In Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, Michael Pollan asks, What is wrong with this picture? Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great...

NYTimes Bits Blog: Twitter, the popular microblogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack. The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack. [...] Other sites reported that they were targets of denial-of-service attacks as well. The social-networking site Facebook said access to its site was impaired for some users for a short...

Chris Albrecht, cross-posting on Business Week, wonders Will Viral Video Kill the Music Video? Historically, music videos were promotional vehicles that ran on outlets such as MTV. Big budgets were spent on lavish productions meant to captivate watchers, prodding them into buying the single or album the song was on. But while music videos have proven enormously popular on YouTube, earlier this year the video-sharing giant got embroiled in skirmishes with the record labels and rights holders over...

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks. Wired’s Danger Room: “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information...

Obama Foodorama’s Eddie Gehman Kohan is downright giddy over the first lady’s impact on food: The White House Kitchen Garden was the start of an unprecedented paradigm shift in our national conversation on children’s nutrition and health, on food and agriculture, on the role of cooking and nutrition education; and it’s a signpost for the Obama administration’s approach to these issues. Never before have we had a First Lady with a food policy agenda, and never before...

TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid: My, how the tables have turned. Earlier this week, we learned that Apple had suddenly begun to pull third party iPhone applications for Google Voice, citing the unconvincing rationale that they “duplicated” some of the iPhone’s functionality. We then broke the news that Apple had also rejected Google’s own official Google Voice application submitted six weeks prior, sparking a din of complaints from developers and users alike over the arbitrary...

Bob Drogin and John M. Glionna of the LATimes: Corazon C. Aquino, the unassuming housewife who toppled a dictator and restored democracy to the Philippines as its 11th president, has died. She was 76. The elegant democracy icon, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2008, was admitted to a hospital intensive care unit in late June after she stopped eating. Aquino served six turbulent years as president of the Philippines after helping lead hundreds of thousands in a “people power” revolution...

Madonna writes of her spiritual awakening to the teachings of Kabbalah in today’s edition of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s leading tabloid daily: “I started seeing that being rich and famous isn’t the end of the road, but the beginning of it,” she writes. In the highest tradition of eyewitness reporting, she reveals: “Countless times I’ve travelled the world, performed in soccer stadiums, acted in films, dined with world leaders, I’ve achieved what’s...

I finished the Open Yale Course on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 today. From the last of the 27 lectures, Legacies of the Civil War: Everything in history has a legacy. We use the term all the time, the legacies of this; the legacies of that; the legacies of that event; what are the legacies of World War Two? What are the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement? But what is a legacy? … Let me attempt a definition… It can be simply another word for historical memory, of...

Legal briefs… Overlawyered’s Walter Olson: Former tenant Amanda Bonnen had just 22 followers on Twitter when she commented in a strongly negative way about Horizon Realty of Chicago. And here’s what a spokesman for Horizon is quoted as saying about its lawsuit: We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. ArsTechnica has more on that. And this: A high school cheerleader claims a coach forced her to give up her Facebook account login information, only to see her...

As expected, Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an internet search deal: Microsoft and Yahoo, whose talks about a merger failed last year, on Wednesday announced a 10-year collaboration in Web search and advertising. Under the agreement, which both companies hope will allow them to compete better with Google, Microsoft will power Yahoo’s Web search while Yahoo will become the exclusive sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Microsoft’s Bing service, which it recently...

No one is more media savvy than Bill Kristol (even if he did land a big belly-flop at the NYTimes). Last night he was Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show: Bill Kristol bets that Sarah Palin will come on The Daily Show and admits the government can provide first-class health care. The televised interview was cut. Here, then, the unedited version: Think Progress watches and finds Kristol saying that the government can run a first-class health care system, “sure it can.” And that...

Ed Felton on the Associated Press announcement last week that it would be developing some kind of online news registry to control use of news content: It was hard to make sense of this, so I went looking for more information. AP posted a diagram of the system, which only adds to the confusion — your satisfaction with the diagram will be inversely proportional to your knowledge of the technology. As far as I can tell, the underlying technology is based on hNews, a microformat for news, shown...

One might suspect bias. Michael Scalisi: Given the rumor mill chatter, it sounds like the mythical Apple tablet is all but a done deal. People seem to be talking with certainty about how, either later this year or early next year, Apple will unveil a multitouch tablet with a 10-inch screen, 3G wireless broadband, and iPhone OS possibly subsidized by a Verizon Wireless contract. It would basically be a big iPod Touch. I’m no Apple hater, and I welcome an Apple device to the (don’t call it a) netbook...

I posted this here on May 21, 2008, during the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The original title of the post was Racism and sexism: it’s time to change the paradigm. I changed the title this time because recent events have changed my emphasis and give it renewed relevance. Ford’s message is one I personally take very much to heart. Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations...

Administered the drugs that killed him, that is. I wouldn’t want to be that doctor. Last night The Daily Beast had Marcia Clark (blonder than I remember her) pondering the next trial of the century. Clark says prescription-drug abuse is the drug story of our time and prescription narcotics “the cocaine of the new millennium.”

The 911 tape has been released. CNN: In the call, Lucia Whalen reports seeing “two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure, and the other one entered, and I didn’t see what he looked like at all.” “I just saw it from a distance, and this older woman was worried, thinking somebody’s breaking in someone’s house and they’ve been barging in,” Whalen says. “She interrupted me, and that’s when I noticed. Otherwise,...

Proving Daniel Gross’s Newsweek Cover Story true, there’s good news and bad out today… WSJ: New-home sales soared in June from the previous month, the third increase in a row and supplying fresh evidence the housing market is beginning to recover from its long crisis. Sales of single-family homes increased by 11.0% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000 compared to the prior month, the Commerce Department said Monday. Though, year-over-year, new-home sales were 21.3% lower...

From Janie Lauder of the NYTimes Caucus Blog: It’s official. Sarah Palin stepped down as governor of Alaska on Sunday, without dropping one hint about her future. Instead, she used her farewell address “to exercise my freedom of speech,” as she put it. [...] She cited accomplishments of her abbreviated administration, condemned big government and warned Alaskans against relying on Washington money for state development: ”Be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn’t come free.” She...

Following up on my two earlier posts on the topic, Dr. Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a member of that country’s Parliament who graphically and stridently opposed the repeal of a law there that criminalizes sex between men, this week backed out of teaching a human rights course at NYU’s Law School in the fall: In a statement released on Wednesday night, Richard L. Revesz, the N.Y.U. law school’s dean, said that Dr. Thio had changed her mind about teaching...

NOTE: forgive my overlap with Jazz. I can only hope it gets chalked up to great blogging minds thinking alike… Says the NYTimes: Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances...

The NYTimes has a a major piece out today, For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky, about the impact of Google’s Chrome on Mozilla’s Firefox. The story is a typical can-the-new-entrant-bring-down-the-incumbent style business tale. The setup is in the new offices of the feisty David, Mozilla Firefox, that has survived and thrived despite the twin Goliaths, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari: “We’ve learned how to compete with Microsoft and Apple,” says [Mozilla CEO...

A couple stories on the sex offender front… TechCrunch’s MG Siegler was browsing the top 10 paid iPhone apps list today: [T]he list appeared pretty typical: A bunch of games, a camera app, etc. Then I noticed one called Offender Locator [iTunes link], mostly because it has a creepy icon. I figured it was a game — it’s anything but. It’s an app to show you registered sex offenders living around you. While all 50 states require that sexual offenders register themselves, and allow...

Harvard Law Professor Steven Shavell has a new paper that “explains why abolishing copyright for academic publications is a good idea — and why the open access movement that seeks a similar goal is unlikely to succeed.” You can download (and comment on) the paper here. From the abstract: The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright...

I almost missed the shocking news that The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source,” has sold itself to a Chinese company, Yu Wan Mei, that also sells fish by-products. Onion publisher T. Herman Zweibel accepted a heathen bargain without the slightest twinge of regret: After subjecting me to a good 20 minutes of infernal bowing and other assorted chinky-dinkery, he offered to pay me what I’ve been assured is an appropriately absurd parcel of riches to take this tiresome publication...