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People and news organizations pay attention to Mr. Icahn because companies that ignore him — see Motorola and Yahoo — do so at their peril. Never mind that Mr. Icahn would probably not know an iPhone from a Galaxy S4. In a market-driven world, the stock price is everything. And the only thing. He doesn’t own shares in a company called Apple. He owns a stock listing called AAPL.

He is akin to everyone’s crazy uncle whom no one should listen to, except everyone does, and he often turns out to be right. He wins in part because he knows the outside play — the media game — so well. Using business news outlets and now social media, Mr. Icahn is able to make corporate boards quake and chief executives tremble because they know he will say anything, and he often does.

Mr. Icahn usually zeros in on troubled companies, but in this case he is cynically suggesting that one of the most successful companies in the world — one that has already announced plans for $100 billion in dividends and buybacks — should borrow $150 billion and go into real, actual debt despite having $147 billion in cash on hand. (Most of Apple’s cash is overseas and cannot be used to buy off investors.) Apple probably won’t take the Twitter bait. The company has replaced Coke as the most recognizable brand in the world, with a steady string of product hits. Does it really need Mr. Icahn’s advice?

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/business/media/using-twitter-to-move-the-markets.html?ref=todayspaper

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Many veteran skateboarders say part of the problem is that the pastime has attracted newcomers in recent years who take their boards from shop to street without the skill or experience to navigate city traffic. In addition, they say, many of these riders use a type of skateboard known as a longboard, which is built for speed with a longer shape — typically 40 or more inches versus 32 inches — and bigger wheels than skateboards generally used for performing flips and tricks.

“It’s like learning how to drive a car in a Corvette,” said Rick Sulz, the founder of the Web site nyskateboarding.com, which covers the local skateboard community. “You’ve got this fast-moving skateboard dodging traffic, pedestrians and bikes, so it’s easy for newcomers to lose control.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/nyregion/despite-hazards-street-skateboarding-thrives.html?ref=todayspaper

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It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?pagewanted=all

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“The Twitter bio is a postmodern art form, an opportunity in 160 characters or fewer to cleverly synopsize one’s professional and personal accomplishments, along with a carefully edited non sequitur or two. It lets the famous and the anonymous, athletes and accountants, surreal Dadaists and suburban dads alike demonstrate that they are special snowflakes with Wes Anderson-worthy quirks.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/fashion/twitter-bios-and-what-they-really-say.html?ref=todayspaper

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In short, meta became shorthand for knowingness. It went beyond beyond. And it used to be fun. Meta could be used to mean something you knew wasn’t true but you believed in anyway. Or it could mean you weren’t quite sure if something was or wasn’t true — an ambiguity that was as playful as it was, well, metaphysical. Meta also raised profound artistic and philosophical questions about truth, reality and identity. But those meatier and rompier ventures into metahood (via Borges, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others) have been superseded by the endless depth and breadth of the Internet (meta on steroids) and the triumphal pervasiveness of social media.

We got to the point where we were so in on the joke that we already knew the punch line. Or rather, we knew, or thought we knew, every (possible) punch line. And it’s this knowingness, a knowingness not based in or on knowledge or experience but simply in the recognition of the artifice at hand, that has arguably numbed us to ourselves, to each other, to love, to freedom, to activism and agitation and protest, to the very act of creating something unironic or nonmeta. Paradoxically, the metadata that our government and our communications giants have been gathering is something this very cynicism of ours helped create.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/when-meta-met-data.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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Some Americans think that this crisis reflects typical partisan squabbling. No. Democrats and Republicans have always disagreed, sometimes ferociously, about what economic policy is best, but, in the past, it was not normal for either to sabotage the economy as a negotiating tactic.

In a household, husbands and wives disagree passionately about high-stakes issues like how to raise children. But normal people do not announce that if their spouse does not give in, they will break all the windows in the house.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/governing-by-blackmail.html?ref=todayspaper

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Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.

Rich in dopamine receptors, the caudate sits between the brainstem and the cortex. In humans, the caudate plays a key role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, like food, love and money. But can we flip this association around and infer what a person is thinking just by measuring caudate activity? Because of the overwhelming complexity of how different parts of the brain are connected to one another, it is not usually possible to pin a single cognitive function or emotion to a single brain region.

But the caudate may be an exception. Specific parts of the caudate stand out for their consistent activation to many things that humans enjoy. Caudate activation is so consistent that under the right circumstances, it can predict our preferences for food, music and even beauty.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?ref=todayspaper

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“Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Smith says, “because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn’t want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions–or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used early silent films restricted their audience). By 1930, attendance to movie theaters had reached 90 million per week. Such a huge patronage created larger possibilities for profits–especially since the sound pictures now muffled snacks–but movie theater owners were still hesitant to bring snacks inside of their theaters.

The Great Depression presented an excellent opportunity for both movies and popcorn. Looking for a cheap diversion, audiences flocked to the movies. And at 5 to 10 cents a bag, popcorn was a luxury that most people were able to afford. Popcorn kernels themselves were a cheap investment for purveyors, and a $10 bag could last for years. If those inside the theaters couldn’t see the financial lure of popcorn, enterprising street vendors didn’t miss a beat: they bought their own popping machines and sold popcorn outside the theaters to moviegoers before they entered the theater. As Smith explains, early movie theaters literally had signs hung outside their coatrooms, requesting that patrons check their popcorn with their coats. Popcorn, it seems, was the original clandestine movie snack.

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– http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2013/10/why-do-we-eat-popcorn-at-the-movies/

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