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The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That’s 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people’s environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city.

Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta’s downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day.

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– http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sacs_are_bad_for_your_health_happy_city_by_charles_montgomery.html

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The English “sorry” is a marker not of grace and decorum, but rather of a belief that one magic word has the power to decontaminate the world even as it both pacifies and reproves those who pollute it. “Sorry” is a mixture of decayed piety and passive-aggressive guile.

The stand-alone “sorry” was unknown to Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson. Only in the mid-19th century did it become common to say “sorry” rather than “I am sorry.” The adjective was divorced from the person feeling the sorrow, and soon ceased to signal even regret.

“Sorry” rose at the same time that the English began using “overfamiliar” as a term of reproach and “detachment” as a synonym for “aloofness.” Stand-alone “sorry” may have dressed like a gentleman, but his heart was made of India rubber.

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– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/14/opinion/a-poor-apology-of-a-word

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The story of America’s squirrels goes back to the early 19th century. At that point in time, squirrels were just another animal running around the woods, mainly useful as a source of food for frontiersmen. If you saw a squirrel in the city, it was almost certainly being kept as a pet. One escaped pet squirrel in New York City, circa 1856, drew a crowd of hundreds according to one of the city papers—which called the squirrel an “unusual visitor.”

Around the same time, a sea change in our relationship with squirrels was already underway in Philadelphia. The city had released three squirrels in Franklin Square in 1847 and had provided them with food and boxes for shelter—and the people loved it. One visitor is quoted as saying “it was a wonder that [squirrels] are not in the public parks of all great cities.” In the years that followed, the trend spread to Boston and New Haven, where squirrels soon grew so fat from humans feeding them that they were falling out of the trees. Cities even started planting nut-bearing trees so that the squirrels would have their own food source.

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– http://gizmodo.com/the-fascinating-story-of-why-u-s-parks-are-full-of-squ-1478182563

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“The releases are a response to a new European Union copyright law that will extend copyright protection to 70 years — but only for recordings that were published within 50 years after they were made. So in the case of the Beatles, the group’s 1963 debut album, “Please Please Me,” already benefits from the copyright extension, but the unreleased session tapes — unused versions of the same songs on the album — did not, hence the release. Similarly, the BBC performances released on “Live at the BBC” (1994) and “On Air — Live at the BBC, Vol. 2” (2013) — are protected, but they represent less than half of the 275 performances the Beatles recorded for the BBC between 1962 and 1965. Another 44 of those recordings are included in the set to be released on Tuesday.”

– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/12/arts/european-copyright-laws-lead-to-rare-music-releases

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The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.

This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.

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– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/12/nytfrontpage/fda-to-phase-out-use-of-some-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-meat

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Let me tell you a little story about innovation and creativity. Years ago, I worked on a wiki-based project to find the first instance of ideas/techniques in video games (like the first game to use cameras as weapons, or the first game to have stealth as a play element). It excited me to dig to give credit to those who laid the foundations of ideas that we now take for granted. I couldn’t wait to show the world how creative and innovative these unknown game designers/developers were.

I went into it with much passion and excitement, but unexpectedly, it turned out that there were almost no “firsts”. Every time someone put up a game that was the first to do/contain something, there was another earlier game put up to replace it with a SLIGHTLY less sophisticated, or SLIGHTLY different version of the same thing. The gradient was so smooth and constant that eventually, the element we were focusing on lost meaning. It became an unremarkable point to address at all. We ended up constantly overwriting people’s work with smaller, less passionate articles, containing a bunch of crappy games that only technically were the first to do something in the crudest manner. Sometimes only aesthetically.

After a lot of time sunk into this project, I came to the conclusion that I was mistaken about innovation/creativity. It would have been a better project to track the path of ideas/techniques than to try to find the first instance of an idea/technique. I held innovation so highly for years before that, but after this project, I saw just how small it was. How it was but a tiny extension of the thoughts of millions before it. A tiny mutation of a microscopic speck that laid on top of a mountain. It was a valuable experience that helped me very much creatively.

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– http://simondlr.com/post/49353423006/on-creativity-and-innovation

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If modern American popular culture was built on a central pillar of mainstream entertainment flanked by smaller subcultures, what stands to replace it is a very different infrastructure, one comprising islands of fandom. With no standard daily cultural diet, we’ll tilt even more from a country united by shows like “I Love Lucy” or “Friends” toward one where people claim more personalized allegiances, such as to the particular bunch of viewers who are obsessed with “Game of Thrones” or who somehow find Ricky Gervais unfailingly hysterical, as opposed to painfully offensive.

The baby-boomer intellectuals who lament the erosion of shared values are right: Something will be lost in the transition. At the water cooler or wedding reception or cocktail party or kid’s soccer game, conversations that were once a venue for mutual experiences will become even more strained as chatter about last night’s overtime thriller or “Seinfeld” shenanigans is replaced by grasping for common ground. (“Have you heard of ‘The Defenders’? Yeah? What episode are you on?”) At a deeper level, a country already polarized by the echo chambers of ideologically driven journalism and social media will find itself with even less to agree on.

But it’s not all cause for dismay. Community lost can be community gained, and as mass culture weakens, it creates openings for the cohorts that can otherwise get crowded out. When you meet someone with the same particular passions and sensibility, the sense of connection can be profound. Smaller communities of fans, forged from shared perspectives, offer a more genuine sense of belonging than a national identity born of geographical happenstance.

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– http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115687/netflixs-war-mass-culture

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Companies can ban beards as part of their dress code to keep up a certain image, said Jennifer Sandberg, a partner in the Atlanta office of Fisher & Phillips, an employment law firm. And an employee can challenge that ban if he (or she, for that matter) argues that a beard is legally protected because of religion, race, disability or gender.

Employers can also ban beards for safety reasons, but that’s no issue on Wall Street. So I dare you, if you are an extraordinary man of finance, to grow one. It’s a way of saying: “I’m good enough at what I do and I’m honest enough — and I look so incredibly handsome this way — that I can get away with it.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/business/whiskers-unlimited-not-on-wall-st.html?ref=todayspaper

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“The success of “Catching Fire” and “Frozen” should put to rest the assumption that audiences don’t want to see female-centric movies, especially female-led action-adventure stories, an assumption that is often trotted out as a defense of gender imbalance on the screen. Earlier this year, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism reported that women were vastly underrepresented in the 100 top-grossing fictional films of 2012. Out of 4,475 speaking characters on screen, only 28.4 percent were female. The recent high-water mark was 2009, when 32.8 percent were female.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/opinion/heroines-at-the-box-office.html?ref=todayspaper

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