To the dismay of some, the Obamas will be keeping the Bushes’ chef, Cristeta Comerford: [S]ince the election, there’s been an almost global assumption that Ms. Comerford couldn’t possibly cook well enough for The Obamas, even though the Bushes adore her, which is due to the fiction that The Obamas have very refined palates. Foodies started speculating madly about whom The Obamas should choose to be their chef; it was assumed it had to be a chef that was as famous as they’d...

Wired News: SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen or read 2001: A Space Odyssey [link], this article contains details that reveal important plot developments. So, if you like to be a tabula rasa when you view a film or read a novel, stop here. 1992, or maybe 1997: HAL 9000, the master computer aboard the Discovery spaceship in the fictional film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, becomes operational. He will inspire millions of dreams — and some nightmares — of artificial intelligence. First,...

You can bet this will be all over the TV news next week. From KTUU-TV in Anchorage: The winner of the $500,000 lottery drawing came forward Saturday to collect his prize, and the man who will pocket a half-million dollars from a raffle designed to benefit a sex abuse victims charity is a three-time sex offender. Alec Ahsoak of Anchorage was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor twice in 1993 and once in 2000, according to the Alaska Department of Public Safety Sex Offender/Child Kidnapper Central...

I keep hearing that FDR’s New Deal didn’t end (or even prolonged) the depression; World War II ended it. Impossible as it is to prove a negative, NPR’s Planet Money looked at the question of if FDR had done nothing with historian Eric Rauchway. His comments are in line with where I come down on the issue: Between 1933 and 1937 Roosevelt’s first term in office — when you have THE New Deal in full swing — you have the biggest peace-time expansion of the economy in...

Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, from “Open For Questions” posted today at change.gov: Thaddeus: Is the new administration going to get rid of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy? Gibbs: Thaddeus, you don’t hear a politician give a one-word answer much, but it’s yes. More from Steve Benen and Kevin Drum. LATER: John Aravosis weighs in.

It was sooo good to have the Stewart and Colbert shows back for the new year this week. On Thursday copyfighter, and close ally and former board member of EFF, Larry Lessig was a guest on Colbert: Colbert: You say our copyright laws are turning our kids into criminals, because they’re keeping kids from doing all the remixing they want of pre-existing art and copywritten material, right? Isn’t that like saying that arson laws are turning our kids into pyromaniacs?? They’re breaking...

The Wall Street Journal Online is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What they’re finding is that after more than a decade of trying, the goal of marrying television and the Internet seems finally to be picking up steam: A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online. Meanwhile, many consumers are finding more attractive entertainment and information choices on the Internet...

Michael Hirschorn speculates in The Atlantic: At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print...

Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses Michelle Obama with an outspoken publisher and former Black Panther—his father… The first line of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ must read piece in the January/February Atlantic, American Girl, puts a distinctly 21st century twist on the “Clinton was the first Black president” trope. Says Coates, “The first time I saw Michelle Obama in the flesh, I almost took her for white.” From the piece: There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the...

Larry Lessig is pleased that president-elect Obama has chosen Elena Kagan, his dean at Harvard Law School, for solicitor general. Kagan is credited with attracting major legal scholars to Harvard, especially Cass R. Sunstein from the University of Chicago and, more recently, Lessig himself from the Stanford University Law School. But Lessig may be less pleased with some of Obama’s justice picks, says CNet’s Declan McCullagh: As president-elect, one of Obama’s first tech-related...

The highlight of an underwhelming MacWorld keynote [video] — after the enhanced iLife, iWork, and an updated 17″ MacBook Pro — was the official death of DRM. Called for by Steve Jobs nearly 2 years ago, the deal that was finally done gives the record labels the variable pricing they’ve been after ($0.69, $0.99, and $1.29, their call). That and what Erick Schonfeld says is a hidden $1.8 billion music tax on their best customers: Anyone who wants to upgrade their entire existing...

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard Yesterday I mentioned that LG Electronics is to announce a new range of Netflix-ready broadband HDTVs that will have a small Linux-powered, Internet-friendly computer embedded that will be able to get video right off the Internet. Today we learn from Robert X. Cringely how pricey they’ll be: The Netflix-capable LG TV’s, we’re told, will cost about $300 more than LG sets that can’t do such streaming.  The difference between the...

Minneapolis Star Tribune: The Minnesota Supreme Court today rejected a bid by Republican Norm Coleman to have hundreds of rejected absentee ballots considered in the U.S. Senate recount, apparently clearing the way for a state board to certify election results showing Democrat Al Franken on top — and also opening the door to a post-recount lawsuit that the Coleman campaign said “is now inevitable.” The state Canvassing Board is scheduled to meet this afternoon to review recount results....

Continuing in my food vein, I wish I’d done this before the holidays. Even though they’ve passed, we’ll still be cooking… Foodista aims to be the Wikipedia for food: Each recipe can be collaboratively edited and improved. Scrumptious photos for each dish are pulled in from Flickr, and descriptions are pulled in from Wikipedia itself. You can add or remove ingredients, see the edit history, or add a comment to each page. The site is well-designed and was put together by [Barnaby]...

Laura Miller on the anti-foodies’ foodie: The essence of the Bittman approach is simplicity, ease and quality, but that means he has to walk a fine and constantly shifting line. Americans’ attitudes toward what we eat are laden with class and cultural baggage. It’s no coincidence that when the conservative Club for Growth PAC produced its famous 2004 television commercial featuring an elderly couple telling Howard Dean to go “back to Vermont,” two out of the seven outré...

And a headache for cable and telephone companies. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix: We want to watch what we want, when we want, where we want, and discover the content how we want. So how well are we doing in the areas of “where,” “when,” “what” and “discoverability”? We’re about 15 percent of the way to “what you want,” 100 percent at “when you want,” 15 percent towards “where you want,” and 25 percent for “discover your want.” To get even farther we need a standard...

Friday in The Guardian Anna Pickard authored a stirring defense of making friends online: The friends I’ve made online – from blogging in particular, be they other bloggers or commenters on this or my own site – are the best friends I now have. And yet, when I say this to people, many times they’ll look at me like I’m a social failure; and when surveys like this are reported, it’s always with a slight air of being the “It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world!”...

Who ever would have thought that so many of us spend our Christmas Eve on the web? Back in the day we waited until we were back at work or school to go online (CyberMonday was premised on that fact). Those days have long since gone. Hitwise on Facebook: On Christmas Day 2007 Facebook reached a peak in traffic that wasn’t surpassed until July 2008. Traffic reached a new high on Christmas Eve 2008 when Facebook saw its highest ever traffic level – reaching 2.18% of all US Internet visits compared...

Like many of my fellow bloggers, I don’t have the credentials to argue the legal issues. I’m inclined to believe no matter what the constitution or case law says, if the Senate wants to keep Burris out, it can find the legal way to do it. Politically, on the other hand, I’m betting Burris gets sworn in. And Blagojevich — after providing plenty more fodder for the late night comics (who never doubted the pols would give them more material) — will walk. No conviction....

Here’s #4 in 365gay’s Top 8 gay videos of 2008… Separately, and significantly, David Bianculli named the Daily Show #1 in his Top 10 TV List of 2008. And when Terry Gross asked on Fresh Air recently if he could give an example of how the comedy shows have demonstrated a new model for the political interview, Bianculli said the Huckabee interview was a great example: Mike Huckabee was promoting a book, but Stewart was more interested in talking to him about his political stance....

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a book in progress, The Googlization of Everything. There he posted today an August interview he did with Vint Cerf, Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. Siva calls it a brief but rich exchange. When Cerf says Google is committed to keeping the Internet open, Siva follows up: SV: Let’s talk about that. There is all this dueling lobbying and arguing going on at the FCC and in Congress between firms like Google and the telecoms. What can Google do...

I’m not sure I understand the headline of the Wired News story, Apple Says Farewell to Macworld, Hello to the Big Time. There’s plenty about the impending decline of Apple, not a word about a big-time hello: Apple and its cult following have much to celebrate, but its future is uncertain. The majority of speculators believe that Jobs’ era — and the entire Apple era — is coming to an end. The corporation recently delivered some shocking news: Jobs won’t be delivering...

From Ariel Levy’s droll review of the new edition of the 1970s phenom, The Joy of Sex, which appears in this week’s New Yorker: The book is still emphatically straight, but [British sexologist Susan] Quilliam has given it a gay-positive tone, in sharp contrast to [the original’s] advice that if you might be that way inclined it was better not to experiment too much with a partner of the same sex, lest you let the gay genie out of the bottle. The original drawings have been replaced,...

Geoff Nunberg‘s pick for 2008′s Word of the Year — JOE. Give a listen. (The linguist can convey much more through the spoken word than in print): In 1942, FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace made a famous speech where he described the 20th century as the Century of the Common Man, and for most of that period, the common man went by the name of Joe. The generic Joe Blow made his first appearance in the 1920s, to be joined later by Joe Schmo from Cocomo. And by the ’30s,...

This has been out for a while but I was unexpectedly out of commission for a while and it’s worth catching up. Google Zeitgeist 2008: Studying the aggregation of the billions of search queries that people type into the Google search box gives us a glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times. We’ve compiled some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and hope you enjoy looking back as much as we do. Fastest Rising (Global) sarah palin beijing 2008 facebook login tuenti heath...