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Bill Buford tells the story of Food Network, a channel that Julia Child could never hope to appear on today.
Update: Accidental Hedonist on Food Network: “The network was no longer about making good food and understanding it, it became about using food to impress other people. Whether it was getting a meal out in 30 minutes, or making the perfect thanksgiving feast, the shows seemed to sell the idea of ‘having’ food knowledge, without actually having any.”
Video of a man putting on 155 tshirts over a four-hour period; at the end, the conglomerate top weights 100 pounds. (via josh)
Harrowing story of surviving a mid-air collision at 37,000 feet. (via sippey)
Interesting story from Steven Levitt: stuck in a Vegas poker tournament with a $3000 first prize but needing to go to the airport to catch the last flight of the night, he starts playing very aggressively in order to win big or lose everything so that he can leave. (via gulfstream)
Jim Holt reports on a pair of books that argue that string theory is hurting theoretical physics. The article contains a good overview of the history and current status of the theory. For those looking to discover which book is better, Holt recommends Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
I posted a link to this earlier, but after watching the first two hours earlier this evening, I must strongly caution against missing Eyes on the Prize on PBS this month. Using nothing more than archival film footage, on-camera interviews, period music, and a narrator’s voiceover, the stories of Emmitt Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of southern schools riveted me to the couch like few viewing experiences have. As compelling as the history of the civil rights movement in America is, the production of the film deserves some of the credit for its power. To hear the stories of these momentous events told by the participants themselves, without embellishment, is quite extraordinary. From a media perspective, watching Eyes on the Prize gives me hope that we can survive the era of the crescendoing musical scores and 20-cuts-per-minute editing and still tell powerful, engaging stories without worrying about window dressing. I won’t soon forget the calm determination in the look and voice of Moses Wright or Mississippi governor Ross Barnett thundering away about segregation.
(For me, Eyes is also a nice companion piece to my twin obsessions of late, The Wire and The Blind Side, both of which deal with contemporary race relations in their own way. The PBS web site for the film lists dozens of resources for further exploration of the topic…does anyone have any specific recommendations for books about the civil rights movement? Lemme know.)
Update: Thanks for the recommendations, everyone…I posted a listing of them here.
Chad and Dave over at ScienceBlogs concocted an experiment to compare the SAT results of high school students with those of bloggers. The result? Short answer: the bloggers lost. More results here.
Must see/TiVo TV: for the first time in years, PBS is airing Eyes on the Prize, a 14-hour series on the American civil rights movement. (via steve)
If you’ve ever used any of the various menu sites out there, you may have noticed that the menus are occasionally not as up-to-date or complete as they could be. A typical response in the blogosphere to a situation like this is to fire off a snarky missive about how menu sites suck, wish harm on the site’s owners and their children, and why don’t they just die already, those sucking bastards, and basically overreact in such a way as to make the writer feel temporarily better and all but ensures that nothing constructive comes of it.
Since its launch last year, I’ve admired the tone of Eater, a site about New York city food and dining. The site strikes the right balance between criticism, enthusiasm, insider knowledge, and detatched reportage while covering a topic where too much of any one of these is deadly for the reader. Last week, Eater took note of the menu site situation, but instead of just complaining, they went looking for some evidence and reported the results:
Last week, Eater began an exhaustive investigative series called MenuGate. For those who think we’d forgotten about it, ten-hut. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be conducting a SPOT INSPECTION of the major menu site players, then scoring them on how accurate (or inaccurate) their menus are. The benchmark will be the menu that’s freely available, at this very moment, on the restaurant’s official website.
In canning the snark, offering fair criticism, and letting the results speak for themselves, Eater made it possible for the menu sites to respond in a congenial fashion:
We saw you chose 11 Madison Park this morning to do a menu comparison and our menu was out of date. To be fair, we waited to let you investigate the differences before we updated the menu, even though we noticed the menu had changed. In any event, now that you’ve written your piece, we have updated the menu as we do for restaurants everyday. We have a team specifically assigned to update menus and we receive user submissions as well to let us know about restaurant changes.
The end result? The situation improved for everyone. A small improvement perhaps, but MenuGate is an ongoing Eater feature so we can expect future improvements. And perhaps when the menu sites get tired of taking their lumps each time around, MenuGate may lead them to think of better ways to keep their menus up-to-date and useful. Anil Dash wrote a post two years ago about how bloggers could take positive action against “Stuff That Sucks”:
I’m proud of what [bloggers have] done in creating so many different weblog communities, and I don’t want our legacy to be one of having the positives overshadowed by our frequent, though understandable, tendency to be unkind or uncivil to those we’re communicating with.
The way Eater has approached the menu sites issue is certainly a good example of what Anil was talking about. Good show.
Danny Meyer on the difference between service and hospitality: “Service is delivering on your promise. Hospitality is making people feel good while you’re delivering on that promise.” Meyer has a new book, Setting the Table, out tomorrow. (via eater)
Sounds like a tactic out of The Wire: instead of mass arrests, law enforcement officials in a North Carolina city have been using pressure from families and the threat of arrest to drive drug dealers out of business. (thx, micah)
Unusual job opportunity of the day: Chief Librarian of the Detainee Library at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Perhaps the person who gets the job can add the text of the detainee treatment bill to the stacks. (thx, stefan)
Sony has announced their Portable Reader…the one with the e-ink screen. The Librie was the precursor to the Portable Reader.
A pair of economists looked at the number of parking tickets accrued by diplomats at the UN (tickets for which they are not charged) to determine each country’s corruption level. “Since, as their study reports, there is ‘essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations,’ the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone.” The worst offenders were the Kuwaitis, followed by Egypt. Diplomats from Canada, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark had 0 parking tickets. Here’s the whole paper. (thx, susan)
They shut all the lights off in Reykjavik last Thursday so that residents might see the stars without light pollution. What a lovely idea.
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