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“Scientists disagree about when humans first tasted kale. But it is known that the ancient Greeks cultivated leafy greens, which they boiled and ate as a cure for drunkenness. And early Roman manuscripts include references to “brassica,” a word that encompassed wild turnips, cabbages and kalelike plants. By the Middle Ages, kale had spread through Europe and Asia. The Italians developed plants with “dinosaur” scales, while the Scots created varietals with leaves like frilly petticoats. The Russians produced kale that could survive in the snow.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/magazine/who-made-that-kale.html?ref=todayspaper

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“This isn’t about “organic” versus “modern.” It’s about supporting the system in which small producers make decisions based on their knowledge and experience of their farms in the landscape, as opposed to buying standardized technological fixes in a bag. Some people call this knowledge-based rather than energy-based agriculture, but obviously it takes plenty of energy; as it happens, much of that energy is human, which can be a good thing.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/how-to-feed-the-world.html?pagewanted=3&ref=todayspaper

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We’re told that this bike program is modeled after the one in Paris. But in Paris, the bikes are a silvery gray and the sponsors have discreet small tattoos on the bike frame. Paris bikes blend. They respect the romance that is Paris.

And what a bargain Citibank got. To put that $41 million in perspective, a co-op at 640 Park Avenue recently sold for $23 million, and Calvin Klein’s Hamptons house reportedly cost around $75 million.

In other words, for chump change to a billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg let Citibank alter the color palette of Manhattan.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/opinion/sunday/color-me-blue.html?ref=todayspaper

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Banksy’s murals are most often public art drawn – illegally, in some cases – on private property. This raises issues of ownership and preservation.

Amy Adler, professor of art law at New York University, suggests that “amendments to planning legislation are therefore a possible next step”, in order to empower public authorities to preserve art in public spaces.

In Los Angeles, legal proceedings were brought when a large mural by the artist Ed Ruscha, on private land, was suddenly painted over. This was one of the few instances in which a work of public art was protected under federal visual artists rights regulations, preserving the work even if the ownership of the physical property changes.

Adler contends, however, that in Banksy’s case, “for this to apply, Banksy himself would have to file for protection, which given his penchant for anonymity and illegality of his graffiti, he does not do”.

When a mural has been put on a publicly owned space, local authorities have greater power to decide what to do – in some cases, they have taken on the task of preservation themselves. In 2006, Bristol city council polled residents when a Banksy image appeared on a public clinic: 97% said they wanted it to stay.

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– http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/06/banksy-new-york-murals-law

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“There are two ways to look at many types of civil litigation. Is the plaintiff’s lawyer seeking to defend the rights of his client, and perhaps those in similar situations? Or is the lawyer abusing the process in the hope of forcing a settlement out of a company that prefers to avoid the costs of litigation?”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/business/extracting-a-toll-from-a-patent-troll.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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What foods are most popular now, and how has food popularity waxed and waned over time? We looked at the rates of comments on eight faddish foods:

We calculated these by first finding the total number of reviews for each food. Then, we figured out what percentage of those reviews came in each quarterly period since 2007. (That arithmetic allowed us to normalize the data—-otherwise, this thing would be a huge bacon chart and everything would look tiny.) Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much the answers conform to anecdotal evidence from pop culture. Low-carb diets and Portobello burgers were totally a mid-2000’s thing. And sure enough, their popularity was tanking by 2007. Similarly, if you live on the coasts, you’ve probably found more and more restaurants and haute grocery stores touting quinoa. The trend is very recent. Bacon, though? Bacon’s always been popular, though things have accelerated ever since it’s become a full-blown meme.

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– http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/bacon-is-a-miracle-food/all/1?viewall=true

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“They compared the results of the Oreo and rice cake test with results from rats that were given an injection of cocaine or morphine, known addictive substances, on one side of the maze and a shot of saline on the other. Professor Schroeder is licensed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to purchase and use controlled substances for research.

The research showed the rats conditioned with Oreos spent as much time on the “drug” side of the maze as the rats conditioned with cocaine or morphine.”

– http://www.conncoll.edu/news/news-archive/2013/student-faculty-research-shows-oreos-are-just-as-addictive-as-drugs-in-lab-rats-.htm#.Ul3oLRZ0-5f

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The common core belief, then and now, is actually descended from “Huck Finn” ’s unforgettable Pappy and his views on the “guv’mint”: the federal government exists to take money from hard-working white people and give it to lazy black people, and the President is helping to make this happen. This conviction, then and now, may not fairly be called racist in the sense that it isn’t just (or always) an expression of personal bigotry; rather, it is more like a resentment at an imagined ethnic spoils system gone wrong. (Hatred is less the key than a throbbing sense of unfairness.) Presumably, it makes space for a handful of hard-working black and brown people who are being victimized, too. (If there is much doubt that there is a racial component, the disparate reactions to Obama’s mythical foreign birth in Kenya and Ted Cruz’s actual one in Canada should put it to rest.) A focus group on the current state of the G.O.P., conducted by Democracy Corps, an organization put together by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, was on the whole quite sympathetic to Tea Party and to evangelical feelings of alienation from incomprehensible social change, making it plain that the core grievance is still the over-riding feeling that “their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”

So we don’t have to look any further than our own past to find exact cognates for today’s movement to the right. The fever won’t break, because it’s always this high. The best hope one can hope for is that, somehow, the adjustments to reality get made, even in the face of the ideology. Reality has a way of doing that to us all.

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– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/the-john-birchers-tea-party.html

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A doctor should get paid if the patient is healthy, not the other way around. This might sound strange, but actually, it’s what you and I do already. We pay insurance and we expect that our insurance will cover whatever comes up.However, it is when insurers pay doctors that doctors are paid for service, not health.

With principle in mind, I came up with this thought experiment:

“Imagine that there is one disease in the world and doctors are able to cure this disease with 97% effectiveness. Furthermore, the custom is to pay for health, not for service. How would a doctor make a living?

She would collect an annual flat fee from her patients. If in any given year, she expects only a certain number of them to get this disease, she charges accordingly — enough to cover the cost of treatment, damages from botched treatments, her own salary and that of assistants, and a cushion in case there is an unexpectedly high number of outbreaks this year.”

What is the doctor doing here? Well, she’s running an insurance company! She is both a provider of medical care (a doctor) and the one who takes on the task of spreading out health risk among a pool of people (insurance).

Unlike our current system, this system works because the provider and the insurance company are one and the same. The current system features an adversarial relationship in which insurance companies try to underpay providers and providers try to get their maximum payment by needlessly tacking on procedures, with nobody incentivized to lower costs. In this ideal system, the incentive for reducing costs is internalized in the doctor/insurer. A doctor who behaves inefficiently will eat into his own profits.

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– https://medium.com/armchair-economics/eba04c21d410

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Should tipping for large parties be left solely to the customer or should the restaurant tack it on to the bill?

The new IRS ruling that takes effect in January will treat automatic gratuities as service charges, rather than tips. The switch means servers will no longer be responsible for reporting those automatic tips as income. And it also means automatic gratuities will be considered a part of a server’s wages, making that money subject to payroll tax withholding and delaying receipt of those automatic tips until an employee’s next paycheck.

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– http://www.indystar.com/article/20131011/BUSINESS/310110015/Automatic-tipping-IRS-rules-change-could-taxing-hospitality-industry?nclick_check=1

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