“Unlike the anonymous inventors of such American staples as the hot dog, the grilled-cheese sandwich, and the milkshake, the creator of the chocolate-chip cookie has always been known to us. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the popular Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, with her husband, Kenneth, from 1930 to 1967, brought the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie into being in the late nineteen-thirties. The recipe, which has been tweaked over the ensuing decades, made its first appearance in print in the 1938 edition of Wakefield’s “Tried and True” cookbook. Created as an accompaniment to ice cream, the chocolate-chip cookie quickly became so celebrated that Marjorie Husted (a.k.a. Betty Crocker) featured it on her radio program. On March 20, 1939, Wakefield gave Nestlé the right to use her cookie recipe and the Toll House name. In a bargain that rivals Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, the price was a dollar—a dollar that Wakefield later said she never received (though she was reportedly given free chocolate for life and was also paid by Nestlé for work as a consultant).”
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“If you’re wandering the barren landscape of Utah or Nevada and stumble across a massive, firmly-grounded concrete arrow, rest assured, aliens have not been marking a path through the United States. Forming a line across the country, these decaying markers are actually remnants of the Transcontinental Air Mail Route, a revolutionary system connecting both coasts over 90 years ago to facilitate speedy mail delivery. But given that the full path is only visible from an aerial view, like the Peruvian Nazca lines, their strange appearance has puzzled many hikers and ranchers who have stumbled across a lone, giant arrow.”
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“On Thursday, a group of small and midsize businesses reached a settlement agreement with American Express in a class-action lawsuit. Under the agreement, which a judge must approve, Amex will allow surcharges to its cardholders as long as the same amount is levied on other credit and charge card users. It agreed to drop a measure that required debit card surcharges at the same level, according to a lawyer representing the company.”
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According to the latest federal figures, which were part of an annual survey, Monitoring the Future, more than 12 percent of eighth graders and 36 percent of seniors at public and private schools around the country said they had smoked marijuana in the past year. About 60 percent of high school seniors said they did not view regular marijuana use as harmful, up from about 55 percent last year.
The report looked at a wide variety of drugs and substances. It found, for example, that drinking was steadily declining, with roughly 40 percent of high school seniors reporting having used alcohol in the past month, down from a peak of 53 percent in 1997. Abuse of the prescription painkiller Vicodin is half what it was a decade ago among seniors; cocaine and heroin use are at historic lows in almost every grade.
Cigarette smoking has also fallen precipitously in recent years. For the first time since the survey began, the percentage of students who smoked a cigarette in the past month dropped below 10 percent. Roughly 8.5 percent of seniors smoke cigarettes on a daily basis, compared with 6.5 percent who smoke marijuana daily, a slight increase from 2010.
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The old saying “Sally sold seashells by the seashore” has nothing on a tongue twister created by researchers at MIT. The verbal puzzle, “pad kid poured curd pulled cod,” tripped up test subjects who tried to spit it out so much, that psychologists believe it could be the toughest one there is to date.
“If anyone can say this [phrase] ten times quickly, they get a prize,” said Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, a psychologist from MIT who specializes in speech errors as a way of understanding normal brain functions, and one of the creators of the mouth-boggling phrase.
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– http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/05/mit-tongue-twister-trickiest-to-say/
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On Friday, at 12 A.M., Beyoncé staged the death of several paradigms by releasing her album “Beyoncé” on iTunes. It has fourteen songs, with a full-blown music video—not a Vine or a MacBook confessional—for each one, plus a few extra videos. The bundle costs $15.99 and many, many people with computers bought it. Billboard now reports that “Beyoncé” is the “fastest-selling album ever in the iTunes store,” with almost nine hundred thousand copies sold since Friday. So, in secret, Beyoncé planned and executed an entire album, and somehow nobody leaked the news or the files. Artists have been practicing the sudden release for several years—Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” is often credited as the first significant example—but there’s never been an out-of-the-blue release of this scope and significance. In her sole statement, Beyoncé said she wanted to recapture the “immersive” experience of everyone hearing an album all at once. She got her wish.
So what died on Friday? Nothing: this drop was a demonstration, kind of like the Trinity test. Yes, social media promoted the release for free, meaning that marketing budgets could potentially shrink for incredibly famous people on major labels, like Beyoncé. Not everyone is building up to an instant profit on release day, and maybe no one who hasn’t first been pumped into the mainstream by the majors can expect such a response. But “Beyoncé” proved that we could be spared viral campaigns and fake leaks and Pepsi ads. It’s not surprising that “Beyoncé” is excellent (the pros often work better faster); what is exciting is watching the minor rearrangement within the Knowles-Carter universe, and then seeing the rippling effects throughout the critical community. It is now painfully clear that, just as there is no one way to release an album, there is no single critical response anymore. Years of message boards and blogs and tweeting set up a crossfire that is more interesting and robust than any single review ever will be. The only consensus is that Beyoncé matters—the rest is a firefight in your pocket.
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– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2013/12/beyonce-new-album-review.html
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Nirvana will be inducted, as was widely expected. But so will Kiss, the costumed and made-up stars of hard rock that been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for years.
The other stars being inducted in the 29th annual ceremony, to be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 10, are Hall and Oates, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens and Peter Gabriel, who is being recognized as a solo performer but has already been inducted as part of the band Genesis.
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– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/nirvana-to-join-rock-hall-of-fame-alongside-kiss-at-barclays-center/?ref=todayspaper
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The record, “Beyoncé” (Columbia), appeared on Apple’s iTunes store at midnight on Thursday with no warning. Yet Apple reported on Monday that it became the fastest-selling album in its history, with 828,773 around the world in its first three days, including 617,213 in the United States. It reached No. 1 on iTunes’s sales rankings in 104 countries.
In the United States, where albums are typically released on Tuesdays, “Beyoncé” had the fourth-biggest opening-week sales of any album this year, after Justin Timberlake’s “The 20/20 Experience” (with 968,000 sales), Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP 2” (792,000) and Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same” (658,000). It also performed far better than Beyoncé’s last album, “4,” which sold 310,000 copies in its first week two years ago.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/business/media/apple-says-beyonce-set-a-record-on-itunes.html?ref=todayspaper
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Today’s patent mess can be traced to a miscalculation by Jimmy Carter, who thought granting more patents would help overcome economic stagnation. In 1979, his Domestic Policy Review on Industrial Innovation proposed a new Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which Congress created in 1982. Its first judge explained: “The court was formed for one need, to recover the value of the patent system as an incentive to industry.”
The country got more patents—at what has turned out to be a huge cost. The number of patents has quadrupled, to more than 275,000 a year. But the Federal Circuit approved patents for software, which now account for most of the patents granted in the U.S.—and for most of the litigation. Patent trolls buy up vague software patents and demand legal settlements from technology companies. Instead of encouraging innovation, patent law has become a burden on entrepreneurs, especially startups without teams of patent lawyers.
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– http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579252662325112076
shaun james bockert 