that he needed a less ideological choice, and he picked the highly qualified and respected Robert Zoellick. Where Dick Cheney was once the poster child for the administration, today policy is being run by Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley and Hank Paulson—all pragmatists. Change has not extended to all areas, and in many places it's been too little, too late. But that there has been a shift to the center in many crucial areas of foreign policy is simply undeniable.

The most obvious case is Iraq. For many people—a clear majority of those polled—the decision to go to war is now seen as a mistake. But wherever one stands on that issue, it is overwhelmingly clear that the administration made a series of massive blunders in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. It went in with too few troops, dismantled Iraq's Army, bureaucracy and state-owned factories, arrested tens of thousands of Iraqis, mistreated and tortured some of them, and used overwhelming military force against all perceived threats. The outcome? Chaos; an angry, dispossessed and armed Sunni community; a sullen and restless Shiite population; an insurgency; a jihadist terrorist movement, and spreading sectarian violence. In addition, foreign forces were destabilizing the country because both the invasion and the occupation were undertaken without first gaining support from neighboring Arab states or winning international legitimacy. The result was a perfect storm in international affairs, a failure that kept getting worse.

For years, even after it was apparent to almost everyone that the Iraq strategy was not working, the administration stuck to its guns. But by 2005, the failure was simply too large to ignore, so some efforts to repair the situation were made—mostly tactical and incremental moves, like searching for a better Shiite leader and trying to slow down the process of de-Baathification. Some U.S. officials in Iraq freelanced—for example, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad began the outreach to Sunni leaders and militants in 2006, even while his bosses in Washington were steadfastly condemning them as terrorists. American generals in Iraq were also learning from their own failures and advocating changes in tactics. (One of them was to support efforts by tribal sheiks in Anbar to take on their Qaeda rivals, which is why the Sunni Awakening actually preceded the surge.) By 2006, Bush told The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes that he was searching for new approaches. But it was only after the 2006 midterm-election debacle that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fired and a new politico-military strategy was put in place with a commander who understood the need for sweeping change.

It took a long time, but the turnaround in our policy in Iraq has been significant. The United States has made broad overtures to the Sunni community, and now actively supports Sunni fighters it had once jailed. We've concentrated on stabilizing Shiite neighborhoods, helping to free them from dependence on militias. We have abandoned dreams of a pure, free market, instead trying to jump-start Iraq's state-owned enterprises in order to create jobs. And we've even been pursuing a more regional approach, trying to get neighboring countries to open embassies in Baghdad and commit to help stabilize Iraq. None of this has changed some of the basic gruesome realities of Iraq—a country from which 2.5 million people have fled (mostly the professional class), thugs and militias rule in too many places, dysfunction and corruption are utterly endemic, and religious theocrats still wield immense power. But given where things were in 2005, the administration has moved firmly in the right direction.

On Afghanistan, there is a more compelling case to be made that the administration mishandled the most important front in the War on Terror. The central critique that Barack Obama makes—that American attention, energy, troops and resources were wrongly diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq—is devastating and hard to dispute. But it's a criticism of Bush policy in 2003. The policy that the administration is currently pursuing is less vulnerable to easy attacks.

Like Obama, Defense Secretary Gates has talked about sending more troops to the region. But the problem is bigger than a lack of American soldiers. European countries haven't contributed enough troops to the effort, and have put absurd restrictions on the forces they do have in theater. Afghanistan itself is extremely complex. The country contains vast swaths of mountainous territory that have never been ruled effectively by the central government, where levels of illiteracy and unemployment are stunningly high, and where Pashtun nationalism has got mixed up with Islamic extremism. Many serious scholars and local politicians argue that more troops would not solve the problem—particularly since the Taliban's back bases are located across the border in Pakistan. And the administration has ramped up spending in the region considerably. Whereas in 2003 it spent $737 million on reconstruction and equipping the Afghan Army, by 2007 it was spending $10 billion.

On North Korea, the administration's reversal has been near total. Within months of entering the Oval Office, Bush publicly repudiated his secretary of State, Colin Powell, for even suggesting that the administration would continue Bill Clinton's efforts to negotiate with Kim Jong Il. But since July 2005, Bush has pursued a very similar approach, in fact an even more multilateral one than Clinton's—four additional parties are now at the table. Bringing in the Chinese has been crucial because they are the only ones who have any real leverage with Pyongyang. Bush began by describing North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil. Today he is considering taking the country off the terror list and has offered economic aid to its regime.

On Iran, the third charter member of the Axis of Evil, the administration has performed a similar about-face. Forget the muttering of various proponents of military action, periodically leaked to newspapers. The efforts of the administration have been diplomatic and multilateral. Its point-person for most of the second term was Nicholas Burns, a veteran diplomat who is viewed with great suspicion by neoconservatives. Last month one of the State Department's senior most officials, William Burns (no relation), joined the Europeans at the table with Iranian negotiators, the first physical American involvement in these talks. One could argue—I would—that the administration's diplomacy is half-hearted and lacks ambition. An offer of direct engagement and negotiations would be a bolder step. But that's not a silver bullet. Such an offer could well prove fruitless. The principal obstacles to a negotiated settlement are Iranian intentions, suspicions and dysfunctions. The general thrust of Bush administration policies has now evolved into the correct one.

The same could be said for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Bush began his term in office vowing that he would not involve himself in Clinton-style efforts at peacemaking. His administration adopted a hands-off approach, allowing resentments to build and conditions to worsen. It gave free rein to irresponsible policies from all parties, encouraging, for example, a thoughtless and ill-planned Israeli attack on Lebanon that ended up weakening Israel, devastating Lebanon and empowering Hizbullah. This year Bush has plunged into the process, holding an international conference in Annapolis at which, for the first time, both Israel and the Palestinians accepted that the purpose of the exercise was to create a Palestinian state. Since that meeting, Rice has made a half dozen visits to the region. All this hasn't produced much yet, may be seven years too late, and perhaps is not the right approach (what is?). But few would argue that U.S. policy is currently on the wrong track.

The ones who would are revealing. Disgruntled conservative hard-liners have been dismayed by the administration's policy in many areas, particularly North Korea, Iran and Israel. John Bolton, formerly Bush's U.N. ambassador and a superhawk, publicly makes the case for betrayal. When Burns joined the talks with Iran, Bolton fumed sarcastically on television that the State Department was obviously "doing its best to ensure a smooth transition to the Obama administration." (Obama has long advocated American negotiations with Tehran.) He described Bush's handling of North Korea as a capitulation, comparing him to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. John Bolton is absolutely right that Bush has changed course fundamentally in many of these areas. Of course, I would celebrate that fact rather than condemn it.

Other reversals have drawn less opposition. In its early years the Bush administration seemed intent on confirming the conservative stereotype of being utterly uninterested in assistance to poor countries, especially if the money was going to treat AIDS patients. In each of its first two years it spent less than $1 billion on global HIV projects. This year the United States will spend almost $6 billion, most of it in Africa. The president's signature program, PEPFAR, has been a bipartisan success story (although the requirement that some of the money be spent on abstinence programs dilutes the program's effectiveness). Bush's overall efforts on disease prevention and aid have won him praise from an unusual assortment of figures—Bono, Bob Geld of and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote that "George Bush has done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did."

Politically the picture in Africa is more mixed. Bush put time, a presidential envoy and considerable effort behind the negotiations to broker a peace between north and south in Sudan, and he's made some similar attempts in Darfur. (These haven't yielded much, though mostly for reasons that cannot be blamed on the administration.) More generally, however, the administration has been far too focused on the threat of terrorism, providing aid and military assistance to any and every regime—from Ethiopia to Equatorial Guinea—that claimed to be battling Al Qaeda. In a sad replay of the cold war, the United States has allied itself with unscrupulous dictators for no particular gain, only because they have learned to mouth the language of the global War on Terror.

An obsession with terrorism has also made the administration devote too little time and energy to the defining feature of the new world order —"the rise of the rest," by which I mean the growth in economic and political power of countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil and a series of regionally prominent nations like South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico and Kazakhstan. In some cases its policy positions are divided and incoherent, as in the case of Russia. But in several crucial instances, they've pursued extremely sensible strategies.

The most important one, without question, is China. The bilateral relationship between China and America will be the most significant one in the 21st century. Bush began his term poorly on the subject. During the campaign, when asked by Larry King for the single most important area where he would depart from Clinton foreign policy, he cited China. "The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership," Bush said. "I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor." The initial months of the administration suggested that Bush would adopt a confrontational approach to Beijing, just as many neoconservatives and Pentagon strategists hoped.

Then in April 2001, four months into Bush's presidency, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter plane about 70 miles from the Chinese island of Hainan, and was forced to make an emergency landing. The Chinese claimed that the American plane had entered and violated Chinese airspace; Washington argued that it was in international airspace. In order to recover the aircraft and crew, Washington had to negotiate with Beijing and—despite much conservative grumbling—Bush agreed to send the Chinese a "letter of two sorries," in which the United States offered some carefully worded expressions of regret about the incident and death of the Chinese pilot.

Since then the administration's China policy has moved toward recognizing the centrality of the relationship. If China can be brought into the existing world order—in some fashion and to some extent—that will greatly improve the prospects for future peace and stability. Bush, despite his grand rhetoric about spreading democracy around the world, has been practical in his relations with the Chinese regime. On the most important issue to Beijing—that of Taiwan—Bush not only sided with the Chinese but has done so in a more direct manner than any previous president. He made clear to the then Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian that were Taiwan to make any moves toward independence, the island would lose the support of the United States. More recently, unlike some heads of government in Europe, Bush chose to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, a move that will earn the United States much good will not just with the Chinese government but also with its people.

Of course, the administration recognizes that the rise of China upsets the strategic balance in Asia. That's led Washington to deepen the strategic relationship with Japan and to develop a new one with India. In the latter case, Bush deserves credit for having transformed the relationship. While Indo-U.S. ties were warm under Bill Clinton, they were always limited by the controversy over India's nuclear program. The Clintonites refused to legitimize India's nuclear program, but for Indians their nukes were absolutely vital. Bush broke the deadlock by accepting, in large measure, that India would have to be treated as an exception and be brought into the nuclear nonproliferation regime as a nuclear power, not a renegade. Now India and America are developing a strategic relationship at many levels of government, which will stand both countries in good stead no matter what the future balance of power in Asia looks like.

If the United States hasn't engaged with this emerging world actively enough, other countries have done even less. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Daniel Drezner points out that the administration has sought to give China, India and Brazil more weight in international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G8 and other such bodies. Timothy Adams, the undersecretary of Treasury, told The New York Times in August 2006 that "by re-engineering the IMF and giving China a bigger voice, China will have a greater sense of responsibility for the institution's mission."

The fiercest resistance to such reforms comes from Europe. If power in international organizations is going to be allocated on the basis of the current configuration of power, European nations, which are shrinking as a percentage of global GDP, will lose influence. If the U.N. Security Council were to be set up today, would 40 percent of the vetoes be given to European powers?

All this is not meant as a defense of George W. Bush. The administration made monumental errors in its first few years, ones that have cost the United States enormously. The shift in impressions about America's intentions across important sections of the globe, the sense in much of the Islamic world that America is anti-Muslim, the vast and counterproductive apparatus of homeland security—visa restrictions, arrests and interrogations—are lasting legacies of the Bush administration. Its dysfunction and incompetence have left a trail of misery in countries like Iraq and Lebanon, which have been destabilized for decades. The embrace of torture and other extralegal methods has violated America's noblest traditions and provided little in return.

And then there is the administration's record outside of foreign policy. Bush 43 has surely been the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history, taking surpluses that equaled 2.5 percent of GDP and turning them into deficits that are 3 percent. This is a $4 trillion hit on the country's balance sheet. On the central issue of energy policy—the greatest economic challenge and opportunity of our times—Bush has been utterly obstructionist, recycling the self-serving arguments of industry lobbyists. On the whole, Bush's record remains one of failure and missed opportunities.

So why offer this corrective? Because we cannot go back to 2001. The next president will inherit the world as it is in 2009. He will have to examine the Bush administration's policies as they stand in January 2009—not as they were in 2001 or 2002 or 2003—and decide how to accept, modify and alter them. There was a U.S. president who came into office convinced that everything his predecessor had done was feckless, stupid, ill-informed and venal. He rejected and tried to reverse everything that he could, almost as an article of faith. Before he had even examined the policies carefully, he knew that they had to be changed. The base of his party was delighted by his clarity and fighting spirit.

That president, of course, was George W. Bush. His decision to blindly repudiate anything associated with Bill Clinton is what got us into this mess in the first place. Let's hope that the next president, no matter how much he despises Bush, will take a careful look at his administration's policies, America's interests, and the world beyond and do the right thing for the country and its future.

Rise of The Sea Turtles

Charles Zhang is practically the personification of hip, 21st-century China. The flamboyant, MIT-educated entrepreneur founded and runs one of China's two biggest Internet portals, Sohu.com. Last week he welcomed an international swarm of revelers to an Olympic bash at Beijing's fashionable Lan Club (décor by Philippe Starck), where he announced his new gig during the Games: talk-show host. "I learned a lot from Letterman and Leno while living in the States," he said confidently.

Zhang is speaking to a different audience now. He says the anti-Western backlash that erupted in China this spring—after pro-Tibetan demonstrators disrupted the Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco—was entirely justified. He himself called for a boycott of French goods and media after an unruly scrum broke out over the torch in Paris. "That was the first time Chinese people as a whole stood up to the world," he says. "It's good for Chinese people ... That incident proves that when Chinese are upset, they can find their voice."

Such sentiments are common on the mainland. But people like Zhang were supposed to be different: he's what Chinese call a hai gui—"sea turtle"—referring to someone who has lived overseas. (The phrase is a pun on haiwai guilai, meaning "returned from overseas.") Their numbers are growing by the tens of thousands every year, and as the sons and daughters of the elite, they have an outsize influence once they move back to China. In the West there's long been an assumption that this cohort would import Western values along with their iPods. They were envisioned as the bridge to a more open, liberal, Western-friendly China.

That daydream got a cold bath during the torch relay this spring, when furious Chinese students in the West showed they could be even more jingoistic than Chinese who had never left home—and good luck to anyone who dared buck the trend. One courageous Duke University freshman from the coastal city of Qingdao tried to intercede in a campus confrontation between a dozen or so pro-Tibetan demonstrators and a much larger group of pro-Beijing Chinese students. For her trouble, she was called a "race traitor" and a "whore"; feces were dumped on her parents' doorstep.

Measuring attitudes among sea turtles can be difficult, especially with all of Chinese society changing around them. Still, some empirical data are beginning to emerge. Prof. David Zweig, head of the Center on China's Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is directing a research project based on responses from thousands of returnees from campuses in Canada, Japan and Europe. The data show they're "no less jingoistic than those who have never gone abroad," Zweig says. "As in, 'My country, right or wrong'." What's more, he adds: "A significant proportion of them believe that using force to promote China's national interests is acceptable." Bottom line? "It means the post-1989 policy to imbue youth with nationalism through 'patriotic education' has succeeded," Zweig says.

China has a long tradition of chauvinism, and for some sea turtles, intimate acquaintance with Western attitudes has only intensified their feelings of defensiveness. Author and business consultant Jim MacGregor, who deals frequently with hai gui, says, "The richest people here are the most anti-Western." Even as they sip cappuccino at Starbucks or show off their new Buicks, the last thing most want is to make over their homeland in the West's image. They're after something far more ambitious: a China that lives up to their sense of national greatness. The pacesetters among hai gui don't aspire to be "modern," as Europeans and Americans often use the word—as a synonym for Western. Instead, prosperous young returnees tend to see themselves emphatically as modern Chinese.

Previous generations of sea turtles were patriotic in a different way. A century or more ago, Chinese students were sent abroad to learn science and technology from the West, and returned with a sense of mission. "They felt the most important thing was to help Chinese education; they wanted to teach," says dissident journalist Dai Qing, who has just finished writing a book about that era.

Now the business opportunities available on the mainland are at least as big a draw for returnees. But even someone like Dai, who served a term in prison for opposing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, says she feels the tug of the motherland. She's just returned from her fourth stint overseas—a year at Australian National University studying "relations between dictatorships and individuals." When she first left the country in 1991 for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, many acquaintances mistakenly assumed she'd never go home. "People say, 'Dai Qing's stupid—after 20 years of going overseas she doesn't even have a green card'," she says with a laugh.

Many sea turtles have their own theories about why Chinese overseas might show a hostile streak. For one thing, they run out of patience with Westerners' ignorance. "To be honest, when we go abroad we do find people asking strange questions, like whether China has modern buildings or cars," says Danny Huang, who lived in Canada and the United States for more than a decade before returning to run an educational charity in Shanghai. "Sometimes it's hard not to feel they have some bias." For others, anger against the West can ease the pangs of homesickness, suggests Shanghai University film teacher Shu Haolun. "They need a bond to their motherland," says Shu, who studied cinema and photography at Southern Illinois University before returning to China in 2003. "They're being anti-Western to feel attached to their own country."

Some of the nationalism exhibited by Chinese living abroad might also be sustained, rather than diluted, by the Internet. "As soon as they get online they can be totally immersed in a Chinese environment," says Zhao Chuan, a novelist who lived in Australia from 1987 to 2000 before coming home to write about Shanghai. "When we were studying abroad ... occasionally you went to Chinatown to read a Chinese paper. Now if you're in the U.K. you can easily not read English papers or watch English TV."

Others say the returnees' driving force isn't exactly nationalism. Instead, they argue, it reflects the extraordinary assertiveness of young urban Chinese. Decades of strict one-child family-planning policies have produced a generation of only-children—"little emperors," the Chinese call them. "Young Chinese feel they have the right to speak out about anything," says Victor Yuan, who studied for a year at Harvard's Kennedy School and now heads Horizon, a market survey consultancy. Some rebel against both Chinese and Western norms—like architect Ma Yansong, who apprenticed under Zaha Hadid in London and is famous for his designs mocking the regime's obsession with huge, imposing buildings. "This generation doesn't want to accept any ideological message, whether it's from the Communist Party or Voice of America," says Yuan.

The power of hai gui is visibly growing. Two of China's cabinet ministers earned their doctorates at universities outside the country, and approximately 100 officials at the level of vice governor or higher have studied overseas for at least a year, according to Zweig's figures. Patriotism notwithstanding, he says his research suggests that as Chinese spend more time outside the country, their thinking becomes more nuanced and internationalist: "They don't want to see China pushed around but are smart enough to know China makes mistakes." At the Lan Club last week, Zhang said it's time for China to prove it can do things right. "After suffering for hundreds of years and then for 30 years scrambling to get things right, now China's getting the respect of the world," he said. "Chinese are gaining more self-respect, too, so they should become more responsible." With luck, that means becoming more responsible to the world, not just to China.

Buildings That Can Breathe

Architect William McDonough draws his green-building techniques from the world around him. Before attending architecture school at Yale, he worked on a redevelopment project in Jordan and observed the clever way the Bedouins' tents utilized natural materials to protect them from the elements. His most ambitious project, a redevelopment of the Ford Motors complex in Dearborn, Mich., incorporates a "living roof" that features nearly 11 acres of vegetation to purify storm water and provide natural air conditioning. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to him about energy efficiency in architecture, the future of environmental design and the possibility of eliminating all industrial waste from the planet. Excerpts:

Zakaria: How important is it to increase the energy efficiency of our buildings?
McDonough: There's no question that energy efficiency in existing buildings and new buildings is one of the lowest-cost ways to save immense amounts of energy. Buildings account for about 40 percent of our energy consumption, and existing buildings will be the primary infrastructure for many years to come. So … it's a ripe place to be looking for energy savings. Cost-effective energy-reduction strategies could yield anywhere between 25 and 50 percent.

What are some of the key technologies that will do this?
A lot of this is common sense. For one thing, we want to stop heating, cooling and lighting ghosts [using] intelligent, wireless controls that can sense when people are present and when they're not. We're starting to see windows that have tremendous thermal properties. And then sealing up the houses, weather-stripping and insulation are very … effective.

You've created some revolutionary green buildings for companies such as Ford. Are these showcase pieces that only Fortune 500 companies can afford?
Our clients have commercial realities. If you look at the Ford plant, for example, that green roof saves Ford millions of dollars in storm-water management. It's an immensely practical exercise. The storm-water management [otherwise would have involved] $48 million of concrete pipes and chemical treatment plants. We did the whole thing for $13 million. And we created habitat. The killdeer [birds] started nesting there five days after the roof went down. And the same thing with our corporate campus for the Gap, where we did another green roof, which blocks all the noise from the airplanes flying overhead. These are practical solutions to real commercial problems.

In the United States, we have a preference for single-family houses, which are less efficient than urban centers. Is the future going to require greater population density?
I think we're going to see two things: one is that we're going to recognize that one size does not fit all and that this propensity we've had for everyone to be in a single-family house will probably shift. We'll have cities for younger people and elders who want more contact and convenience. There is a point in a family's life, when you're raising a couple of kids, [where] you might want to be in a place where they have grass to play on. But that doesn't mean that's the only offering we should be giving our citizens, and I think we will see greater celebration of density.

Tell me about your "Cradle to Cradle" concept. What does it mean??
Cradle to Cradle is a protocol I've developed with a German chemist, Michael Braungart. We characterize things as either being part of nature—biological nutrients—or being part of technology, which we call technical nutrients. We look at the world through these two lenses and we say, let the things that are designed to go back to soil, like textiles and clothing, be designed in order to be returned safely to soil, to restore it. But the cars and the computers … [should be] designed to go back into closed cycles for technology.

And the idea here is nothing gets wasted?
Exactly. The other questions we ask are: Is it powered by renewable energy? Does it have reverse logistics—do you have a way to get it back to soil or back to industry? Is the water clean? One of our first [Cradle to Cradle-certified] products was a textile for Steelcase corporation in Switzerland. The water coming out of the textile mill is as clean as the water going in, which is Swiss drinking water. Now when a textile mill has effluent that's clean enough to drink, you're entering the next industrial revolution. All of a sudden, there's nothing to fear from human production.

You say we need to move to renewable energy, and seem to focus on solar. Why?
Direct solar is distributed, it's generally available to most of the planet and it can be applied at the local level. I think about our highway system—phenomenal achievement, but also phenomenal opportunity, because we can [put up solar panels along] all the highways. We can solar-power the railroads. Amtrak can basically let out its airspace for solar collectors. It's already got infrastructure, it's already got power, it's already got distribution. It's an opportunity waiting to happen.

When Jimmy Carter was in the White House, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came, he took them off. You'd put them back on?
I think that as an emblem and as a signal, it's probably a good thing to do. But I think that we ought to relax a little when we insist on modernizing historic buildings. I got a call from a college president who was saying they were going to renovate a building which he thought was very beautiful. It had high ceilings and tall windows, and they were going to put in aluminum fixed windows, drop the ceilings down to 10 feet from 15 to put in AC. It was going to cost $5 million to make the building energy-efficient. My response to him was: "Don't do it! You'll destroy the building! Go raise $1 million and put up a megawatt of wind power on a family farm in western Minnesota. Let that farmer … send his kids to college, and pay his mortgage, and you'll produce a megawatt of power, which is more than you'll need for your building."

The Top Twelve Rivalries

Rivalry? What Rivalry? Ask our most famous colleges about their feuds with celebrated adversaries and they brush them off as no longer relevant in an open-minded, caring age of national unity. "Sir, we do not consider ourselves rivals with our sister academies except on the fields of friendly strifes," says West Point spokesman Francis J. DeMaro Jr. Annapolis spokeswoman Deborah Goode has the same earnest message: "We support each other and our nation on the front lines of the global War on Terror."

And they're not the only ones. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Notre Dame and others also don't want to talk about stolen school mascots, insults spray-painted on campus statues or anything else that smacks of the old grudges. In academia these days, such seeming hatreds of any kind are considered unfashionable and maybe even illegal in a few instances. But intense competition between high-quality institutions—what most people would call rivalry—still has importance in the college-admissions process. These rivals (OK, pick a friendlier word: competitors? counterparts? bosom buddies?) are continually trying to differentiate themselves for applicants who wonder which of two or three very similar and high-performing schools might be best for them.

We've picked 11 pairs and one trio of colleges whose strengths are so great and resemblances so compelling that careful comparison is necessary to sort out which schools work best for which applicants. It's also a bit of a guilty pleasure just to marvel at how deeply embedded many of the rivalries are. Some of the rivals have been associated in the public mind for more than a century, like Michigan and Ohio State, and some are as recent as digital movie cameras and multiplexes, like the film schools at USC and NYU.

But in every case, no matter what the schools' press releases say, students, faculty and alumni feel as if they're in competition with one another. Like most successful American institutions, that turns out to be one of their strengths. Herewith, the top 12 rivalries at U.S. colleges:

Old Ivies: Harvard vs. Yale
Gila Reinstein, spokeswoman for Yale, says "the Yale-Harvard rivalry is not substantial enough to merit attention." But many of the 6,600 undergraduates at Harvard and the 5,300 (set to grow to 6,000 by 2013) at Yale would disagree. There is a reason that Montgomery Burns, the most loathsome character on the TV comedy "The Simpsons," displays his Yale pedigree: many of the writers are graduates of The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. There is a reason that many Yale graduates note, not bragging or anything, that every U.S. president since 1988 has had a degree from their New Haven, Conn., alma mater, and express some concern for the country since the last Bulldog candidate with a chance, Hillary Rodham Clinton, J.D. '73, pulled out of the race.

Harvard is the oldest and Yale the third oldest college in the country. Most years they are among the most difficult to get into, with acceptance rates around 8 percent. They rank first (Harvard's $35 billion) and second (Yale's $23 billion) in the size of their endowments, and have both made strides to remove costs for low-income students so that their lovely brick buildings won't look so much like bastions of the upper-middle class. But they also have world-class professors and students who thrive by challenging each other. Their residential houses were designed and funded by the same man, Yale graduate Edward Harkness, who discovered Harvard was quicker to accept his gift. His design is still envied as a model for undergraduate life.

The argument over which school is better thoroughly bores outsiders, but applicants have no such inhibitions, particularly when they have to choose between the two. Yale sophomore Abby West was turned off by Harvardian boasts that "the competition is incredibly intense" when she visited Cambridge, so she selected what she considers the more friendly Yale dynamic. Malcom Glenn, president of The Harvard Crimson, says he preferred Harvard because it is close to a big city, Boston, but "on the surface the two schools couldn't be more alike." He knows people at both campuses, and "many would have gone to the other if not for the fact they weren't accepted."

Bay Area Giants: UC Berkeley vs. Stanford
German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, famous for his Uncertainty Principle, was indeed uncertain when asked once about the location of Stanford University, but he knew of its rivalry with another northern California school. "They steal each other's axes," he said. That competition has escalated far beyond the annual football game that decides who gets the Stanford Axe. The two universities have become intellectual centers of the Internet boom, doing their best to attract the best science, math and engineering talent, and in the process attracting great wealth. In 2007, Cal (as UC Berkeley is often called) signed a $500 million contract with BP, the largest grant in the school's history, to develop alternative energy sources. Stanford is deep into the same explorations, and is nestled right in the heart of Silicon Valley, where corporate giants like Google, founded by two Stanford students, prosper.

Students seem happy to be at either Bay Area school, and the taunts between them are, according to Julie Yen, Stanford '07, "little more than lighthearted joking." She chose the smaller Stanford over Berkeley because she liked its quieter, grassier campus, a better place for a contemplative art-history major than the more raucous and urban Berkeley streets (just over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco). But if she had gone to Cal, she adds, she says she would've found the instruction "of the same high caliber—they have a very good museum." She is aware of the good jobs available for graduates of either university, no matter what their degrees. She's just started as an investment-firm analyst in Menlo Park, just a few miles from Stanford.

American Warriors: Annapolis vs. West Point
Craig Meekins attended Chaminade High School in Mineola, N.Y., a Roman Catholic school that churns out applicants to two of the nation's oldest military academies. Meekins, who graduated from Annapolis in 2008, laughs at the notion that the two schools aren't fervent competitors. "It's an intense rivalry," he says. When he ran the 800 meters for the U.S. Naval Academy track team, "if the coach saw you talking to a West Point guy before the meet, it was bad news." But amid the teasing, he says, "there is still a strong sense of camaraderie, because we all know we're facing the same challenges." Both have a much longer list of required courses than civilian institutions do. Both require students to participate in team sports. Each has 4,300 students, about 23 percent minorities and 20 percent women. Students at both want to serve their country, and acquire academic and technical skills with no bills for tuition, room or board.

Many applicants apply to both, and make their final decisions based on atmospherics, family traditions and career inclinations, just as students applying to less-regimented campuses do. Daniel Mills, who graduated from a public high school in northern Virginia in 2008, says he liked the idea of a military education "because I thought I really needed structure." He visited Annapolis and thought of taking that route to becoming a Marine Corps officer, but decided that if he was drawn to ground combat, he might as well go Army. His father was a West Point graduate, the Academy's wrestling coach liked him and his overnight at the campus introduced him to cadets he found smart and thoughtful. Meekins, on the other hand, picked Annapolis because it was in a city and seemed to offer more career choices. He plans to become a Navy SEAL, and is happy that he can get such an unusual college education without "spending a ridiculous amount of money."

For Women Only: Smith vs. Wellesley
As two of the few colleges that still bar male undergraduates, Smith and Wellesley have similarities that are deeper than their differences. And not just because the two small schools are in Massachusetts. Smith celebrates its big group of undergraduates from low- income families; 23 percent receive Pell grants, the leading federal aid program for disadvantaged students. (Wellesley has 13 percent.) Sidnie Davis, class of '08, says her high-school counselor called it "Wellesley for working girls."

But that's not really fair. Consider the Archer twins, Kendra and Shenquia, both class of '08, who grew up poor in a single-parent home and say they both found Wellesley, Kendra's choice, as welcoming and engaging as Smith, where Shenquia decided to go. Kendra says she was particularly taken with Wellesley's motto, "Not to be served but to serve," as a sign the place was no haven for the spoiled rich. "We are continually aware of the outstanding accomplishments of alumnae such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright," Kendra says.

The Smith campus in Northampton lures students with its big, comfortable and friendly wood-frame and brick houses for undergraduates. An even bigger draw is the off-campus scene, which consists of restaurants, bars and clubs throbbing with music, in a western area of the state occupied by several other colleges. Café-crawling Smith students say of their school, "The coffee is strong and so are its women." In 2007 Smith enhanced its reputation for science and engineering—30 percent of Smith students major in the sciences—with the construction of Ford Hall, a $73 million science teaching and research facility. Wellesley has its own engineering focus, which allows students to cross-register at nearby MIT and the Olin College of Engineering. Wellesley also has one of the country's most beautiful campuses and, according to some calculations, has produced more female corporate leaders than any other college. The two schools do compete, the Archer twins admit, but they call it "a sisterly acknowledgment of mutual greatness."

Social Activists: Guilford vs. Oberlin
Founded in 1833, Oberlin is the oldest coeducational college in the country. Guilford, founded in 1837, is the third oldest. Both were established by religious idealists who opposed slavery. Both were stops on the Underground Railroad. Both have about 2,800 students, although half of Guilford's are older, nontraditional undergraduates.

Guilford, lesser known for many years, has enjoyed a rising reputation through raves from high-school counselors and major play in Loren Pope's best-selling guide "Colleges That Change Lives." But Oberlin, in Ohio, is still the bigger name. At 38,000, it has double the number of alumni; at $735 million, it has 10 times the endowment. Ninety-one percent of Oberlin students are from out of state, a sign of its significant national reputation, compared with 63 percent at Guilford.

Still, a shared tradition of political activism has been noticed by applicants. Some have applied to both, knowing that Oberlin is harder to get into but happy to find any school bucking what, until the 2008 presidential election season, appeared to be a politically apathetic trend on U.S. campuses. Mary Ann Willis, a college counselor at Bayside Academy in Daphne, Ala., says despite their many differences, Oberlin and Guilford attract the same sensibility, "not just politically aware, but also politically engaged."

Kriddie Whitmore, Guilford '11, applied to both schools because, she says, "I like to be around people who are conscious of what is going on." Both colleges accepted her. She says she chose the central North Carolina school because it was warmer, less secluded and gave her a better financial-aid package. Whitmore is now majoring in environmental studies while she searches for just the right cause to take on.

Catholic Powers: Boston College vs. Notre Dame
Few college rivals are as similar to each other—or as competitive—as the Eagles of Boston College and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. Both are large schools with rich traditions, shared faith and splendid professors. In football, where there were once several Division I Roman Catholic schools, there are now just these two. In 17 football clashes, the South Bend school has a 9-to-8 edge. When they played each other for the 2008 NCAA national ice-hockey championship, Boston won 4-1, further intensifying the rivalry.

The schools are so well matched that a bit of gridiron magic can make a difference. Chris Hine, Notre Dame '09, applied to both BC and Notre Dame, and saw much to love. They both had outstanding academic reputations grounded in Catholic theology, which was important to him. They both had committed alumni and attractive campuses. But Hine went with the South Bend, Ind., school because of his memories of watching football with his grandfather, a huge fan of the Irish. "He passed away just weeks before I got my acceptance letter to Notre Dame, but I knew he'd be proud if I went to school there," says Hine, now editor in chief of the campus newspaper, The Observer.

One of every seven students accepted to BC also applies to Notre Dame. Their shared traditions can create tension when someone is thinking of trying the option that kinfolk have rejected. An article in the Boston College newspaper, the Chronicle, told the story of the Camacho family of Lenexa, Kans., with four children enrolled as undergraduates at BC at the same time. The third to enroll, Michael, insisted on also looking at Notre Dame. "That almost tore our family apart," says his older brother Paul, seemingly joking—but maybe not.

Consortium Jewels: Amherst vs. Pomona
The tree-filled campuses, 2,884 miles apart, sit at or near the top of nearly everyone's list of liberal-arts gems. They attract the smartest students, the best teaching professors and the envy of the vast majority of their applicants who didn't get in. But what puts them in a different category from other small schools are the unusual partnerships they have forged with their closest neighbors. Allied with Amherst in its woody section of western Massachusetts are Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and University of Massachusetts Amherst—the Five Colleges group. Tied firmly to Pomona, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles, are the other Claremont Colleges: Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer and Scripps.

At each school, students may take courses at any of the other nearby four colleges. Students regularly eat at each other's dining halls and attend their social events. The Claremont Colleges are right next door to each other, while Smith and Mount Holyoke are a bike or shuttle-bus ride from the others in the Massachusetts cluster. The combination of small-college atmosphere and big-college choices has been a winning strategy for both schools.

The two biggest differences between them are that more people have heard of Amherst, and that Pomona has more sunshine. "There are moments when I really lose out on the ability to sound all obnoxious and snooty about my education," says David Lydon, who chose Pomona despite being accepted by Amherst, which was better known to his friends and family in Connecticut. Now studying law at Stanford, Lydon says the crucial moment was his overnight visit to Claremont: "It was late January, so the weather really beat the crap out of New England."

Stephanie Brown grew up in southern California and, though impressed by Pomona, decided Amherst was the place for her. She liked the changing of the seasons and the different cuisines and accents of the East. "It was like studying abroad without the passport issues," she says. Amherst was particularly active in reaching out to black students like her, she says, with a students-of-color weekend for visiting applicants. She graduated in 2007 and plans to return to California to pursue a career in mental-health care.

About 100 students in 2008 were admitted to both Amherst and Pomona, a competition likely to continue. Amherst changed all of its student loans to grants in July 2007 and Pomona did the same five months later. Each has small classes, with student-faculty ratios of about 8 to 1. Both are going after what Amherst spokeswoman Carolina Hanna calls "the same high-achieving, academically promising applicants regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds."

Science Magnets: Caltech vs. MIT
The pranks never end. MIT still celebrates the 2006 theft of Caltech's Fleming Cannon and its transport to what a press release from MIT itself called "sunny Cambridge, Mass.," where 21 MIT women in bathing suits, looking uncomfortable, and one bare-chested male posed with the catch. Caltech got its revenge in 2008, when participants in the annual MIT Mystery Hunt discovered the puzzle they were working on was a fraud, fooling them into calling a number that announced it was the Caltech admissions office, welcoming all MIT students who wished to transfer to its sunny campus. Who would've thought hardworking geeks and wonks at both had such time on their hands?

The two schools don't have to worry about their reputations. Little Caltech with 900 students and bigger MIT with about 4,000 are both known throughout the world as research meccas that may be producing scientists who someday will solve the energy crisis, explore space and kill off spam in our time. But such minds can't be as creative without some fun. So applicants like to check out the practical jokes—called "hacking" at MIT and "pranking" at Caltech—as inspiration for getting us all to Tomorrowland.

Tim Black, Caltech '11 and one of the perpetrators of the Mystery Hunt hack, was going to such puzzle-gatherings when he was still in high school in Madison, Wis. Some of them lasted two days and had hundreds of puzzles, many of which lacked instructions. He met some Caltech students, saw the campus and decided that was for him. His friend Paul Hlebowitsh, from Iowa City, picked MIT instead. He decided he liked to see the leaves change and concluded the Cambridge school had a bigger and stronger hacker bench. "I don't think Caltech will ever get to our level," he says. But the fake admissions-office phone number, he concedes, "was an amazing hack."

Big Hoosiers: Indiana vs. Purdue
"My grandmother will hate me for this," says Indiana University senior Ben Homrig, "but I have never really liked Purdue." It is not just Grandma, but most of his family are proud Purdue grads, a serious dilemma in what is probably the most deeply divided state in college loyalties. Indiana higher-education officials purposely designed their two major universities to be complementary, not competitive. Purdue focuses on engineering, agriculture and veterinary medicine. Indiana specializes in liberal arts, medicine and music. But that has only aggravated the desire to crush the rival. Homes throughout Indiana have flags that say HOUSE DIVIDED, meaning the family has both IU and Purdue people. "Marriage counselors' eyes light up when they drive past those signs," says IU spokesman Ryan Piurek.

The number of applicants to both schools is huge. About 8,000 students who sent IU their SAT scores in 2007 also sent their scores to Purdue (about a third of total applicants). Hoosiers take pride in the other school's heroes, such as Neil Armstrong, the Purdue grad who walked on the moon, or three-time national champion basketball coach Bob Knight, of IU. But that gets into the ticklish subject of sports, and sparks cries from Purdue fans that over the years the schools have played each other about even in basketball, a religion they all share. In football season, not so big a deal, the two play for the Old Oaken Bucket, a competition that began in 1925 with a scoreless tie and where Purdue leads in victories, 54 to 26.

Sam Killermann, Purdue '09, thinks his school has "more of a scholarly reputation." Homrig of Indiana plans a career in journalism and thinks the IU business connections are superb. Michelle Keesling, Purdue '08, says it is a matter of taste. Do you like Purdue's buildings close together in the urban setting of Lafayette or IU's wide green spaces in Bloomington? Casual Purdue or dressy Indiana? She says it's fun to argue. "When Indiana plays Purdue in a sport, you better believe I'm texting or calling my best friend at IU to let her know if Purdue is winning," Keesling says. "We didn't create that rivalry, but we sure as hell won't let it die."

Midwest Stars: Michigan vs. Ohio State
These two public behemoths do not shrink from the R word. Mabel G. Freeman, assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions and first-year experience at Ohio State, calls her university's relationship with the University of Michigan "the best rivalry in the entire country." U-M spokeswoman Deborah Meyers Greene responds: "Go Blue! Go Buckeyes!"

It starts early for incoming Ohio State freshmen: at orientation, anyone from the state of Michigan is asked to stand for a round of applause. For non-Midwesterners who want a big-school, big-sport environment, it's hard to make a choice between the two. Michigan is usually higher rated academically and more selective, but Ohio State has a strong graduation rate and the advantage, to many applicants, of being in the heart of Ohio's largest city, Columbus, with good shopping and dining and other recreational pursuits.

Partisans of the two schools' athletic glory have difficulty agreeing who has better football. Ohio State has been ranked No. 1 in recent years, but has not won the title in a while. Michigan, less of a contender, evokes the past, as well as other sports. "Michigan remains the winningest football program in the nation, and has more Big Ten titles in all sports than any other conference school," says Greene.

Like most colleges whose endowments soared in the 1990s, the schools have been using the money to put up more facilities. In 2009, Michigan will open a 53,000-square-foot expansion of its Museum of Art. Ohio State has opened a child-care and community center connected to a public school in its neighborhood. But they are also counting down to the next Big Game.

Historically Black: Howard vs. Morehouse and Spelman
Students interested in an education that focuses on African-American culture often give these three schools a close look. Coed Howard in Washington, D.C., has about 7,300 undergraduates. If they were one school, all-male Morehouse and its Atlanta next-door neighbor, all-female Spelman, each with about 3,000 students, would come close to Howard's size. For all three, their prominence in American higher education derives in part from their active and famous alumni. Nobel laureate Martin Luther King Jr. went to Morehouse; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, Spelman, and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Howard. Many other intellectual, social and economic luminaries attended the schools, and those alums are quick to network with the latest crop of graduates.

The sense of competition is there, but undergraduates at all three schools say they're bound by a respect for the power of the social and political organizations that unite them. Howard sophomore Natasha Metts, walking quickly across the Yard to get to a Spanish class, mentions her work with the Alpha Phi Omega national service fraternity. Morehouse student-government president Chad Mance says his and his college's success "stands on pillars of community service and academic excellence." Former Spelman student-body president Adeola Adejobi, who is now at Cornell's law school, says she gained much from her school's insistence on developing her sense of the world through community service.

Travers Johnson, former managing editor of the Morehouse student paper The Maroon Tiger, credits that emphasis on real-world connections for his internship at the Clinton Foundation and his new job in New York with Random House. All three schools, he says, leave their students with "a consciousness about black issues and a sense of pride," something to share even while they argue over which college is best.

Cinematic Enclaves: NYU Tisch vs. USC Film School
These institutions, both part of larger universities, are formally known as the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. But people in the business usually just say they went to NYU or the SC film school. Both have lists of graduates that feed the fantasies of applicants yearning for shelves full of Oscars. USC claims George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis, among others. NYU includes Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.

Recent graduates say the differences between the schools are clear. USC is bigger and more commercial, a Hollywood blockbuster. NYU is smaller and grittier, an indie film. Jason Shuman, class of '96, loved the opportunity to work while he studied at USC. "If I had class three days a week, I spent the other two days interning at Warner Brothers," he says. He worked for big-time filmmakers and began to accumulate a string of his own producer credits, including "Darkness Falls" and "Daddy Day Camp." Jane Renaud graduated from NYU in 2005, and is where she wants to be, in New York producing news features on education for PBS, while directing a short film in her spare time. Shuman has friends from NYU. Renaud knows USC people. In the end, rivals get along just fine.

Fussy Kid, Flustered Mom

Kylee Smith, 5, of Richmond, Va., loves cheese—grilled cheese sandwiches, mac and cheese, cheese quesadillas. It’s what she doesn’t like that has her mom worried. Kylee won’t eat meat, other than chicken nuggets. Her vegetable consumption is limited to tomato sauce—but only on pizza, not spaghetti. Most nights, her mother has to prepare a special dish just for her. “If we’re eating something she doesn’t like, she won’t even sit next to us,” says her mother, Jean-Marie.

If this sounds familiar, take heart. Children can be notoriously picky eaters—and today’s snack-food culture makes it even harder to channel their tastes in healthy directions. But research is shedding new light on how food preferences are formed—and what we can do to promote healthy eating. The good news: your choices aren’t limited to sneaking puréed vegetables into foods or battling it out over broccoli.

One of the most surprising findings is that it’s never too early to start—not even during pregnancy. Flavorful compounds from a mother’s diet cross the placenta into amniotic fluid, which babies in the third trimester swallow at the rate of a quart a day. “Babies develop preferences for these foods long before they actually eat them,” says Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Similarly, during lactation, flavors pass from the mother’s bloodstream into breast milk. Mennella has done studies showing that babies whose moms drank carrot juice or ate fruits while breast-feeding liked carrot and peach baby foods better than formula-fed infants did.

But picky eating is not always about the taste of food. Often it’s about texture, such as pulp in orange juice, nuts in brownies or gristle on meat. This doesn’t have to be a huge problem—it’s easy enough to cut off gristle. In fact, some of what passes for finicky eating is just normal development. Humans, being omnivores, are biologically programmed to be wary of new foods until they know they’re safe to eat. This “food neophobia” peaks between 2 and 5, when a newly mobile child would otherwise be at greatest risk of ingesting, say, colorful but toxic berries. The degree of caution varies greatly among children—and a recent study shows it is largely genetic. But everyone has it to some extent—even adults. Not surprisingly, it applies mainly to bitter foods (think vegetables), since bitterness often indicates poison.

The quickest remedy may be that of Missy Chase Lapine, author of “The Sneaky Chef,” who conceals puréed vegetables in a wide range of foods. “If you can get eight vegetables, all hidden, and wheat germ and whole grains in a tasty meatball, why would you ever not do it?” she asks. Most experts approve of the tactic, saying it can boost the nutritional content of meals and take the pressure off mealtimes. But they also say it shouldn’t be the only approach: parents should also serve whole veggies so kids will acquire a taste for them. “If you want your child to like spinach, that won’t happen by sneaking it into brownies,” says Tina Tan, a pediatric-feeding specialist at New York University Langone Medical Center’s Rusk Institute.

So what’s a parent to do?

• Be persistent. Psychologist Leann Birch at Pennsylvania State University has shown that children often need to try a new food 10 to 15 times before they will accept it. Most moms give up after three to five times.

• Don’t force kids to eat. When introducing a new food, give a very small amount. Let the child spit it out if she wants. “Children have to get accustomed to the taste and texture of a food before they feel comfortable swallowing it,” says family therapist Ellyn Satter, author of “Child of Mine: Feeding With Love and Good Sense.”

• Take kids’ tastes into account. Children generally have a higher preference than adults for sweet and salty tastes. But you can work with that and still have healthy meals. Dietitian Elizabeth Ward, author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Feeding Your Baby and Toddler,” suggests putting grated cheese on veggies. The salt in the cheese counteracts some of the bitterness. Serve carrots, which are sweet, for snacks. Purée cauliflower; it looks like mashed potatoes.

• Don’t fix separate meals. It’s hard to resist when kids are refusing to eat. But it only reinforces their biases. Instead, each meal should contain some foods the kids like and some the adults like. Serving meals family style lets the child choose and gives her a sense of control. Eventually, most kids will start eating many of the same foods as the parents.

• Don’t bribe kids. Promising ice cream as a reward for eating broccoli only fuels the suspicion that there’s something wrong with the broccoli. “It serves a short-term goal, but in the long run, it makes kids like broccoli less and ice cream more,” says Birch.

• Find a role model. If your child has a friend who’s a good eater, invite her to dinner. In one study, Birch sat children who hated peas with kids who were eating the veggie happily. After a week of this routine, the pea haters started eating peas, too.

• Involve kids in cooking. It will help get them used to the smell, feel and texture of foods. And having a stake in the meal will make them somewhat more likely to eat it.

• Relax. If meals become a power struggle, you’re likely to lose. “Along with potty training and sleeping, eating behavior is one thing kids can control,” says Tan. “And it definitely gets a reaction out of Mom and Dad.” Just remember: as long as the kids are getting some kind of fruit, vegetable and protein, they’re probably doing fine.

Time to Hang Up the Keys: Worries about your elderly parents' driving?

Watch for warning signs
-take notice if your parents are reluctant to drive at night, seem tense or exhausted after driving, or complain about getting lost
-discreetly check the car for any dents or nicks and ask whether your parents have received traffic tickets or warnings
-take opportunities to ride in the car while your parents drive. Look for indications of discomfort: Do they crane forward or look tense? Do they tailgate or drift between lanes? Do they react slowly? Do they have trouble finding their way?

Starting the conversation:
-don't sound alarmed. If you begin with a dramatic outburst, you're likely to trigger resistance. Work toward the topic slowly and gently
-turn the conversation toward the downside of driving, including the cost of maintaining a car. Let your parent realize for himself that he risks a serious accident.
-discuss interim measures such as driving only in daylight or on familiar routes; or explore other transportation options like the bus
-suggest a senior driving refresher course offered by the AARP or a driving school

If a parent refuses to stop driving
-suggest a joint bisit with a trusted doctor, who can discuss whether any treatable medical conditions are interfering with driving or if assistive devices can help
-as a last resort, look into the possibility of anonymously issuing a safety complaint through the local DMV, which will ask your parent to submit to a medical evaluation
-don't let your parents get cut off. Most elderly drivers dread giving up the car keys out of fear of isolation. Offer to drive them to activities and include them in your own life when you can. If you don't live nearby, you might encourage them to move closer to loved ones or to areas where it's easier to get around without a car. They may be losing a vehicle, but they'll gain new helping hands.

Repairpal.com: be in the know on your next trip to the mechanic. Comprehensive explanations of what typical repairs should cost based on your car make, model, year, and zip code.

Newsweek - August 11, 2008

2008-08-31T18:12:00.000-07:00

Hey, Man, Learn to Drive!

The best way to enjoy Tom Vanderbilt's new book, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," is to forget the psychobabble title and merge like a commuter into the text itself. Like real traffic, it's sometimes slow going. But it's also a delightful tour through the mysteries and manners of driving. Think you do it well? Vanderbilt thinks not.

The big idea: "Driving," Vanderbilt writes, "is probably the most complex everyday thing we do in our lives." Yet most people zip around without ever realizing that their driving is based on faulty perceptions and folksy "superstitions" about life on the road.

Examples: Women can't drive? Actually, men are the terrors: they speed more, honk more, drink more, wear seat belts less and are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents. Nice people merge early? Waiting until the last second to change lanes when traffic bottlenecks actually helps things flow more smoothly. The other lane is moving faster? On the contrary, manic lane changers make up only four minutes of lost time—while the stress of cutting all those people off, Vanderbilt notes, probably takes more time off their lives.

Conclusion: Don't expect traffic nirvana any time soon. Confronted with bad driving all around them, most people give their own wheel-work two thumbs up—and don't see a need to change. Even if they did, they'd still be human. And that, says Vanderbilt, is exactly the problem.

When Life is Like a TV Show

As a director of psychiatrics at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, Joel Gold has seen thousands of delusional patients. But a few years ago, he began noticing a different sort of paranoia: young white men who believed they were the subjects of their own reality-TV shows. Some, says Gold, who with his brother has written a preliminary paper and hopes to author a larger study, seemed pleased by their roles—excited by the anticipated million-dollar payout. Others were tormented. One came to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen—believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he'd be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top, and finally be released from the "show."

Grandiose, paranoid delusions are a staple among schizophrenics and psychopaths. Typically, they apply to one aspect of a patient's life—say, irrationally believing a spouse is cheating. But these patients, much like Jim Carrey's character in the 1998 film "The Truman Show," believe their entire lives are being broadcast, and that everyone is in on the joke. The numbers are small—Gold has observed only five firsthand and has heard from or about more than a dozen since—but he and others think "The Truman Show Delusion," as Gold now calls it, is the pathological product of our insatiable appetite for self-exposure. Delusions are often related to the larger cultural and political climate: during the cold war some people thought they were being monitored by the KGB. Today, some might think Al Qaeda is after them. When all it takes is a Webcam and the click of a mouse to be seen and heard by millions, and with hundreds of surveillance cameras capturing our movements each day, it's not necessary to go on "Big Brother" to feel like you're in the public eye. "If you have a predisposition to paranoia, going on YouTube and seeing some guy doing something can really shake you up," says Gold. You could think, "Is the world watching me?" Perhaps the key to sanity is knowing that while the whole world isn't watching, someone probably is.

A Life in Books: Darin Strauss, Guggenheim fellow
My five most important books
-Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
-Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
-Collected Stories, VS Pritchett

A book to which you always return: Herzog, Saul Bellow

A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed: Portnoy's Complaint. "It was important to me, but the humor has dated badly."

Anything But Crocs

Lessons From Locke

Earlier this summer, Wendy Kopp flew round trip from New York to L.A. in one day. Kopp, the founder of Teach For America—the national teaching corps that recruits high-performing college grads to teach in low-performing public schools—wanted to personally welcome some 700 new recruits to summer boot camp. When she took the podium, the teachers-in-training started cheering before she could finish saying her name. Then it was rapt silence as she exhorted them to engage in the battle for educational equity, first as quality teachers, then as leaders of the systemic reform needed to close the appalling achievement gap between the richest and the poorest students. It was a rousing call to arms not unlike the one I heard the summer of 2005 when I began to follow four TFA recruits through their first year of teaching.

Today TFA is not only the postgrad destination of choice for many of America's top college seniors, it's also a magnet for reform-minded philanthropists. Despite a battered economy, TFA is on target to raise $110 million in fiscal 2008, a 40 percent hike over the previous year's record intake. The number of applicants has spiked to a record high—now 25,000 college seniors compete for the privilege of taking on one of the toughest jobs on earth. Among the candidates: 11 percent of seniors at Yale, 10 percent at Georgetown and 9 percent at Harvard. This summer, 3,700 corps members who were carefully culled for their leadership skills through TFA's data-driven, envy-of-Wall Street selection model underwent an intensive, five-week crash course in teaching. In a few weeks, they will begin their two-year classroom commitments.

They will be assigned to schools like Locke High School in Watts, where I spent my year as an embed. At Locke, a school hemmed in by competing gangs, 2 percent of ninth graders are proficient in algebra; 11 percent read at grade level. Too many can't read at all. I learned that when a friend asked me to visit the school months earlier. As I sat in her classroom, she carefully enunciated the word "cat" while holding up a finger for each sound in the one-syllable word. "Cuh-A-Tuh," intoned Ms. Levine: "CAT." Her embarrassed ninth graders reluctantly repeated the exercise. It was excruciating to watch. When I later realized that Locke would be a training site for TFA's L.A. summer institute, I wondered: what could be learned about how we educate our most impoverished students through the teaching experiences of our most privileged?

Lessons emerged on a daily basis. Some of the most important:

The American system of education is broken. America has been wrestling with the problem of declining student achievement ever since 1983, when the government issued the report "A Nation at Risk," which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" that threatened our country's future. Twenty-five years on, the tide is in. The United States truly is a nation at risk—our graduation rate ranks 19th among top developing countries. At Locke, 1,000 ninth graders were enrolled in 2001. Of the 240 who graduated four years later, only 30 were eligible to apply to a California state campus. Note to Obama and McCain: do the math. The impact an uneducated populace has on the integrity of the country's social fabric and the health of the economy cannot be underestimated.

It's the teachers, stupid! The single most important factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher. And yet, we have no effective system to attract, train, retain and promote high-caliber candidates for our schools. Today's teachers score in the lowest quartile of college grads and too many of the schools that train them are diploma mills. By making its program highly selective and attaching status to the job, Teach For America has proved that it is possible to get the best and the brightest into our classrooms. But no one—not TFA, not the districts, not the unions—has figured out how to keep them there. TFA's most recent alumni survey indicates that one third of former corps members are still teaching K–12. Critics charge that the recruits' short forays into the classroom exacerbate the critical issue of staff churning in our neediest schools and gibe that TFA really stands for Teach For Awhile. But the truth is, up to half of all the country's 3.5 million teachers bail within five years. Low pay, low status and low satisfaction undoubtedly drive many out. The transformation of teaching into a financially rewarding profession with high standards of admission—and accountability—would go a long way toward establishing staff stability.

Teach For America recruits can't close the achievement gap, but its alumni might. TFA knows that it will take systemic change to zap the gap. It's banking on its alums—in whatever field they eventually choose—to lead the charge. Some already are. In Washington, D.C., the reforming schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, is a 1992 TFA alum. The founders of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the wildly successful chain of 57 charter schools, are 1992 TFA alums, too. Nationwide, there are now 360 school leaders and 16 elected officials who got their start in public service with Teach For America. By 2010, the ranks of America's next generation of leaders will be seeded with 20,000 high-achieving alums who will have seen the crisis in our classrooms firsthand. If, as Francis Bacon once said, knowledge in itself truly is power—if by knowing the profundity of the problem TFA alum will be empowered to find its solution—then Wendy Kopp's battle for educational equity will be won. Big ifs.

Cleaning Up The House

Last October, the month before Joey Specter was expecting to give birth, part of the ceiling in her and her husband's Brooklyn apartment started to flake off. Annoyed, but with their minds occupied, they weren't too concerned. Until the day after they brought the little bundle home from the hospital and Specter's husband went to work sweeping up the flakes. "He just poked the ceiling a few times and a huge chunk of it collapsed," Spector says, exposing a vast black growth that looked like mold, accompanied by an "awful, earthy smell." Panicking, they searched online for help, coming across a listing for an environmental consultant who came to test the air. It turned out to be toxic black mold.

While much environmental debate is over how fast the ice caps and forests will disappear, the great indoors look more likely to get to you first. Airborne particulates coming from mold, dust, lead paint and building materials are causing heightened concern as people develop higher sensitivities to things in the air. Home-inspection companies have been around for decades, looking for things like asbestos and mold, but increasing awareness about home-based allergens has led to a brisk upswing in the home-inspection and consulting industry.

Micro Ecologies, the firm that responded to Specter's black-mold problem, usually gets calls from people wondering why their living room makes them sneeze. What comes next isn't cheap. A full home consultation with a lab analysis can cost around $1,000, depending on the size of the residence and extent of the problem, says Arthur Lau, a general manager of the company. A different company comes later to fix the problem, which can be covered by insurance.

The industry keeps a loose hierarchy of dangerous particles. Asbestos, the building material found in the 1970s to lead to forms of cancer, has always ranked first, although it's rarely found in newer homes. But consulting experts agree that the more prolific, and growing, culprit is mold. The fungus—of which 200,000 species are known to exist—often enters homes through an open door or window before taking haven in dark, moist environments like wall cavities or under carpeting. Most homes have small amounts of hidden mold that are usually harmless to nonallergic people, says industrial hygienist Victor D'Amato, especially in humid regions like Florida or the Northeast. Simply living in an environment also means things like dead skin cells, animal dander and carpet fibers will float in the air, often in small, unaffecting doses. The Centers for Disease Control call floating things like mold spores "respiratory irritants" that could cause different levels of allergy-like symptoms. Floating particles affect all people differently, depending on the quantity inhaled and the susceptibility to lung irritation. Longer-term exposure in higher doses could cause breathing difficulties like asthma.

The consultants NEWSWEEK spoke with said they consider mold a harmful substance worth removing from your home, even though science hasn't yet linked spore inhalation, of even the toxic kind, to much more than varying levels of allergic irritation. But a lack of regulation in the environmental home-consulting industry poses a more immediate problem. Investigators disagree on testing methods, like whether cursory air samples or visual inspections are the better way to spot a problem. Both can be inconclusive if done quickly. More important can be finding the source—often a leaky pipe or poor ventilation.

The wider concern is about consultants' certification. Asbestos inspectors are required to be certified by state and federal health agencies, but anyone can inspect for other irritants. "It is possible to become a certified mold inspector in the amount of time it takes you to print a business card," says Owen Seiver, a consultant and professor of environmental health at California State University Northridge. "It's hard to know who's doing it right." When something strange is growing in your ceiling, that's not a comforting thought.

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PC Magazine - September, 2008

2008-08-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

Defeat Airport Delays: A bit of tech savvy is all you need to avoid getting stranded
-FlightStats.com: enter your flight numbers and you'll get the odds of the flights being on time
-www.fly.faa.gov: learn if there are any delays specific to your travel destination
-waittime.tsa.dhs.gov: not in real time, but a good estimate of how long your wait in TSA line will be

Save Gas the Geek Way: Boost your mileage with some high tech tips and save money
-Find the best gas prices on the web: GasBuddy.com, GasPriceWatch.com
-Track your gas use: dashboard gauge (ScanGauge.com) keeps track of your mileage and will trouble shoot your "Check Engine" light
-Know your car's health: use a diagnostic device (CarMD.com)

Best of the Internet
-Fiscal Zen (fiscalzen.com): learn the fundamentals of saving money during a recession and smart ways to spend your money.
-Twitter Spy (twitspy.com): peek into the lives of people around the world who are on Twitter right now.

Top Five Underused Google Services
-Google Labs (labs.google.com): testing ground for new products and services.
-Google Pack (pack.google.com): "essential software" for neophytes, including Google Earth, Norton Security Scan and StarOffice
-Google Translate (translate.google.com): translate a chunk of text or an entire site
-Google Custom Search (www.google.com/coop/cse): create a customized search engine with your company's branding or just search a specific set of sites
-Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts): keep tabs on whatever/whomever

Extend Your Laptop's Life With These Tweaks
Keep it cool
-start with a cooling pad via 2+ fans
-blast the dust from your laptop's air vents with compressed air once a month
Opt for SSD
-solid-state drive, built with nonvolatile flash memory, with no moving parts, generating less heat and mor resiliant to being knocked/dropped
Carry it like an egg
-choose a bag that affords maximum protection
-when carrying without a bag, avoid stressing the case, don't hold it by the corners, use the sides or the middle
Baby your battery
-remove the battery whenever your notebook is plugged into an outlet (if left in, the AC power could cause the battery to overheat and overcharge)
-when running on the battery, use the machine until you get a low-battery warning, then let the battery recharge fully
Baby your battery, part 2
-Standby mode consumes some power, which burns through some of your charge/discharge cycles
-use Hibernate instead
Reformat the hard drive
-use your manufacturer's system-restore CD, just boot it and follow the instructions
-make sure to offload all documents, email, bookmarks, etc. to a network drive, external drive or DVDs before hand

Maxim - May, 2008

2008-08-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

Chuck Palahniuk, author
-Fight Club
-Choke
-Snuff
-Survivor
-Lullaby
-Diary

The 300 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Comedy

Top Picks
The Big Lebowski
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Kingpin
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
This is Spinal Tap
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Other
Airplane
Animal House
American Pie
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Bachelor Party
Bananas
Beverly Hills Cop
Blazing Saddles
Caddyshack
The Cannonball Run
Clerks
Dazed and Confused
Duck Soup
Dumb and Dumber
Election
The 40-year-old Virgin
Ghostbusters
Groundhog Day
Happy Gilmore
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
The Jerk
Modern Times
The Nutty Professor
Office Space
Old School
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
The Princess Bride
Raising Arizona
Sixteen Candles
Some Like It Hot
Trading Places
Vacation
Wedding Crashers
Wet Hot American Summer
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Young Frankenstein

War

Top Picks
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Dr. Strangelove
The Deer Hunter

Other
Apocalypse Now
Black Hawk Down
The Dirty Dozen
Gallipoli
The Great Escape
MASH
Platoon
Saving Private Ryan

So Bad They're Good

Top Picks
Showgirls
Glen or Glenda

Other
Airport 1975
Barbarella
Battlefield Earth
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Death Race 2000
Phantom of the Paradise
Reefer Madness
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Toxic Avenger

Rebels

Top Picks
Cool Hand Luke
Taxi Driver
Sid & Nancy
Easy Rider

Other
Billy Jack
Dirty Harry
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
The Graduate
A History of Violence
The Hustler
The King of Comedy
Network
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Raging Bull
Risky Business
Smokey and the Bandit
Three Days of the Condor
Trainspotting

Classics

Top Picks
Lawrence of Arabia
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Adventures of Robin Hood

Other
Ben-Hur
Casablanca
Double Indemnity
Metropolis
The Night of the Hunter
On the Waterfront
The Third Man
Touch of Evil
Vertigo
White Heat
The Wizard of Oz

Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Top Picks
Starship Troopers
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Empire Strikes Back

Other
Alien/Aliens
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Children of Men
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
ET
King Kong
Planet of the Apes
Star Wars
Terminator/T2

Horror

Top Picks
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead

Other
Carrie
The Exorcist
The Fly
Halloween
Jaws
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Psycho
Rosemary's Baby
The Shining
28 Days Later

Westerns

Top Picks
The Searchers
Jeremiah Johnson
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Other
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
High Noon
High Plains Drifter
Tombstone
True Grit
Unforgiven
The Wild Bunch

Buddy Movies

Top Picks
The Last Detail
Top Gun
Superbad
Deliverance

Other
American Graffiti
The Blues Brothers
Breaking Away
Glengarry GlenRoss
The Goonies
Lethal Weapon
The Right Stuff
Saturday Night Fever
The Shawshank Redemption
Stand by Me
Stripes
Swingers
The Warriors

Action

Top Picks
Rocky I-IV
The Matrix
The Road Warrior

Other
Batman
Batman Begins
Battle Royale
Bourne trilogy
Braveheart
Clash of the Titans
Die Hard
Enter the Dragon
Face/Off
First Blood
48 Hrs
Gladiator
The Incredibles
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Predator
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Speed
Spider-Man

Art House

Top Picks
City of God
A Clockwork Orange
Annie Hall
Withnail and I
Midnight Cowboy

Other
Badlands
The Bicycle Thief
The Conversation
Do the Right Thing
Elephant Man
The Last Picture Show
Repo Man
Rushmore
Short Cuts
There Will Be Blood

Mindbenders

Top Picks
Akira
The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Others
Beetlejuice
Blue Velvet
Brazil
Donnie Darko
Edward Scissorhands
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fight Club
Memento
Pink Floyd: The Wall
The Manchurian Candidate

Cops

Top Picks
Bullitt
To Live and Die in LA
Hard Boiled

Other
Bad Lieutenant
Chinatown
The Departed
Donnie Brasco
Fargo
The French Connection
RoboCop
Se7en
Shaft
The Silence of the Lambs
The Untouchables

Criminals

Top Picks
The Godfather I and II
No Country For Old Men
Bonnie and Clyde
Reservoir Dogs

Others
Atlantic City
Bad Boys
Bloody Mama
The Boyz From Brazil
Boyz N the Hood
Carlito's Way
Casino
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Dog Day Afternoon
The Getaway
Get Carter
Goodfellas
Heat
A History of Violence
In Cold Blood
The Long Good Friday
Mean Streets
Natural Born Killers
Pulp Fiction
River's Edge
Scarface
Sexy Beast
Sin City
Super Fly
True Romance

The Master Class
Breathless
Citizen Kane
La Dolce Vita
Seven Samurai
The 400 Blows
The Seventh Seal
Un Chien Andalou

Sequels That Are Better Than The Original
Bride of Frankenstein
Evil Dead II
Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan
Superman II
Terminator 2
The Empire Strikes Back

Non-Boring Documentaries
Brother's Keeper
Don't Look Back
Gimme Shelter
Hoop Dreams
Pumping Iron
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
When We Were Kings

Essential James Bond Movies
Casino Royale
Goldfinger
The Spy Who Loved Me
Live and Let Die
You Only Live Twice

Best Movies With Puppets
Being John Malkovich
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Team America
The Dark Crystal
The Muppet Movie
Weekend at Bernie's

Movies You Need to See Once, But Are So Traumatic That You Never Need to See Again
Leaving Las Vegas
Million Dollar Baby
Requiem For a Dream
Schindler's List
United 93

The Super B's, B-list superheroes who deserve their shot in a movie
She-Hulk (short list: Jessica Biel, Katherine Heigl)
Luke Cage (Will Smith)
Captain Canuck (Keanu Reeves)
Black Widow (Jessica Alba)
Nixon (Nicolas Cage)
The Sandman (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers)
The Savage Dragon (The Rock)
Emma Frost (Charlize Theron)
The Flaming Carrot (Carrot Top)
The Green Arrow (Sean Penn)
Thor (Matthew McConaughey)
Nick Fury (Martin Lawrence)

History of Violence, the blood-soaked world of New York's Five Families

Bonnano: founded by Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno Sr., the story of the family was told by Gay Talese in "Honor They Father". In the 70s, Federal Agent Joe "Donnie Brasco" Pistone famously infiltrated the group.

Gambino: in 1957, Carlo Gambino, said to be the primary inspiration for Vito Corleone in The Godfather, took over the family that now bears his name. It's long been the most powerful of the five families.

Colombo: originally known as the Profaci family, the Colombos gained renown under fame-hungry boss Joe Colombo. The 1971 film "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" is based on a faction of the family.

Genovese: the family founded by "Lucky" Luciano and later run by Vito Genovese, was taken over by the "Oddfather", Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who's said to be the model for Uncle Junior in The Sopranos.

Lucchese: famous among movie fans as the inspiration for GoodFellas, the Lucchese family rose to power under boss Gaetano "Tommy" Lucchese. The New Jersey contingent inspired The Sopranos.

Fit To Fly, working out your legs with Dwight Howard

1. Quadriceps: Lunge

Beginner: take a large step (3 ft) forward, plant your front food, and lower your back knee to about an inch from the ground. Push back up to a standing position, switch legs, and repeat. Try four sets of 10 per leg.

Intermediate: throw the lunge into reverse. Grab a medicine ball or dumbbells and take a big step backward, this time dropping the knee of the stepping leg. Drive that knee forward to stand again, switch legs, and repeat. Try four sets of 10 per leg.

Advanced: holding dumbbells at your sides, place the sole of one foot on a stability ball or bench behind you. Slowly lower front leg to form 90-degree angles with each knee. Try four sets of 10 per leg.

Gastrocnemius: Donkey Calf Raise

Beginner: stand bent-over next to a railing, holding it for support. With legs straight and back flat, contract calves to rise up to your toes. Count two to lift, four to lower, and repeat. Try four sets of 10.

Intermediate: from same position, but with a step under the balls of your feet, cross your left foot behind your right ankle, slowly lower your right heel toward the floor, then rise up as high as possible. Try four sets of 12 per leg.

Advanced: do either of the first two exercises with extra resistance, such as a dip belt, weight plates, or someone on your back. Five sets of 10.

Hamstrings, Glutes: Stability Ball Bridge

Beginner: lie on your back with your lower legs on a stability ball. Contracting your abs and glutes, press your legs into the ball to lift your hips until your body forms a straight line. Hold for three seconds, lower down, and repeat. Three to four sets of 15.

Intermediate: from the hips-up position, bend your knees to bring them toward your chest while rolling the ball to the soles of your feet. Slowly return to the starting position and repeat. Four sets of 12.

Advanced: this time, once your hips are up, point one leg straight up. Keep your lower back firm as you curl the ball with your other leg. Do all reps with one leg, then switch without letting your butt hit the ground. Four sets of 12.

How to walk off the belly fat

2008-08-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

Sure, you know walking is good exercise. But here's something you might not realize: You can give your waistline (and other body parts) a serious trimming by tweaking that walk around the block.

The three women below each walked off at least 35 pounds, much of it around the middle, using one of these secret weapons: plyometrics, hills, or intervals. The strategies also strengthened their legs more quickly than plain old walking sessions, so they could walk longer and faster to burn more calories.

After six weeks of walking four to six times a week, you will feel stronger and look slimmer where it counts. Health.com: Walk a little, live a lot (longer)

Secret weapon: Plyometrics

Adding bounding, jumping, and skipping moves (called plyometrics) to your walk is a fun way to spike the intensity. You'll burn up to twice as many calories --and significantly more belly fat -- per minute than you would just walking at a moderate pace.

"These moves vary the walking pattern your body has grown accustomed to, so you engage different muscle fibers," says Joy Prouty, veteran Florida-based trainer and American College of Sports Medicine-certified health-fitness director. "And that helps shape and define your body." Health.com: Walk this way

It worked for Claire Jefferson-Glipa, 31, of Riverside, California.

Adding one-minute bursts of plyometrics to the Stroller Strides classes she leads each week -- along with making healthy changes in her eating habits --helped Jefferson-Glipa drop 36 pounds in just nine months. "It's so exciting that my clothes are looser," she says.

Make it work for you

Try this workout from Prouty, gradually adding more plyometrics as your fitness level improves. It can be done either outside or on the treadmill (just be sure to step off the machine to do the plyometrics moves).

• 1. Walk 15 minutes, building to a moderate pace.

• 2. Do 30 High-Knee Steps forward (alternating legs); skip for 30 seconds, then walk at a moderate pace for one minute.

• 3. Do 15 Traveling Lateral Squats (turn and move sideways as you squat) in slow motion, followed by five Squat Jumps (squat slightly, then swing arms up as you jump). Knee problems? Rise up on your toes instead of jumping.

• 4. Walk at a moderate pace for 10 minutes.

• 5. Repeat step 2.

• 6. Walk for five minutes at a moderate pace, then five minutes at a slow pace to cool down.

Secret weapon: Hills

To triple the number of calories you burn, go to where it's hilly, Prouty says. Walking on hills can burn tons of calories and fat, so you'll work that stomach pooch off faster than you would on flat terrain. Uphill walks are great for strengthening and shaping your lower half -- plus, you'll feel stronger and go faster on level ground. Health.com: Tips if you don't have time to walk

It worked for Robyn Kammerer, 33, of Rowayton, Connecticut.

Kammerer dropped 50 postpregnancy pounds in four months by eating healthier and walking every day on the hills near her home. "If I'm out of breath at the top of one of these killer hills," she says, "I remind myself that I can now wear skirts that haven't fit in years."

Make it work for you

Start by changing your walking routine: Twice a week, replace 25 percent of your flat route with short or gradual hills. (New to walking? Start with 20-minute walks that include five minutes of hills.) After two weeks, seek out longer or steeper hills, and add 10 percent more climbing each week. Your goal is to do between one-half and two-thirds of your workout on hills.

Live in a flat area? Substitute this treadmill climb: After a 10-minute warm-up, gradually increase the incline from 0 to 2 percent for 5 to 10 minutes. Then, gradually decrease the incline in the same amount of time, finishing with 5 to 10 minutes of flat walking. Each week or two, increase the incline by 1 percent.

Secret weapon: Intervals

Alternating moderately paced walking with short, faster-paced intervals lets you amp up your walk without tiring yourself out. You'll also dump stomach weight more quickly and torch more calories than you would on a steady-paced walk. By peppering in a 30-minute walk with 10 one-minute speed bursts, for example, you can nearly double your calorie burn. Health.com: The ultimate walk-it-off plan

It worked for Virginia Cox, 42, of Belmont, Massachusetts.

Doing 15 miles' worth of interval walking a week (plus cutting down on starchy foods and sweet treats) helped Cox shed 45 pounds of baby weight in just six months. "I look and feel great because of walking," Cox says. "Plus, I now fit into the jeans that I wore when I was in my 20s." An unexpected bonus: She's sleeping much better, too.

Make it work for you

Warm up at an easy pace, then walk at a moderate pace for 10 minutes; increase speed for one minute, Prouty says. Do another 3 minutes at a moderate pace; repeat one or two times, then do 10 moderately-paced minutes.

As you get stronger, add more intervals, aiming to alternate 1-minute speed bursts with one minute of moderate walking.

Newsweek - August 4, 2008

2008-08-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Book: Why I'm A Democrat, Susan Mulcahy

A Life In Books: Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban, A Handbook to Luck

My Five Most Important Books
1. Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
2. Collected Stories, Anton Chekhov
3. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
4. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
5. The Emigrants, WG Sebald

A book you always wanted to return to: Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo

A book you hope parents will read to their kids: The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer

China’s Agony of Defeat

It's impossible to understand what the Games mean to the Chinese without understanding their history of humiliation.

By Orville Schell

The Olympics are an irresistible stage for athletes—but also for those who wish to act out their grievances before the world. The Beijing Games, which kick off on Aug. 8, are hardly an exception. While Chinese leaders furiously insist they're not, and should not be, "political," these Olympics promise to become one of the most charged in history. Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event.

China is bedeviled by internal problems—human-rights violations, media censorship, corruption, pollution, labor abuses and lack of due process, to name a few. Several "domestic" issues—Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong—have also regularly spilled over into the international realm. At the same time, a host of relatively new, purely international problems have accrued to China as the country has aggressively sought access to natural resources around the world. By dealing with pariah states like Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran in order to feed the country's voracious appetite for oil, timber and metals, Chinese leaders have been accused of playing an irresponsible global role. Their critics would like nothing more than to flay Beijing before a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions.

Chinese officials are doing everything possible to block such protests. They've designated three remote sites in Beijing in which to corral a few neutered "demonstrations." Rarely have the Chinese military and police been more anxious or at a higher state of alert. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Tens of thousands of police, paramilitary troops and regular soldiers have been deployed to guard Olympic facilities, major buildings and public spaces. Many foreign NGO staffers based in Beijing have been asked to leave for the summer. Visa applications to attend the Games—now requiring not only letters of invitation but hotel reservations, round-trip airline tickets and bank statements—have frequently been turned down with no explanation. Indeed, the whole bureaucratic structure of the Chinese government and party seems coiled like a spring, ready to release into action if any errant soul emerges to make a disturbance, or even express unacceptable views, in a public way.

Now, I am the first to admit that the Chinese government gives ample cause for protest. Nor is vigorous dissent always counterproductive when dealing with Beijing. But I would argue that this is not the time—and not just because any unauthorized protest is quite likely to fail. The Beijing Games present a fraught and sensitive moment. China has made a Herculean effort to prepare the way for this spectacle, in which ordinary Chinese, not just their leaders, can announce themselves to the world as having regained their national greatness. Protests would almost certainly spark the kind of nationalist and autocratic backlash that they're meant to remedy. Remember what followed the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations—a nearly 20-year period of reaction and restoration from which China has still not recovered.

This proud prickliness has deep historical roots that involve China, the West and even Japan. As I argue in the current New York Review of Books, the most critical element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with its defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century and the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America. The process was exacerbated by Japan's successful industrialization. Tokyo's invasion and occupation of the mainland during World War II was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, where China had failed.

This inferiority complex has been institutionalized in the Chinese mind. In the early 20th century China took up its victimization as a theme and made it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity. A new literature arose around the idea of bainian guochi—"100 years of national humiliation." After the 1919 Treaty of Versailles cravenly gave Germany's concessions in China to Japan, the expression wuwang guochi—"Never forget our national humiliation"—became a common slogan. To ignore China's national failure came to be seen as unpatriotic. Since then, China's historians and ideological overseers have never hesitated to mine the country's past sufferings "to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present," as the historian Paul Cohen has written.

Sun Yat-sen, for instance, described China in 1924 as being "a heap of loose sand" that had "experienced several decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers." In his 1947 book, "China's Destiny," Chiang Kai-shek wrote: "During the past 100 years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special 'concessions' and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged." And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Zedong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation."

Highlighting their victimhood has led Chinese leaders to rely on what historian Peter Hays Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." This was especially true during the 1960s, when non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most authentically revolutionary. But it has continued to the present day. In 2001, the National People's Congress passed a law proclaiming an official "National Humiliation Day." (Of course, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates couldn't agree on any particular one.)

This history pretty much guarantees that certain traits will express themselves again and again whenever China responds under stress to the outside world. "The question of Western humiliation is always unconsciously inside us," filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng—whose recent film, "Dark Matter," explores this theme—told me. "There is something almost in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs." Or as Lu Xun, China's most famous essayist and social critic, lamented almost 75 years ago, "Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals."

The Chinese themselves have made the search for a more self-confident, less-aggrieved persona harder. For much of the past 100 years China has been engaged in a series of assaults on its culture and history. These frequently uncompromising self-critiques started in the early 20th century when Chinese reformers began denouncing traditional Confucian culture, above all because it seemed to have left them so weak before the technological might of the West.

By the 1930s and 1940s, these attacks began to turn against Chinese nationalists. Having begun to fashion a new identity that combined elements of both East and West, Chiang Kai-shek and his Wellesley-educated Christian wife were criticized for, among other things, being too Westernized. Then, after Mao's communists had spent three decades trying to fashion a new revolutionary identity for China, Deng Xiaoping came along and performed yet another act of demolition, this time on the revolution itself.

The failures of these successive efforts at self-reinvention have cast the Chinese adrift, with an uncertain sense of cultural and political direction. We tend to forget this when focusing on how efficient the regime in Beijing is at building infrastructure, or managing the economy. Take the reaction to the anti-Beijing protests this spring in Tibet, and later around the world as the Olympic torch made its way to China. Old-fashioned police controls were tightened and rhetoric that harked back to Mao made China look retrograde, just when it most wanted to look modern. One official raged that the gentle Dalai Lama was "a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast."

Equally surprising was the fact that many of the most indignant counterdemonstrators—those flooding the BBC and CNN with angry Internet threats, or shouting down protesters along the torch route—were young Chinese, born during the booming post-Mao era. Because they are better educated and more worldly than their elders, one might have expected them to have been exempt from the China-as-victim syndrome. But, perhaps because they, too, have been subject to the party's propaganda, many have turned out every bit as nationalistic as older Chinese.

What made the Tibet protests such an affront to so many Chinese was the timing: China had finally allowed itself to imagine that its national identity might metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games. In one grand, symbolic stroke, a successful Games was meant to cleanse China's messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn. The Chinese, though, may again be looking for self-confidence in the wrong places. As Xu Guoqi suggests in his new book, "Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008," Beijing is fixated on winning gold medals as a means of proving its status as an economic and political powerhouse. "A nation that obsesses over gold medals," Xu notes archly, "is not a self-assured nation."

Ironically, on the surface China has never seemed more "equal" to the West. Anyone arriving in Beijing is bound to be impressed by the magnificent new Norman Foster–designed Capital airport. The Beijing Olympic Park, with its Herzog & de Meuron–designed "bird's nest" stadium and its bubble-skinned, transparent National Swimming Center, is stunning. The dingy Soviet-style apartment blocks, disheveled courtyard houses and defoliated streets that I first came to know in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution have all but vanished. Now one is everywhere overwhelmed by new "development," or fazhan, a word that has attained almost sacerdotal overtones in China.

Yet few Chinese of my acquaintance have allowed themselves to be psychologically convinced by China's success, to believe truly in China's establishment as a leading nation. To do this, I suppose, they would have to be convinced that they already are, in fact, successful and powerful; that the world has already begun to look on their country with a growing sense of wonder, even envy, and that the past is, in fact, the past.

While honest criticisms should not be muted just because Chinese leaders find them grating, we foreigners should be mindful of this complex psychological landscape. In reacting to contemporary events, we tend to forget just how deeply implicated we are in how China came to experience and view the modern world. This long relationship has created a still rather unyielding tension as each country interacts with the other. Despite the fact that China has gotten closer than ever to escaping from this past, it's important to understand that its leaders and people are still susceptible to older ways of responding to the world around them. Now is not the time to provoke them further and impede their progress toward a new, more equal and self-assured sense of nationhood.

Bissinger's Gummy Pandas (bissingers.com)

Newsweek - July 28, 2008

2008-08-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

Living a Second Life Online

Jessica Bennett

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:07 PM ET Jul 19, 2008

We've all heard the warnings: addiction, isolation, a waste of time. But some 50 million people log on to online role-playing games like The Sims and Second Life—and many of them never log off. The makers of a new documentary called "Second Skin," which hits theaters in September, followed seven hard-core gamers to find out why. Victor Piñeiro, the film's producer, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jessica Bennett:

Why make a film about gamers?
It all started with a teacher friend who got so into Star Wars Galaxy that he was leading a double life. He'd run home from work during lunch, 10 blocks, to check what was going on inside the game. He was staying up all night and would show up to class with bags under his eyes. From the outside it looked crazy. But from the inside it was kind of amazing. He'd become the mayor of his town and was leading hundreds of people.

What's the lure of such games?
What it comes down to is trying to find fulfillment and like-minded individuals. In a virtual world, you can choose your destiny. There's satisfying work, the chance to be good at something. From outside you might say, "Oh, that person's a nerd." But inside these people are well known and respected.

One of your subjects games 16 hours a day, sleeps by the computer and does it all over again.
Yes, and there's of course a point where people go too far—many lives are wrecked by gaming. But these games are very fulfilling to people, and to some that's not addiction, it's an extension of living.

Some of your sources say they found true love in virtual reality. Do you think that's possible?
In many cases I think real love blossoms best in a virtual world. We hung out with countless couples who met inside these games, and many were among the most madly-in-love people I've met. Each will say they had no expectations of falling in love, but that they really got to know each other from the "inside out."

What was the most unexpected thing you discovered?
There was a guy we met in Second Life who was really great: affable, funny, smart and fun—we really connected. Months later, we were shocked to find out he was completely disabled by cerebral palsy, to the point where he could only work one finger on one hand and couldn't talk. In that moment, the power of virtual worlds to enhance people's lives really crashed down on us.

History of Jokes

-Palamedes, Greek legend, mythical inventor of the joke
-Sigmund Frued, author of "Jokes and their relation to the unconscious"
-Poggio Bracciolini, ran a "fib factory" for storytellers at the Vatican and compiled Europe's first joke book
-Gershon Legman, "self-taught scholar of the dirty joke", credited with amassing the largest collection of blue humor in the world
-Sarah Silverman, master of the dirty joke

A Life in Books: Niall Ferguson, professor at Harvard University, renowned in field of counterfactual history. Three-part series on WWII "War of the World".

My Five Most Important Books
1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
2. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
3. Diaries, Victor Klemperer
4. Gold and Iron, Fritz Stern
5. At Swim-Two Birds, Flann O'Brien

Book you hope parents will read to their kids
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

A classic that, upon revisiting, disappointed
On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Carbon-offset Buyers' Guides
Tufts Climate Initiative (tufts.edu/tie/tci)
Clean Air-Cool Planet (cleanair-coolplanet.org)
Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org)
Also, carbonfund.org

Swaptree.com, free service that allows members to exchange books, DVDs, video games and CDs.

Newsweek - July 14, 2008

2008-08-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

A Life In Movies: Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II

My Five Most Important Movies
1. Los Olvidados
2. The Bride of Frankenstein
3. Greed
4. The Gold Rush
5. La Chienne

Film revisited with disappointment: Crime and Punishment

Films parents should share with kids: A Little Princess and The Iron Giant

Perspectives (Quotes)

"Yeah, I don't do cowering." Barack Obama, when asked by Rolling Stone about how past nominess from his party seemed to "cower" in the face of Republican attacks.

"I don't like her outfit... It was one of the motivations to beat her." Russian tennis player Alla Kudryatseva, who upset 3rd-seeded Maria Sharapova in Wimbledon's second-round, on the sheer, tuxedo-style get-up that Sharapova wore during the match.

Defining Moments: Darwin and Lincoln

Charles Darwin
-2/12/1809, born in Shrewsbury, England
-1831, graduated from Cambridge and began a five-year scientific expedition on the HMS Beagle
-1839, married Emma Wedgwood
-1859, "The Origin of Species" was published
-1860, defended his theory at the Oxford evolutionary debate
-1882, died in Downe, England. Buried in Westminster Abbey.

Abraham Lincoln
-2/12/1809, born in Hardin County, Kentucky
-1842, married Mary Todd
-1858, debated Stephen A Douglas seven times in failed Senate campaign
-1860, elected 16th US president
-1863, issued Emancipation Proclamation and delivered Gettysburg Address
-1865, assasinated by John Wilkes Booth. Buried in Springfield, Illinois.

Also in 1809:
-Napoleon and Josephine divorce after she fails to give birth to a son
-James Madison is inaugurated the 4th president and his wife, Dolley, becomes noted for her parties
-John Stevens' Phoenix becomes the first steamship to navigate the ocean, sailing from Philadelphia to New York
-Elizabeth Seton founds the Sisters of Charity, later becomes the first US-born person to be made a saint.

The Don't Bother States (fivethirtyeight.com)

Red States:
-Alabama, 99% chance of McCain winning
-Kentucky, 97%
-Idaho, 98%
-Oklahoma, 99%
-Utah, 100%
-Wyoming, 98%

Blue States:
-Washington, DC, 100% of Obama winning
-California, 97%
-Massachusetts, 97%
-New York, 98%
-Rhode Island, 97%
-Vermont, 99%

Boning Up the Body Politic
There are many ways to predict who'll win the White House in November. The most fun? Physical appearance. A feature-by-feature face-off:

Height
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the shorter candidate has actually won 4 of the last 9 elections. But at 5'7", McCain is 6.5 inches shorter than Obama. The last time anyone overcame such a huge height gap was i 1952. We haven't elected a shorter-than-average president since Ben Harrison. Advantage: Obama.

Eye color
Of our 43 presidents, 38 have had blue, gray or hazel eyes. Two exceptions: disgraced Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon. Sure, light eyes used to be more common. But even as the general incidence fell from 50 to 16% over the last century, our presidential peepers stayed 89% non-brown. Advantage: McCain.

Handedness
Only two POTUSes before 1974 were known to be lefthanded - Garfield and Truman. But since then, a full 66% (Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton) were born southpaws, compared with only 10% of the general population. And either Obama or McCain would continue the trend. How gauche. Advantage: None.

Baldness
The US has elected only 5 hairless presidents, and only 4 of them won the White House before 1880, when voters weren't forced to endure the sight of their shiny, uncovered craniums on TV. Ike beat a bald guy (Adlai Stevenson). Ford wasn't elected. And Dick Cheney wasn't technically president. Advantage: Obama.

Melanin
An exclusive Newsweek analysis has determined that precisely 100% of our presidents have been white. Advantage: McCain.

The Final Score
A tie. Maybe there's something to that whole "waiting until Nov. 4 for the actual results" thing after all.

The Elitism Index
Ivory Tower
-McCain: nearly last in his class at the Naval Academy
-Obama: proud son of Columbia and Harvard

Old-school ties
-McCain: "old boy" of Virginia's Episcopal High School
-Obama: Hawaii's dreamy private school Punahou

Home/Homes
-McCain: Phoenix, Sedona, Arlington, and California
-Obama: Victorian in Hyde Park, apartment in DC

Hollywood Pals
-McCain: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lorne Michaels
-Obama: Oprah, David Geffen, Scarlett Johansson

Top CO2 Emitting Regions
1. China - coal plants are a big culprit
2. USA - still the most per capita
3. EU-15 - transport emissions rising
4. India - a booming car culture
5. Russia - not limited by Kyoto

Top Ecofriendly Countries
1. Switzerland - size of forests increasing
2. Sweden - carbon tax since 1991
3. Norway - hydropower pioneer
4. Finland - state promotes strong environmental policies
5. Costa Rica - 23.4% is protected land

The Cost of Learning
$414.42: public elementary or high school; average annual cost (school supplies and lunch)
$16,440: private day school; median annual tuition
$35,087: private boarding school; median annual tuition, room and board
$13,589: public four-year college; average tuition, room and board
$32,307: private four-year college; average tuition, room and board

Highest Annual Births per 1,000 people
1. Guinea-Bissau: 50
2. Liberia: 50
3. DR Congo: 50
4. Angola: 49
5. Uganda: 48
6. Mali: 48
7. Niger: 48
8. Sierra Leone: 48
9. Chad: 47
10. Afghanistan: 47

US: 14

Highest Annual Deaths
1. Swaziland: 29
2. Botswana: 27
3. Lesotho: 25
4. Sierra Leone: 23
5. Zambia: 22
6. Angola: 22
7. Zimbabwe: 21
8. Afghanistan: 21
9. Mozambique: 20
10. Guinea-Bissau: 19

US: 8

Single Parents Traveling With Kids
-singleparenttravel.net
-breezes.com
-beaches.com
-offshore-sailing.com

Read: The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat, by Eric Roston

Newsweek - July 21, 2008

2008-08-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

A Life In Books, Matt Taibbi (author, The Great Derangement)

My Five Most Important Books

1. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol.
2. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
3. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
4. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
5. Papillon, Henri Charriere

A book to which you always return: Candide

Perspective (Quotes)

"Don't think about dying. Think about living." Former White House press secretary Tony Snow's message to cancer patients, delivered in an April 2007 interview with The New York Times, during his very public battle with the disease that took his life at the age of 53.

"Maybe that's a way of killing 'em." John McCain, responding to news that a tenfold rise in US exports to Iran was largely due to cigarette sales.

"The best way to put itis... cutting off his, uh, you-know-what." CNN anchor Don Lemon, discussing comments made by the Rev. Jesse Jackson about Barack Obama's anatomy without directing repeating them.

Lively: 3-d virtual world where users can create cartoon versions of themselves and chat with other users

Books of Ember, Jeanne DuPrau. An underground city that's home to the 100 or so people who survived what's ominously but vaguely called The Disaster. For kids aged 9-12.

Grow It Alone
-Garden Writers Assocation: gardenwriters.org
-National Gardening Association: garden.org
-seedsofchange.com: organic seeds
-johnnysseeds.com: organic seeds

BabyCenter: social-networking site for parents (community.babycenter.com), lets you share photos, blog, keep up with prenatal yoga buddies and meet new families with common interested.

Maxim, April 2008

2008-08-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

Manned Cloud: a flying 60-room luxury hotel that will lazily lap the world in three days.

PitbullArmory.com: custom-made armor

ScientificMatch.com: new dating service that, for $1,995.95 will use DNA analysis to find you a partner who's genetically matched to give you a good-looking baby.

Noise-canceling headphones
-Sennheiser PXC 450: sweet-sounding and articulate but weak at blocking noise (4/5, $450)
-Bose QuietComfort 3: others kill more noise, but none travel as well as the comfy, compact Boses (3.5/5, $350)
-Maxell NC-IV: not bad for the price (3/5, $100)
-Creative Aurvana X-Fi: best noise killer of the bunch with a signature sound that most people liked (4.5/5, $300)

Upgrade Everything

Money

Terminology
-meatball sundae: mixing together of two excellent business ideas with predictably disastrous results
-blamestorming: meetings that devolve into finding fault for why projects have gone wrong rather than looking for successful results (aka postmortem)
-petting the eagle: using American-based imagery to get consumers to purchase your product
-skintern: female intern who quickly decides to don provocative clothing to alter the competitive balance of the intern pool

Nab an odd job
-millionaire concierge: concierge-in-a-box.com (up to $100/hour)
-sleep consultant: take a course in polysomnography to get accredited ($1,200/day)
-domain namer: pickdomains.com ($50/name)
-professional guinea pig: gpgp.net (guinea pigs get paid) (up to $300/day)

Officeplayground.com: you can buy a 14K-gold-plated Slinky for $90

Travel

Recession-proof fun
-Czech Republic: beer is a buck, lunch runs about $; you can go to wine country and stay at a hotel in Moravia
-Argentina: wine flows and steak dinners are $15; hotels cost about $25-$35; ski the Andes for half of the Rockies (all-day lift is $25-$30)
-Honduras: Utila is a budget scuba diver's paradise and one of the cheapest places in the world to get an open water PADI certification ($225 vs. $500 in the US); hotel rooms for under $40, full meals for under $20 and $1 beers
-Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia: Nha Trang beach in Vietnam features $2 lobsters cooked beside you and a coconut-oil massage for $10; in Cambodia and Laos, $20 will buy you plenty of ganja

Globorati.com: travel web site

Watering Holes
-Jimbo's Place, Virginia Key, Biscayne Bay, Miami: shack stands beside a lagoon surrounded by palm trees
-Skibar Vail, Vail, Colorado: elegant beverages like the Blackout and the Rocky Mountain Bear Fucker in four rooms of documents debauchery
-The Beach Ball, Newport Beach, California: spectacular view of the Pacific, opens at 6am, features live music and pool tables

OneSky Jets: private jets for less (empty plane returning from a chartered flight)

Fitness

Bad Medicine
-cigarettes: may delay Parkinson's
-beer: improves cardiovascular function
-fat-ass-ness: 25 pounds overweight may decrease Parkinson's
-fast food: helps reduce anxiety levels

Brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand will flush your brain with neurotrophin, which causes your dendrites to grow.

Killer Waves

Ghost Tree, Monterey, California
-sheer cliff of water up to 70 feet high, considered the toughest wave in the world

Mavericks, Half Moon Bay, California
-30 miles south of San Francisco, home of cold water, hard rocks, and sharp-toothed sharks; perfect 20- to 40-foot riding wave; impact zone runs right into rocks

Teahupoo, Tahiti, French Polynesia
-break is called a freak of hydodynamics; wave forms a near perfect barrel, but the water is shallow and riddled with reefs

Jaws, Maui, Hawaii
-70-foot, 30 mph wave wear Laird Hamilton and his crew invented tow-in surfing (using jet skis)

Nelscott Reef, Lincoln City, Oregon
-situated on a remote swath of coast with a savage undertow and volatile shallows, this break is nearly impossible to paddle to and harrowing to ride

Todos Santos, Baja California, Mexico
-couple of breaks here, a tiny island 12 miles off the coast of Baja, but the aptly named "Killer" is the nastiest of the bunch

Extreme Escapes

Mountain Biking
-Pass on Moab, Utah: has the roller-coaster Slickrock trail, but can get very crowded during peak season
-Go to St. George, Utah: 90-minutes northeast of Vegas; has riding as good as Moab but none of the crowds (trails like Gooseberry Mesa)

Snowboarding
-Pass on Whistler, BC
-Go to Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada: world-class snowboarding and legal gambling; crash and dine in luxury at casinos like the MontBleu, Harrah's or the Lakeside Inn, then hop the free shuttles to Heavenly, Kirkwood, and Sierra

Kayaking
-Pass on Buena Vista, Colorado
-Go to Pagosa Springs, Colorado: has some of the best sections of river in Colorado, try the Buena Vista stretch of the Arkansas River

Climbing
-Pass on Yosemite Valley, California: multi-day 3,000 foot climbs
-Go to Red River Gorge, Kentucky: an hour from Lexington; features a wealth of one-pitch (100-foot) sandstone climbs for all skill levels

Surfing
-Pass on Oahu's North Shore, Hawaii: raging meth epidemic
-Go to Sayulita, Mexico: small town 45 minutes from Puerto Vallarta; two perfect waves, a long, gentle right break ideal for beginners and a steeper left-hander for when you've grown a pair

Work Smarter

Outsource Away
-elance.com, asksunday.com, and odesk.com can put you in touch with "Bangalore butlers" who take care of busywork

Consolidate and Conquer
-simpleology.com: online management tool'

Break the Banter
-wear noise-reducing headphones to tune out distractions

Get to the point
-reply to emails within 24 hours to acknowledge receipt, but keep your messages extremely brief (20 seconds)

The Dope on Doping

THG: tetrahydrogestrinone, a powerful anabolic steroid in liquid form, guaranteed to ramp up protein synthesis for lightning muscle bulkage
-anabolic steroids in general can cause acne, testicular atrophy, and heart attack
-used by track stars like Kelli White, Alvin Harrison and Marion Jones; All-Star sluggers like Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds

EPO: protein hormone produced by the kidneys, erythopoietin hikes the number of red blood cells in the body to supercharge an endurance athlete's energy levels
-can cause thick, syrupy blood can gum up in the heart or brain, causing strokes or cardiac arrest
-used by nine riders from a 98 French Tour de France team

HGH: by stimulating the synthesis of protein, human growth hormone strengthens cartilage and bones, thus enabling athletes to recover faster and get hurt less
-can cause acromegaly, a hormonal disorder that causes enlarging of the hands, feet, jaw and brow
-used by Barry Bonds, Chinese swimmer Yuan Yuan

DHEA: dehydroepiandrosterone is a steroid prohormone that may increase muscle mass and lwoer body fat, available over the counter
-can cause baldness, acne, breast enlargement and impotence

"The Cream": ultra-high-tech ointment composed of testosterone and epitestosterone, the Cream makes your muscles rock-hard (and your hands baby-soft)
-can cause usual anabolic steroids effects
-used by Jason Giambi, Jeremy Giambi, and Barry Bonds

Five of NYC's Hottest Young Chefs

Craig Koketsu, Park Avenue Spring
-the name changes with the season; Koketsu designs four menus each year, corresponding to each season
-"One of the first things I tell my new cooks is 'You're going to be working every day.' People get into cooking for the wrong reasons. It's not a glamorous industry."
-On celebrity chefs: "I hope it's a passing fad. If you're the chef and your name is on the restaurant, you need to be in the kitchen."

Sam Mason, Tailor
-culinary wizard with a rep as NYC's mad scientist of the kitchen; interplay of sweet and salty, as in pork belly with miso butterscotch and artichoke or passion fruit poached char with lime pickle and coconut
-"Shows like Top Chef are great because they promote cooking as a whole."

Todd Mitgang, Crave Ceviche Bar
-cure of escolar, arctic char, duck and lamb with brown sugar and Negra Modelo beer is a taste to remember
-"I felt like not enough was being done with the concept of ceviche", the method of curing meat and seafood with acidic liquids.
-"The love and the passion for cooking, it's in my blood. I don't think I could every walk away from this industry. Sometimes you want to, but you can't. Seven days a week I'm there. I don't just jump on the line when a cook needs help; I am the line."

Neil Ferguson, Allen & Delancey
-comfort is paramount, with a cozy, relaxed and sophisticated ambience and serving bold downtown takes on haute classics (caramelized bone marrow with caviar, Colorado lamb chop persillade with potato puree)
-"In New York there's a great late-night restaurant scene. I want to be open until 3am, serving soak-up-the-alcohol-style food. WE have a big communal table, and I'd love for people to come and say, 'All right, we're here for three or four hours, and Neil's cooking for us.' There are places that do it, but I think we can raise the bar. In New York you can do anything you want. It's just perfect."

Michael Psilakis, Anthos
-He opened his first restaurant as an owner, but one day the bulk of his kitchen staff failed to show up. "As an owner I was at the whim of the chef, so I decided to go back to the kitchen and teach myself to cook. It's been a wild ride ever since."
-"I don't think most people understand what it's like (in the kitchen). The kitchen is all about sacrifice. I'm like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Out front I'm very cool and mellow, but when I get in the kitchen, it's not pretty."

Inc, February 2008

2008-08-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

Book: "Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization", Logan, King, Fischer-Wright
-view of high-performance cultures in which competitors cease to matter and a noble cause is the group's only compass

Social Capital: Four socially minded VC firms and banks breaking from tradition
-Underdog Ventures, Island Pond, VT: expects to sell its stake in its investments in 7-8 years instead of the traditional 5-7. If a company wants to change its social mission, it must get Underdog's approval.
-Root Capital, Cambridge, MA: nonprofit investment fund that can lend up to $750,000. Lends directly to cooperatives in the developing world, allowing them to use their orders as collateral. Similar to factoring, but charges only 9% interest.
-ShoreBank Pacific, Ilwaco, WA: community bank with $143M in assets, lends money to green businesses in the Northwest and companies that bring jobs to the region.
-TBL Capital, Sausalito, CA: stands for "triple bottom line". Has raised $50M to invest in companies that promise a significant social impact. Invested in its first company in October 2007.

Remote Control: Working From Wherever

Xdrive (xdrive.com)
-password-protected online service that allows you to store and swap files on the Internet
-owned by AOL; an easy way to back up important files (presentations, proposals, MP3s); compatible with a wide range of OS, log on through a web browser to securely upload or download files; can grant colleagues access to certain files without giving away your password
-can be time consuming to upload and download your files every time you hit the road or want to work from home; advertisements
-free for 5GB of storage

Basecamp (basecamphq.com)
-web-based collaboration tool that works like a souped-up, secure version of MySpace
-team members on a project log on to a shared space on the Internet, where they can post files for the team's review, chat in a secure environment, and chalk off project milestones
-won't handle much customization; requires an administrator to keep careful tabs on which projects certain employees are allowed to view, so the wrong people won't stumble onto a confidential project
-free: limited number of projects

MojoPac Freedom (mojopac.com)
-software that allows you to copy your desktop (with applications and settings) onto a removable hard drive such as an iPod or a USB stick; just plug the device into any PC and you're suddenly staring at your office computer
-you can leave your laptop behind; plug the iPod or USB drive into a computer at an Internet cafe for example and any work you complete stays on the portable device, not the computer; your changes are still there when you plug the device back into your computer at the office
-runs exclusively on Windows XP; you need a USB stick or iPod with enough free space (>2GB recommended)
-free

TightVNC (tightvnc.com)
-free open-source software that lets you control another computer over the Internet
-Unix-based software created to help IT departments troubleshoot co-workers' computers without leaving their desks; other employees can use it to control their office desktops from home; only costs are additional servers (if necessary) and time; no pesky subscription fees
-not a very secure system; no technical support; must keep up with latest security patches
-free

How to Jazz Up Your Site
-analytics: Google
-ideas: Compete.com, Quantcast.com, Alexa.com offer free data on hundreds of thousands of websites
-forums: YaBB, Vanilla, phpBB
-avatar: SitePal ($10-$50/month)

Esquire, April 2008

2008-07-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

Vocabulary

Memento Mori: a Latin phrase that roughly translates into "Remember you will die," which can be used to cut the boastful down to size or place one's own life into elegant perspective.

Supernatural selection: the belief that humans have divine sovereignty over the creatures of the earth, and there's no way we could be related to them.

Books

Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister.

The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead by David Shields. A clear-eyed look at the ways in which we come undone.

Things To Ask Your Barber

How's the family?
If you had my hair, what would it look like?
If you had my hair, what should I have for dinner tonight?
When's the last time you changed the Barbicide?
A riddle: if you say my name, I disappear: What am I?
Whatever happened to mousse?
You promise this'll make women like me?
Aren't sideburns supposed to be even?
Tike or Ronde?
You mind if I read this magazine?

Rule No. 548: Beware the third thing - sequel, helping, drink, wife

Frida Giannini's Rules, the creative director of Gucci.
The first thing I notice about a man are his shoes.
Then I look at his watch.
The most iconic figures - Jean-Paul Belmondo, Steve McQueen, James Dean - were all rebels. Without a strong personality, you can have the most beautiful clothes in the world and you will never look right.
Sexiness is a very subjective thing. A man can be just as sexy in a buttoned-up suit as he can be in jeans and t-shirt.
I would love American men to embrace a narrower silhouette in suits and coats. It's way more sexy for a man to wear closer-fitting clothes.

Why does this shoe (JM Weston) cost $900?
1. The shape: the eight-week process of hand-crafting a pair of JM Weston shoes begins with the last-maker. This guy - and it's almost always a guy - has trained for decades and can optimize the balance between form and fit.
2. The leather: cheaper shoes are made from scuffed-up hides that have been treated, but Weston uses only unmarked, untreated leather. The shoes are softer and more supple because of it.
3. The stitching: craftsmen stitch together the shoe's various pieces using both machine and hand sewing, resulting in a construction that lasts longer than anything mass-produced.
4. The lining: inexpensive shoes don't have linings; the best ones, like these, have soft calfskin that's gentle on your foot.
5. The heel: this beveled heel contains thick layers of leather that form a supportive base for the foot.

A Few Final Thoughts On Leather
It always looks better polished.
Leave the wearing of leather pants to our good friends in Menudo.
"You're with me, leather," even when said in jest, isn't as funny as you think it is.
The deadlier the animal, the more expensive the leather.
Shoes: shine once a week. Leather jackets: condition once a year. Everything else: as needed.
Animal-rights advocates are the angriest protesters.
"Pleather", "Naugahyde", and "faux leather": no.
Avoid web sites and publications that showcase leather. Except this one.

www.howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com
other quizzes: http://www.oneplusyou.com/q

Music Awards
Best Live Band: Kings of Leon
Best Second Act: Sharon Jones
Most Likely To Get Kicked In The Teeth By Backlash: Ghostland Observatory
Most Prescient Reunion Warm-Up: Ronnaroo's John Paul Jones, Ben Harper, and ?uestlove Superjam
Best Instrumentalists: Explosions in the sky
Best Soundtrack: Once, featuring Marketa Inglova and Glen Hansard
Rookies of the Year: Vampire Weekend
Terrifying Woman of the Year: Miranda Lambert
Best Male Voice: Mark Lanegan
Most Misunderstand Band: Against Me!
Best Female Voice: Tift Merritt
Best Hero: Slash
Best Interpreter: Cat Power
Best Third Wheel: T Bone Burnett
Best Roots-Rock Band That Deserves Better Than To Be Called Roots Rock: Marah
Best Storytellers: Drive-By Truckers
Best Moralists: The Avett Brothers
Soaring Verse Award: Band of Horses
Best Young Guy With an Ancient Voice: Ryan Bingham
Best None of the Above: Calexico
Best Opus: Terence Blanchard
Club of the Year: Slowdown
Sweater-Vested Musican of the Year: Sam Beam

Sleep Better: Easy things that will help you fall asleep anywhere and sleep through anything

The Otis Bed Haley 150 Futon

Alarm clocks: iHome iH9, Sonic boom, Clocky, Hammacher Schlemmer Peaceful Progression alarm, Hammacher Schlemmer projection alarm

Alternative to sheep-counting
i) choose a color
ii) brainstorm a whole bunch of objects that are that color
iii) brainstorm through categories: foods, animals, phrases, etc.

Random insomnia knowledge:
-it might make you fat because it lowers levels of leptin, a hormone that tells the body when it's had enough to eat, and raises levels of ghrelin, which stimulates you to eat more.
-it's bad for your heart because it raises cytokines, proteins that active immune responses. They're great when you need them, but when you don't, they can become a source of inflammation associated with heart disease.
-it's bad for your immune system because it saps white blood cells, crucial blockers of infections and cancer.
-it's bad for your memory because it elevates cortisol levels which can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that helps create new memories.

Advanced sleep hygiene: your new nightly routine
-dim the lights an hour before bedtime. This mimics sunset. Smack in the middle of your brain is the pineal gland. It releases melatonin, the hormone that readies the mind and body for sleep in response to lowered light levels.
-if you've got things on your mind, write them down fifteen minutes before bed. This sweeps them out of your mind.
-if you're still awake after fifteen minutes, get up and do something quiet, like reading a book. No Internet, no TV, no exercise. You have to let your body and mind slow down to be able to slip into sleep. If you just lie there thinking about how you're not sleeping, you'll never sleep.
-wake up at the same time every day. An hour extra on weekends is fine, but if you wake up at seven every morning during the week, then sleep until 10 on weekends, you're effectively giving yourself jet lag. Monday morning, you'll feel like you just got off the red-eye from three time zones away.
-a little chemical help once in a while is fine. Not alcohol - it actually interferes with the normal sleep cycle. But Benadryl or one of the combination OTC painkillers or sleep drugs can give you that little nudge into natural sleep.
-sex.

Four sheets
-Egyptian Cotton: considered the best because it's made from the long, soft fibers grown along the Nile. Try Sferra Celeste.
-Pima Cotton: worth considering because it's made from the same plant in Egypt, but in California and the Southwest. Try Thomas Lee.
-Flannel: you enjoyed it in college because it's cotton that's been brushed, leaving only the softest fibers. Great for sleeping naked. Try LL Bean Ultrasoft flannel.
-Silk: becuase on the right night with the right music and the right woman, sliding around on these is wonderful. Try Kumi Kookoon Classic.

One blanket: Under The Nile Cotton Blanket, the thickest, creamiest blanket.

Sleep knowledge:
-Before Thomas Edison's invention of the lightbulb, people slept an average of 10 hours per night. Today, Americans average 6.9 hours of sleep on weeknights and 7.5 hours on weekends.
-Men are twice as likely as women to sleep in the nude (31% of men and 14% of women).
-42% of dog owners share their beds with their dogs.
-65-68 degrees is considered the ideal temperature range for sleeping.
-54% of people who suffer at least one symptom of insomnia a few nights a week.
-12 million people are affected by sleep apnea, a breathing disorder characterized by brief interruptions of breathing during sleep.
-60% of Americans said they had driven while feeling drowsy in the past year. 37% actually dozed off while driving.
-Ducks sleep with one eye open.

New York Restaurants

Lever House, Lure Fishbar and Chinatown Brasserie, owner: John McDonald
-eats at Keens Steakhouse
-The best way to order at a new restaurant? "I usually ask the waiter what the most popular dish is."

Park Avenue Spring and Quality Meats, executive chef: Craig Koketsu
-eats at Casa
-"There tends to be a little more thought and deliberation over an item that's on the regular menu."

Degustation, executive chef: Wesley Genovart
-eats at Soba-ya

San Domenico, wine director: Piero Trotta
-eats at Buddha Bar
-"I always ask the sommelier or wine director what he thinks is good with the food that he serves."
-"If someone doesn't like their wine, they should ask for the person in charge of wines and point out that they don't like it. When I'm put in that position, I tell the customer, "If this is not what you're looking for, I'll try to understand what you're looking for.""

Le Bernardin, maitre d': Ben Chekroun
-eats at BLT Steak
-"A ten-minute wait is a great time to unwind at the bar and have a drink. I don't feel like that's a negative thing. Now, if ten minutes turns into an hour, then, of course, it becomes a problem."
-"I think twenty minutes is a good time to ask questions."

Anthos, executive chef and co-owner: Michael Psilakis
-eats at Insieme

Pastis, maitre d': Chris Session
-eats at Uncle Nick's
-thirty minutes is too long to wait

Allen & Delancey, executive chef: Neil Ferguson
-eats at Blue Hill

Maxim, March 2008

2008-07-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Trash Talking Politicians
Republican
-Don Young, Rep AK: Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not American, never have been American, never will be American.
-John Boehner, Rep OH: I listen to my Democratic friends, and I wonder if they are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.
-Rudy Giuliani, former NYC mayor: Our military is too small right now to deal with the Islamic terrorism threats, but it really is too small to deter would-be aggressors to even think of challenging us. And that's due to Bill Clinton.
Democrat
-Hillary Clinton, Sen NY: When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation... I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.
-Maxine Waters, Rep CA: We're at a time when very smart people have been allowing this dumb-ass president of the United States to do as he pleases... I'm not backing off. I said it, and I mean it!
-Tom Harkin, Sen IA: When I hear criticism of John Kerry's heroics coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil.

A different talent agency: Ugly NY

The Danger of Traveling

Southeast Asia: Arrest
-Singapore and Sri Lanka: narcotics crimes are punishable by death
-Vietnam: foreigners aren't allowed to bring nationals of the opposite sex to their hotel rooms
-tip: everything is negotiable, even the law; officials may expect bribes and other "gifts"; beyond cash, it helps to have chocolate or cigarettes

Latin America: Kidnapping
-particularly popular in Colombia, but also in Mexico and Brazil
-tip: "express kidnappings" are most popular, where victims are snatched off the street, taken to an ATM, forced to withdraw the maximum, held until ATM resets, and forced to make a second withdrawal; recommended to travel to packs and traveling insured, but if cornered, don't be a hero; only time people get hurt is when they resist; if you comply, you'll probably be released with just a few scratches

Eastern Europe: Fraud
-all over the former Soviet Bloc, particularly Russia
-tip: leave the plastic at the hotel and carry cash in small denominations; don't trust a uniform (people will often pose as police in complex "good samaritan" schemes); don't pick up a dropped money clip; you'll be "arrested" and have everything confiscated

Africa: Disease
-monkeypox in Central and West Africa
-guinea worm in Sudan, Ghana, and Nigeria
-chikungunya fever throughout
-tip: week before leaving, go to a travel clinic or your doctor and begin a series of antimalarial medication; keep Cipro and Imodium on hand, as well as a stash of granola bars to eat instead of fruit (which spreads cholera)

The Middle East: Evildoers
-300 Americans have died abroad in terrorist incidents
-Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Israel are hotbeds of violence
-tip: register with the local US consulate, they'll keep you updated on latest security intelligence; avoid public transportation; after initial attack, run; secondary attacks are common

Quaff on the Cheap: top-notch wines for cheap

Marques de Caceres Crianza Rioja 2004: $12
-red wine good for any Spanish-influenced dish, especially hearty tapas like enchiladas, empanadas, and chorizo

Bogle Vineyards Old Vine Zinfandel 2005: $11
-good for subtly saccharine foods like BBQ ribs and wings

Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet 2005: $9
-good for pepper steaks, smoked meats, aged meats, and chili

Casa Lapostolle Rapel Valley Merlot 2005: $13
-good with filet mignon and similar fancy beef cuts; also good for portobello burgers and soft cheeses

Alamos Mendoza Malbec 2006: $11
-good with marinated meats, steak fajitas, chimichangas, and any dish with a little south-of-the-border sass to it

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Newsweek

2008-07-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

June 23, 2008

A New King of The Idiots

Devin Gordon

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:01 PM ET Jun 14, 2008

"The Foot Fist Way," a new comedy made for pennies by a bunch of pals from the North Carolina School of the Arts, is not a particularly good movie. Many of the actors can't act. Whole scenes fall flat. And you'll find more sophisticated camerawork on YouTube. But you should see the movie anyway, because what it does have is Danny McBride, the most hilarious man you've never heard of, heir to Will Ferrell's throne as king of the idiots. Last year McBride was the funniest thing in two deeply unfunny star vehicles for Andy Samberg ("Hot Rod") and Ben Stiller ("The Heartbreak Kid"). "The Foot Fist Way" is something of a first: a star vehicle for a guy who's not even close to a star.

McBride plays Fred Simmons, a strip-mall tae kwon do instructor who bullies his 6-year-old students ("Your weakness disgusts me") out of the delusion that he's preparing them for a world in which a man is defined by how many planks of wood he can break with his palm. To Simmons, life is just one long version of the tournament scene in "The Karate Kid," only in his version, the jackhole sensei from the Cobra Kai dojo is the hero, not Daniel-san. McBride is blessed with a face that oozes dumb. His eyes are always at half-mast, and that black scrapple of fuzz on his lip is not, to put it mildly, a thinking man's mustache. But that's why his whipsaw comic timing always catches you flat-footed. When it comes to stupidity, McBride is a borderline genius.

My Five Most Important Books, Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side)
1. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. "Among the funniest books every written."
2. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. "Gave me a new sense of the pleasure to be had from books."
3. The Education of Henry Adams. "The book I kept nearest at hand when I wrote my own first book."
4. Writing Home, by Alan Bennett. "Reminds me of how much interest can be got by paying attention to the most picayune details of life."
5. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe. "Put to rest any fears about the limits of the nonfiction narrative."

Book to which you always return: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, by George Orwell. "Reminds me of the force of a writer working to strip his prose of pretension and nonsense."

Book you hope parents give to their children: His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. "Even my 8-year-old could sense she was in the grips of a master storyteller."

June 30, 2008

My Five Most Important Movies, Andrew Stanton (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E)
1. Lawrence of Arabia. "David Lean is the master of filmmaking. His staging and editing is awe-inspiring."
2. The Lion in Winter. "Not the most cinematic film, but you'll never encounter better dialogue."
3. Gallipoli. "Peter Weir's WW1 story of friendship and purpose is deeply engaging. A seminal movie for me."
4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "Sheer wonder has never been captured better, before or since."
5. Cool Hand Luke. "What a character. What an allegory. A man's movie, introduced by my father, and I've introduced it to my son."

America's Least 'Wanted'

The trailers for the action movie "Wanted" promise some hot romantic sparks between stars Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. "Is this when we start to bond?" asks McAvoy. "Would you like to?" Jolie purrs. Then there's a shot of the two smooching. The thing is, that first rooftop scene isn't even in the movie and the kiss (which is) has nothing to do with romance. There is no love story. At all.

So much for truth in advertising. The rest of the trailer, however, gives you a fair taste of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's hyperbolically violent movie. The filmmaker, whose Russian sci-fi fantasies "Day Watch" and "Night Watch" broke box-office records in his homeland, whips this preposterous tale of an ancient secret society of assassins into an expressionistic frenzy, relishing every slo-mo bullet through the skull. McAvoy is an anxious, cuckolded office drone who's recruited by the Fraternity and transformed into the superhuman super assassin he was born to be: it turns out his murdered father was this nutty organization's greatest killer. Its sagacious leader (Morgan Freeman, natch) explains that they are just restoring order to a chaotic world. "Trust your instincts," he advises, which should give you an inkling of the script's originality.

Jolie, radiating slinky, lethal glamour, is one of the more accomplished death-dispensers, though when she punches out McAvoy (during his training) you fear her needle-thin arms will crack on the spot. Somebody needs to give this beautiful assassin a Fatburger.

"Wanted" has one good plot twist in store (though it makes little sense), and its sense of humor about its own silliness keeps the fantasy afloat for a while. But as the body count rises, so does the portentous tone, and the relentlessness of Bekmambetov's overamped style becomes oppressive. The astonishingly versatile McAvoy does more than keep a straight face; he works his butt off to anchor the tale in real emotions, and almost pulls it off. Here's a movie that offers mass murder as a cure for the 9-to-5 blues. Is that Russian, or what? Personally, I'd have preferred the love story.

Quick Read

How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets, Felix Dennis
Executricks: Or How to Retire While You're Still Working, Stanley Bing
Good Guys & Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes With the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between), Joe Nocera

PC Magazine

2008-07-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

April 10, 2007

Raise Your Profile

Aloha Whistler Accommodations
Size: 15 full-time employees
Challenge: Increase traffic to Alohawhistler.com
Solution: Redesigned the site using search engine optimization techniques for better visibility through search results
Results: From February 2006 to January 2007, 35 percent traffic increase; 50 percent reduction in pay-per-click advertising.

For more than 25 years, Aloha Whistler Accommodations has managed condos and rental properties in and around Whistler, in British Columbia, Canada. The company focuses on ski-in/ski-out and larger rental properties, providing personal attention for both the home owner and the vacationer.

From the moment the company went online in 1994, increasing visibility was the primary goal. "Travelers consult the Internet, so building our Internet presence quickly became a priority," says Gordon Huxtable, vice president in charge of guest and owner relations. At first, a pay-per-click campaign brought more visitors to the site. Then Huxtable began to think about boosting traffic further by devoting some resources to SEO, or search engine optimization—tweaking site code to increase search hits.

In 2005, Huxtable turned to the Custom Fit Communications Group Inc. to help redesign the site from the ground up to be more search engine–friendly. Results have been very good. Not only is overall page traffic up by 35 percent, but Aloha Whistler's front page abandonment rate has plummeted from 78 to 32 percent, and traffic resulting from search engine results has jumped from 5 to 25 percent of overall traffic. In fact, the traffic improvements from search engine optimization led to Aloha Whistler's reducing pay-per-click spending by approximately half.

Continue

August 21, 2007

E-Mail Marketing 101

Whether your business delivers products or services to consumers or to other businesses, if you haven't started e-marketing, you are missing a real opportunity.

You can use any of a variety of tools to create awareness of your company and your products/services, and I've talked about options such as blogs and podcasts in previous articles. Since the goal of any marketing activity is cultivating and communicating with targeted potential customers, let's begin with the critical questions of how to find those customers, how to communicate with them, and how to build a relationship that can generate new business.

We've all experienced the dreaded e-mail spam—I'm up to about 30 minutes a day deleting messages I never asked for and don't want. It's simply a variation of direct marketing, which began with direct mail and telemarketing, and we are all getting these e-mails because, like it or not, they work. The cost of generating an e-mail campaign is so small that it takes very few actual sales to justify it.

That isn't the kind of e-mail marketing I recommend, because it's certainly no way to build your business's reputation. But a well-thought-out e-mail campaign can be hugely successful. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

Mailing Lists. I don't endorse list-buying. From an illegitimate source, you're getting an untargeted list that has been sold to many, many others already. And in my experience, a legitimate, valuable list isn't for sale. Legitimate marketing firms develop demographic data over time. They'll help you determine whom you want to target and identify likely customers in their files, then they'll take the marketing materials you supply—newsletters and the like—and mail them out on your behalf.

Spam. Frequency of communication is one important measure of the difference between spam and legitimate e-mail communications. Since a marketing firm has many clients, you cannot know how often the same addresses are being used. Ask about mailing frequency—how many pieces of mail are going to each recipient in a given period—and make sure the list is targeted to your purposes.

Permission. In the online world, permission is a critical element: You want potential customers to opt to receive communications from you. To gain and keep their favor, you need to do more than simply tell customers about your offers. You need to provide value on an ongoing basis. For many companies, that means sharing news and information about their industry or a topic related to their industry, or sharing their perspective in areas that help inform and educate potential customers, in the form of an online newsletter. Letting customers sign up for a single issue of a newsletter, with clear "opt out" procedures and language, creates a "safe" option for customers who might be willing to receive communication but have been burned by others in the past.

Collaboration. Once you make a commitment to regular communication with your potential customers, you'll need to stick with it. Are you prepared to invest that much time? To see what's involved in developing regular communications, consider becoming a regular contributor to an existing communications product that targets a similar customer base. Are you in real estate? Agree to write a monthly column on the housing market for your local newspaper. Or offer a quarterly tips column to an online community newspaper on topics relating to your trade. If you're comfortable with that level of communication, take it to the next level. Create your own topical newsletter and ask that the paper include a way for readers to sign up with you for more frequent communications.

In the next issue, I'll provide some additional tips to help you use e-mail marketing effectively.

Russell Morgan is the president and founder of the Information Technology Solution Providers Alliance (ITSPA), a national nonprofit organization of technology experts headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

June, 2008

A New Take on Text Search

Like the annoying student who spouts off a litany of facts when the teacher asks for a one-word answer, many search engines dredge up far more than users want. Now, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center say the days of keyword-based search results might be over—at least for academics.

Their eTBLAST search tool scans documents for text similarity, rather than matching keywords, allowing users to input a full paragraph—say, an abstract or invention description—as a query. Based on word order, frequency, and proximity, eTBLAST turns out a list of documents and scores them by similarity. UT's Harold "Skip" Garner, who helped develop the code, says that the team is poised to release an updated version of eTBLAST, which would return results in a matter of seconds, down from several minutes.

Garner adds that eTBLAST can also catch cheaters. By searching an excerpt from a scholarly paper or journal, the engine can look for an exact match. At least four plagiarism investigations have started as a result of suspiciously similar pages found through eTBLAST. The technology's limited scope, however, means that most universities will still use more road-tested tools, such as Turnitin or SafeAssignment, which compares a manuscript with data from a broader Internet archive.

For now, the engine searches only biomedical, physics, and U.S. patent databases, but Garner predicts further expansion into law, business, and other areas. And he's always looking for more databases. "Any free computer-science database the public knows of, just let us know, and we'd be happy to incorporate it," he says.

To try out eTBLAST for a text search, visit invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml.

Gmail assistant - this free Java-based notifier can check multiple Gmail accounts and alert you when you have new messages. IT works with multiple OSs and is portable to other systems.

UNData - this complex UN site is a clearinghouse for the data and stats it collects worldwide, including populations, demographics, trade, commodities, and more.

InsideTrip - a very simple, all-business flight search site. The service asks you some questions about your trip and immediately returns fares based on factors like airline comfort, flight time, and accessibility.

501 Tips for Better Computing

July 2008

avast! antivirus 4.8 Home Edition: Tough, Free Virus Killer
Pros: free! certified by independent labs for virus detection (but not cleanup). Blocks spyware installs very well. Decent at removing existing malware. Simple, skinnable user interface.
Cons: no scheduled scan. Leaves many Registry traces and nonexecutable files when cleaning up malware.

Online Backup Services
-HP Upline: 1GB free
-IDrive: 2GB free

Wi-Fi Home Improvements

There's one almighty reason to have a Wi-Fi network: freedom to roam where you want, laptop or handheld in hand. Everything else—not having to punch holes in your walls for Ethernet cables or hide the cables, for example—is icing. Wi-Fi is not perfect out of the box, however. We'll reveal how to maximize the network range from your access point, troubleshoot problems, and prevent strangers from usurping your bandwidth—or share it with all comers while keeping your data and computers safe.

Improve Signal Strength and Range
Ground zero for any home network is the router, which manages your Internet traffic. These days, most routers have an integrated access point (AP) for the wireless side. The first step to a solid wireless connection is placing that router where the signal can best reach your wireless devices. That means up high in a central area of the home; there's a reason some APs have brackets for wall mounting. Just make sure the antennas are pointed the way the manual indicates; don't assume that horizontal when wall-mounted is the same as vertical when the unit is sitting on a desk. A router in the basement will work—just don't stick it under a desk or too close to a filing cabinet.

Wi-Fi signal strength depends on several factors. Some (but not all) routers can be set to increase the transmit power of the signal. Upgrading a router with free, third-party firmware like DD-WRT (www.dd-wrt.com) can add this feature, but such firmware doesn't work on all routers, and installing it voids any warranty.

What's more, though you may think you have little to lose with an older router now out of warranty, installing firmware incorrectly could "brick" the router, converting it into an inert piece of plastic. DD-WRT's wiki has some tips for recovery. One note: If you use DD-WRT, don't set the transmit power (called Xmit Power in the Web-based interface) much above 70mW. Set it too high and the router can double as a hot plate; it won't survive that kind of heat for long.

Unsurprisingly, there are those who aren't brave (or foolhardy) enough to muck with firmware. In their case, getting a stronger signal requires spending some money. Purchasing a router from the latest generation of 802.11n Wi-Fi products to get better range and speed is always an option, but even that's not foolproof. Your other options include:

Buying new antennas. Check first for a removable antenna or a jack for a new antenna on the current router. It's smart to buy antennas from your router's manufacturer, unless you're very sure of the connector type. Antennas can be omnidirectional, but directional units, which serve just a certain section of your property, can provide a stronger signal.

Adding a second AP. Put it in a different area of the house, then connect it to the main router via Ethernet. When moving from the main router/AP to the second AP, a PC will take some time to reassociate to the network. This may take only seconds, but to avoid noticeable interruption, don't do it in the middle of a download or a Skype call. If you secure your wireless network with WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption, the re-association may take a little longer. Set each AP for different channels, especially if their signals overlap.

Repeating the signal. Repeaters have gone out of fashion in the past few years as new technology such as 802.11n's MIMO (multiple input multiple output) has increased signal range and throughput. You can still find them, though. For example, the $99 Apple Airport Express (go.pcmag.com/airport_express) is a Wi-Fi router in and of itself, but it can also serve as a range extender when connected back to the main router, using a technology called wireless distribution system. DD-WRT can also convert an old router into a repeater.

Continue

Resources

2008-07-13T21:01:00.001-07:00

Core77, Inhabitat, Design*Sponge (design, furniture and
objects)
Gizmodo, Engadget, Ubergizmo (cutting-edge gadgets and
electronics)
Treehugger (eco-chic products)
Curbed (real estate)
Cool Hunting, The Coolhunter, Josh Spear, NOTCOT (cool,
beautiful, have-to-have 'stuff')
Gridskipper, superfuture, Jaunted, Wallpaper, TripAdvisor, Monocle (hotels, restaurants,
architecture)
Flavorpill (coolest city events)
FlyerTalk, SeatGuru, Skytrax (best airlines and seats)
Luxist, Born Rich (most
desirable luxury goods and services)
Autoblog, Jalopnik, Hybrid Cars Blog (automotive scoops)
JC Report, The Sartorialist (fashion and style)
Kotaku, Joystiq (video
games)
Styledash (beauty)
Slashfood, Chocolate & Zucchini (food and
beverage)
EUKicks (sneakers)
Vinography (wine)
FirstShowing, /Film (movies)
Digital Photography Review
(photography)

Flight Sites

2008-07-13T20:44:00.001-07:00

FlightStats.com and FlightAware.com to find out about the flight's historical performance in the most recent period

Wend Magazine, Volume 3 Issue 1

2008-07-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Voluntourism sites
-www.volunteerabroad.com
-www.mmrfbz.org (Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize)
-www.panyaproject.org (Panya Project, Thailand)
-www.yelapa.org (Casa de la Imaginacion, Mexico)
-www.rainsongsanctuary.com (Rainsong Wildlife Sanctuary, Costa Rica)
-www.longwayhomeinc.org (Long Way Home, Guatemala)
-www.cofradiaschool.com (Confradia School, Honduras)
-africanvolunteers@gmail.com (African Volunteers, Ghana)
-www.ambassadorsforchildren.org (Ambassadors For Children)
-www.transitionsabroad.com (Transitions Abroad)
-www.voluntourism.org (VolunTourism)

Newsweek, June 2, 2008

2008-07-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

FlyLite
-clothing butler for frequent business travelers. New customers pay an initial $500 fee and pack their bags. FlyLite clean, press and store the clothes, polish the shoes and scan everything into a virtual iCloset. Each trip, travelers can virtually pack their suitcases by dragging and dropping clothing icons, after which Flylite delivers the bags to any US destination. After each stay, Flylite picks up the bags, cleans the clothes and stores everything for the next trip.

Cutting Water Consumption

Quench
-from Australia's HydroCo, first cycle is normal shower for sudsing, shampooing and rinsing that lasts two minutes, then it starts recycling the hot, suds-free water, saving about 30 gallons for a seven-minute shower, costs $4000.

Eco-Drop Shower
-from Italy's Tommaso Colia, floor mats with concentric circles that look like ripples in a rain puddle, the circles pulsate to become uncomfortable for a person showering too long

See-Through Bathtub
-from Belgian design student, the bathtub is marked like a measuring cup, the levels tell you how much drinking water you're wasting

Books
-How to be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, Megan Hustad
-Escape From Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams, Pamela Skillings
-Millionaire by Thirty: The Quickest Path to Early Financial Independence, Douglas R. Andrew, Emron D. Andrew, and Aaron R. Andrew

Latin Links
-La Loma Club de Golf in San Luis Potosi: Jack Nicklaus Signature Course (www.lalomagolf.com.mx)
-El Camaleon near Cancun: Greg Norman-designed (mayakobagolf.com)
-La Paz Golf Club in Bolivia (lapazgolfclub.com)

Cookies That Cost a Fortune
-Parisian macarons, $72 for 48, lepicerie.com
-personalized fortunes on the inside of dark- or white-chocolate-coated Giant Wedding Fortune Cookies, $100, fortunatebiscuits.com
-Butterfles in Nature cookies, big, hand-iced sugar biscuits in bold hues at Eleni's in New York, $75, elenis.com

Rate Escapes
Inflation is on the rise, but there are ways to protect your portfolio and purchasing power

Look at traditional inflation fighters
-food, timber and non-precious metals might be safer than gold and real estate. Look to buy within inexpensive exchange-traded funds like iShares GSCI Commodity-Indexed Trust ETF (GSG) or iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return ETN (DJP), and Black-Rock Global Resources Fund (SSGRX).

Don't go overboard
-keep 5% of your investment portfolio reserved for anti-inflation investments like T. Rowe Price New Era Fund. Don't plow all funds into commodity investments.

Buy stocks
-they usually do well in periods of moderate inflation (5% or so). Go for consumer-goods companies that have room to raise prices and solid blue chips with strong dividends.

Consider bonds
-Treasury inflation-protected securities and I bonds guarantee that yields will rise to match growth in the consumer price index, but yields are very low now (under 2%). Look for better yields in inflation-protected bonds issued by corporations (incapital.com) and other countries via a new exchange-traded fund, SPDR DB International Government Inflation-Protected Bond ETF (WIP), or Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities (VIPSX) and Harbor Real Return Fund (HARRX)

The Dumbest Generation? Don't Be Dumb
Really, don't we all know by now that finding examples of teens' and twentysomethings' ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel? - Link

Photography Books
-The Family of Man, exhibition put together for the Museum of Modern Art by its photography curator, Edward Steichen
-The Americans, Robert Frank

Job-Hunting Teens
-snagajob.com, an hourly job-listing web site
-coolworks.com, for teens willing to travel for more interesting jobs

Bag It, With Style
-flipandtumble.com, folds like a pair of socks into a 3-inch ball in less than 5 seconds, the secret is a patent-pending sewn-in spandex pouch, $12
-chicobag.com, no-nonsense 16x14-inch nylon bag folds into 3x4-inch integrated pouch and can onto anything with its carabinerlike clip, also machine washable, $5
-envirosax.com, 44 different designs and certified up to 40 pounds, $8.50

Website Magazine, May, 2008

2008-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Semantic Web

Zoominfo (zoominfo.com)
-business-focused search engine, allowing drill-down on companies, people and jobs through Q&A based searching.

Powerset (powerset.com)
-extracts meaning by reading documents like website pages, sentence by sentence.

Semanticator (semanticator.com)
-enables marketers to translate their target markets or market segments into semantic personas which can be detected moments before arrival. Each persona/profile represents a combination of attributes like geographic location, operating system, day of the week, search keywords, targeted websites visited, etc.

Twine (twine.com)
-help us discover our world in ways we'll find interesting. As we organize and share interestes, we'll discover new information within those interests and people who are equally as passionate.

Audacity 101: Free Podcast Production For Your Website

Audacity Software
-free software, reproduces recordings, making them ready for posting online.
-http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Lame MP3 Encoder
-http://lame.buanzo.com/ar

Audacity applications for a website
-tell your organization's story, explain how to use products and services, describe how to find your place of business and detail how to take advantage of special offers of the week or month.

eWeek, May 19, 2008

2008-07-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

Promising Web 2.0 Apps

Microsoft Live Mesh
-promises to enable customers to access their info in multiple places and on multiple devices without having to worry about synchronization.

Zude SocialMix
-super mashup of social networking sites. Access Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter from a single canvas.

Octopz
-online collaboration software for architectural engineers and industrial designers, allowing them to communicate via text, VOIP and webcam while working on 3-d models and schematics on their PCs from any location.

OpenACircle
-collaboration platform for small businesses, provides a private meeting room for up to 12 members

IdeaSpigit
-provides lightweight business intelligence for social networks, calculates the validity of users and content based on contributions, user reputation, community feedback and buzz to help enterprises improve their network

Vyew
-collaboration and conferencing platform that allows users to leverage file annotation, screen capture, whiteboard and plug-in capabilities to create content. Also has live conferencing sessions via text chat, webcam and VOIP

360 Magazine

2008-07-04T18:53:00.000-07:00

Spring, 2008

L.20 - chef Laurent Gras focuses on preserving seafood's inherent qualities. 2300 N Lincoln Park West, Chicago.

Italy's Hidden Treasures

-Bologna: Ristorante Diana on Via Indipendenza (tortellini), Basilica of San Domenico (Nicola Pisano's 13th-century tomb for Saint Dominic), church of Santa Maria della Vita (terra-cotta Lamentation, Il Compianto, by Niccolo da Bari/dell'Arca), Basilica of San Petronio (the main door by Jacopo della Quercia), Da Cesari on Via de'Carbonesi (gramignone verde, pasta with sausage)

-Ferrara: city walls (by architect Biagio Rossetti), Jewish quarter around synagogue on Via Mazzini, 12th-century Romanesque cathedral, Castello Estense, Palazzo dei Diamanti (an elegant house with 12,000 rhombus-shaped marble bosses)

-Rimini: single surviving triumphal arch of Caesar Augustus, bizarre church Tempio Malatestiano

-Ravenna: Sant'Apollinare in Classe, Basilica of San Vitale, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

Eastern Europe's Most Exclusive Art Fair
The Moscow World Fie Art Fair, organized by Sixtine Crutchfield, a glamorous art and fine jewelry show.

Up-and-coming names in women's fashion

-Phillip Lim, for streamlined elegance, laid-back refinement, and attention to detail

-Thakoon, for billowy, ethereal dresses and precisely silhouetted workwear separates

-Chris Benz, for vintage-inspired clothing retooled in luxury fabric

-Thom Browne, for menswear-inspired jackets, pants, and button-downs

-Bensoni, for tailored yet feminine pieces that utilize unexpected mixes of fabrics

-Grace Sun, for comtemporary clothes made of organic and natural fabrics

-Dagmar, for Art Deco-inspired styles with a strong focus on detailing

-Delphyne, for delicately feminine designs

Summer, 2008

Grythyttan, Sweden

-Grythyttan Inn: 2 Prastgatan, 46-591/63300, grythyttan.com, doubles from $170 (including breakfast), dinner for two is $177, 368-years-old, the most charming hotel in the area

-Loka Brunn: 46-591/63100, lokabrunn.com, doubles from $139 (including breakfast), accomodations spread over 15 buildings that differ in style, 84-acre estate with spa and mineral springs, dating from 1720

-Grythyttan Inn: Swedish standards like roasted deer tenderloin with porcini-filled potato roll and black-truffle gravy, locally-sourced menu

-Nordic House of Culinary Art has a library, cookbook museum and the restaurant Kantinen Hyttblecket (2 Soralgsvagen, 46-591/34060), lunch for two $22

-Formens Hus design museum: 7 Sikforsvagen in Hallefors, 46-591/64360, displays iconic furniture

-Grythyttan Vin winery: Grythyttan Livsmedelsby, 46-591/19111, grythyttanvin.se, tours $9 per person

Tetsuya's Restaurant, 529 Kent St., Sydney NSW 2000, Australia, 011-612/9267-2900, tetsuyas.com

Fashionable shops around North Third Street, Philadelphia

-Clothing
---Deep Sleep: the latest in street styles, limited-edition merchandise on deepsleep.net, 54 N. Third St., 215/351-9124
---Sugarcube: vintage clothing, 124 N. Third St., 215/238-0825
---Third Street Habit: chic boutique with a good roster of labels and laid-back vibe, get added to the SugarHabit mailing list for sales from Sugarcube and Third Street Habit (up to 90% off!), 153 N Third St., 215/925-5455
--- Vagabond: women's boutique with cutting-edge labels, local lines, and designer vintage, get wholesale hand-knit sweaters from co-owner Mary Clark (Stellapop), that sell at Barneys for more than $200, 37 N Third St., 267/671-0737.

-Accessories
---J. Karma: originally a jewelry shop, expanded with shoes and bags by of-the-moment designers, 62 N. Third St., 215/627-9625.

-Interiors
---Bruges Home: everything from coffee-table books to club chairs, 323 Race St., 215/922-6041.
---Minima: who's who of modern designers, staff will do a consultation, so bring pictures of your room, 118 N. Third St., 215/922-2002.
---Reform Vintage Modern: secret source for other Mid-century furniture dealers, they have a warehouse across town with bigger pieces that owner Arthur Meckler will sell at a discount, 112 N. Third St., 215/922-6908.

My Own Private London

-Hotel: The Langham, london.langhamhotels.co.uk (doubles from $460)

-Food (by restaurant critic Sudi Pigott)
---La Fromagerie (lafromagerie.co.uk)
---Marylebone Farmers' Market: more civilized and better people watching than the bigger and better-known Borough Market (lfm.org.uk/mary.asp)
---Divertimenti (divertimenti.co.uk)
---Rococo Chocolates: hand-made, hand-packaged chocolates (rococochocolates.com)
---Villandry: villandry.com
---Canteen: sleek, chic restaurant with excellent, inexpensive modern British food (canteen.co.uk)
---William Curley: exquisitely crafted, Japanese-influenced chocolates and pastries (williamcurley.co.uk)
---Emma Bridgewater: emmabridgewater.co.uk
---Texture Restaurant: texture-restaurant.co.uk

-Things (stylist Rachel Meddowes)
---Liberty: one-stop showcase for what's happening in the world of interiors in London at the moment (liberty.co.uk)
---9 Albermarle St.: Paul Smith's funky curiosity shop (paulsmith.co.uk)
---Dover Street Market: looks more like a contemporary art museum than a clothing and design store (doverstreetmarket.com)
---Appley Hoare Antiques: appleyhoare.com
---Gallery 25: gallery25.co.uk
---Established & Sons Limited: establishedandsons.com
---Grays: graysantiques.com
---Soane: soane.co.uk

-Nights (Nick Barrington-Wells, public relations manager at the Langham Hotel)
---Artesian: soothing bar in sleek silver and soft lavender
---The Landau: restaurant
---The Kingly Club in Soho: smaller than expected, looks like an underwater living room of the future (kinglyclub.com)
---Chloe: underground in the Firehouse restaurant and bar (firehousesw7.com)

Moscow

Hotels
-Ararat Park Hyatt: moscow.park.hyatt.com, doubles from $1,050
-Golden Apple: goldenapple.ru, doubles from $429
-Hotel Baltschug Kempinski: kempinski-moscow.com, doubles from $820
-Le Royal Meridien National, national.ru, doubles from $585
-Pokrovka Suite Hotel, doubles from $600
-Ritz-Carlton Moscow: ritzcarlton.com, doubles from $1,100

Restaurants
-Cafe Pushkin, 26A Tverskoi Bul, 7-495/229-5590, dinner for two $125
-Dymov No. 1, 6 Ul. Malaya Dmitrovka, 7-495/699-0770, dymov1.ru, dinner for two $45
-The Most, 6/3 Kuznetsky Most, 7-495/660-0706, themost.ru, dinner for two $150
-Nedalny Vostok, 15/2 Tverskoi Bul, 7-495/694-0154, dinner for two $135
-Prichal, Km. 2, Ilyinskoe Shosse, 7-495/504-1269, eng.novikovgroup.ru/restaurants/prichal, dinner for two $100
-Simple Things, 32 Ul. Konyushkovskaya, 7-495/255-6362, dinner for two $70

Sights
-Art 4, art4.ru
-New Tretyakov Gallery, 10 Krymsky Val, 7-495/238-1254
-Pobeda Gallery, pobedagallery.com
-Sandunovskiye Baths, sanduny.ru, $40 for three hours

Shop
-Cara & Co, caraandco.com
-Denis Simachev, denissimachev.com
-Respublika, respublica.ru
-TsUM, tsum.ru

Maxim - February, 2008

2008-06-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

The 10 Best Potato Chips You've Never Heard Of, Penn Jillete, magician and food junkie
10. Tim's
-Out of Seattle, they are loud, hard chips. Favorite flavor: Hawaiian Kettle Style Sweet Maui Onion
9. Utz
-Salt & Vinegar is amazing, but very strong
8. Golden Flake
-really nice, no-kidding Hot Think & Crispy chip that are "on fire"
7. Tri-Sum
-from Massachusetts, crunchier than others and tasty
6. Backer's
-Red Hot Potato Chips are from Missouri and they are hot!
5. Martin's
-from central Pennsylvania, Red Hots are hot, Jalapenos are complex, and ridges on the chips are strong enough for dipping
4. Mister Bee
-slightly soggy, old-fashioned chip from West Virginia
3. Deep RiverSnacks
-from Connecticut, Rosemary & Olive Oil is delicious
2. Route 11
-Mama Zuma's Revenge is made from some of the hottest peppers on the planet
1. Better Made
-from Detroit, not too crunchy, a little bit mushy, no ridges or added flavor, just salt and cotton-fat goodness

Sexy Coffee Table Books by Uwe Ommer
"Do It Yourself", "Black Ladies" and "Asian Ladies"

Sexiest Fire Extinguisher
homehero.net, $25

Sexist Pocket Gizmo
DJ System with 120GB of music and two channels (like turntables); pacemaker.net, $725

Sexiest Calendar
totallynerdcore.com, $25

Get Six-Pack Abs
Link