We got one in our little town. No doubt you’ve got at least one in yours. Woot: With GM and Chrysler closing almost 2,000 dealerships between them, and with car dealers generally suffering from the collapse of new-car sales, America’s going to have a huge lot of huge lots sitting empty. And the current commercial real-estate market isn’t exactly crying out for more unwanted property. Sure, we could just sit back and let the crackheads and feral dogs take the places over, but the...

Two months ago, Union Square Ventures convened a group of educators, entrepreneurs, and researchers to talk about “hacking education.” The event went on for six hours and last week Brad Burnham posted what his partner, Fred Wilson, says is the definitive take on the event. I sent this excerpt to a brilliant student I mentor; a student who is bored by much most of what we in the the academy have to offer today. A student who is not heard, understood or reached by anything faculty or administration...

The headline in The Chronicle, Millennial Generation Will End Culture Wars, Researchers Say. The story is on two new reports released today by the liberal Center for American Progress: “The story throughout this survey is one of conservative decline and progressive ascendancy among young people,” says the first report, “The Political Ideology of the Millennial Generation,” which identified 17 liberal and four conservative values and beliefs supported by a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds....

A recent study looked at liberal and conservative reactions to Stephen Colbert’s satire. Heather LeMarre, one of the study’s authors, was a guest on On The Media Friday. She explains that both liberals and conservatives actually think Colbert shares their political beliefs: You might watch that and you might think that’s hilarious, he’s making fun of conservatives, look how funny that is, which is what we found for liberals. However, if you’re conservative, you might look at that...

Wired has lots more. As I watch the very sad news of that other winter crash that didn’t work out so well, I am clear that I would prefer higher ticket prices and a well-trained, well-rested, well-paid professional flight crew to a pilot who had failed five tests. I want a re-regulated air system.

In internet time this is old news. But the irony that earlier on the very day that the NY Assembly voted a bill to legalize gay marriage still more photos of Carrie Prejean were revealed makes it too hard to resist. That last batch — taken when “Carrie was the ripe ol’ LEGAL age of 20″ — came after she was the featured event in a press conference held by The Donald in the city of Sodom. There he announced his ruling, Miss California can keep her crown: Once again,...

NYTimes: The State Assembly approved legislation on Tuesday night that would make New York the sixth state to allow same-sex marriage — a pivotal vote that shifts the debate to the State Senate, where gay rights advocates and conservative groups alike are redoubling their efforts. In a sign of how opinion in Albany has shifted on the issue, several members of the Assembly who voted against the measure in 2007 voted in favor of it on Tuesday. The final vote was 89 to 52, including the backing of...

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus had a nice wrap-up of the goings on in the supposed post-mass-lawsuit era at the RIAA: Ray Beckerman, a lawyer in New York who writes the blog Recording Industry vs. the People, went looking for new lawsuits against alleged illegal file-sharers, found three, and called the Recording Industry Association of America’s stated end of its mass-litigation campaign a “total fabrication.” Ars Technica characterized the RIAA as cagey, for fudging the definition of...

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where Google invited K-12 students to play around with their homepage logo. This year’s theme what “What I Wish for the World.” It’s time to vote for your favorite: [W]e’re pleased to announce the approximately 400 state finalists and the 40 regional winners. They were chosen by a panel of independent judges, all experts in design, but now it’s your turn. We invite you to help us select the four national finalists by voting on...

Remember that 1897 NYTimes story on music industry complaints that revenues had fallen fifty percent because “Canadian pirates” were flooding the market with “spurious editions” of copyrighted music? Well in that context it’s worth remembering that the United States has quite a pirate history of its own. Over the weekend All Things Considered interviewed Matthew Pearl about his new novel, The Last Dickens. A mix of fact and fiction, the novel looks at Dickens’...

Kirby Dick, director of the new film Outrage, was interviewed on Fresh Air this week by Terry Gross. She asked what level of hypocrisy merits ruining, somebody’s life and career? Mr. DICK: I looked at their voting records… and if their voting records were substantially anti-gay, I think in the case of all the politicians I had focused on, they were anywhere between zero and 25 percent pro-gay, the rest was anti-gay. And that to me, over oftentimes a two-decade career, was certainly an...

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that I made it through all of the links below without saying what I thought… An oversight. I marveled in every minute of its escapist glee; I left believing J. J. Abrams has arrived at genius and each of his new young stars is destined to be a screen idol (or stuck locked in sequel hell). At once retro and exuberantly now, it made me feel young again; I felt as I did as I watched the original Star Wars on opening night at Mann’s Chinese Theater in...

The story of the cow that escaped a slaughterhouse in Queens, was named Molly and taken to Farm Sanctuary, a vegan farm where she could roam free in upstate New York, sent me back to Michael Pollan’s December 2002 New York Times Magazine cover story, An Animal’s Place: There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable...

Obama Foodorama: Later today, when the President announces his 2010 budget, which slashes 121 programs and about $17 billion, there’ll be one crucial area where spending will increase. Working with his closest advisers, President Obama is attempting to redress the longstanding civil rights grievances of black American farmers, by proposing a $1.25 billion deal to settle the ‘Pigford Claims,” a longstanding discrimination against USDA. The funding could benefit as many as 80,000...

The Chronicle: Grove City College, a Christian institution north of Pittsburgh, has suspended a student whom officials found to be working in the gay-pornography industry, reported The Herald, in Sharon, Pa. It’s against the rules, obviously, but look what else is, too: Grove City’s student handbook lays out possible penalties for specific infractions, including a suspension of at least one week for “possessing pornographic material” or “premarital sex (heterosexual or homosexual),”...

NO! But before getting into it… I linked yesterday to Marion Barry’s “We may have a Civil War” over gay marriage quote. Ta-Nehisi Coates puts Barry & his quote in some much-needed perspective: I don’t think that can be said loudly enough. There are 12 members of the City Council. Seven of them are black. One is Marion Barry. To anyone who’s followed Barry’s career, I’m not sure why “Marion Barry Is A Demagogue” is breaking news. It’s...

According to AP, the NH House passed it. The vote wasn’t expected until tomorrow. And last I heard Governor John Lynch said he believes marriage to be between a man and a woman and feels the state’s civil unions are sufficient for equality. LATER, clarity: The bill legalizing same-sex marriage is on its way to the desk of Gov. John Lynch following a narrow vote of approval in the House today. The House voted, 178-167, to accept a Senate-approved compromise (HB 436) that would let gays...

Becoming the fifth state to permit gay marriage: The governor’s signature came barely an hour after the measure won final approval in the state Legislature, with a final 31-8 vote in favor in the Maine Senate. Baldacci said in a statement that while he has opposed gay marriage in the past, “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and ofequal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage. “This new law does not force any religion to recognize...

It’s virtually unanimous that the new Kindle e-book reader will have a larger screen and be designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers… WSJ Online: Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences...

Short answer: You might! Via Sugar Stacks, where you can compare foods, find out where sugar is hiding, and see how much of the sweet stuff you’re really eating. In other sugar news, last week Daniel Engber had a piece in Slate on the decline and fall of high-fructose corn syrup:

The ransom note: “I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.” The hacked Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program site is used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of Virginia’s...

AP, minutes ago. Later — The NYTimes: Jack Kemp, the ex-quarterback, congressman, one-time vice-presidential nominee and self-described ”bleeding-heart conservative,” died Saturday. He was 73. Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according to spokeswoman Bona Park and Edwin J. Feulner, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Park said Kemp died at his home in Bethesda, Md., in the Washington suburbs.

Towleroad’s Nathanial comments on BioWare reinstating use of the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ and ending its ban of any discussion of homosexuality in community forums: It’s become an entirely predictable narrative: Company makes discriminatory decision, internet explodes with anger, company issues lame explanation as to why they did so, company reverses offending decision as quietly as they can hoping that the issue will just go away and they don’t have to...

The digitizers at ProQuest have discovered not all content is serious academic research. Some is just plain fun: Bryan Benilous, a historical newspaper specialist at the digital-archive company Proquest, said he and his colleagues came across a Boston Daily Globe article from August 24, 1902, titled, “Face Book The New Fad,” describing a party game where revelers sketch out cartoony caricatures for fun. “I think it is interesting to note the similarities with this first iteration of Face Book...

Larry Kramer went back to his alma mater, Yale (’57), last week to pick up the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the university’s Gay and Lesbian Association. Kramer, you will remember, burst on the scene with the 1978 novel, Faggots, which portrayed the gay community of the time as shallow and promiscuous. He went on to a lifetime of ardent AIDS activism, co-founding GMHC and ACT-UP. Anyone who thought the author might mellow with age is sorely mistaken. Kramer arrived in New...