Kids who grow up with 500+ books in the house go to school 3.2 years longer than kids who don't, even after adjusting for dad's occupation and income. That's nearly a bachelor's degree, right there, or a master's if a bachelor's is the standard.
My Life Check: painless and helpful in suggesting, quantitatively, what you could be doing better for your health, without being puritanical about the salt, sugar, and fat.
In an essay that would make Strunk & White proud, Salt & Fat lays out the virtues of cast iron in the kitchen.
This may be the only way investigative journalism will continue to get done: ProPublica, which is funded by a non-profit and by individual donations, not subjected to focus-groups or concerns about news-stand sales. Of course, that is what NPR is supposed to do, but they aren't exactly investigative, are they?
Courtesy of David Wondrich, who knows his drink:
The Shandy Gaff
Fill a pint glass a little more than halfway with a good American pale ale (eg, Red Tail) that's been well chilled. Top off, slowly, with ginger beer (we recommend Goslings).
Fascinating. Beautiful. Not sure what it is good for otherwise.
Turns out when broken down by social program spending and sick care/rescue spending, the US values sickness more than health, and, just as interesting, the USA's overall spending on health & sickness is similar to other countries'.
One could apply some supply-side thinking and hypothesize that if we did more to keep the 300+ million Americans healthy, they'd be more productive than they are now, what with all that sick time missed at work, and GDP would go up, so that as a percentage of GDP, health/social program spending would go down...
Interactive graphic at the NYTimes. We thought more BMWs came from South Carolina than just the SUV-types, but nice to know we have a decent selection of Mazdas and Subarus if we want to buy American.
We especially like that they've been sitting, largely ignored, in a garage in Brooklyn.
On the heels of yet another annoying Facebook re-design comes Google Buzz, which is like the Facebook feed without the time-wasting games that people of weak minds (like ours) are so easily addicted to.
