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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 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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THERE ARE 55,000 fast-food workers in New York — more than the entire population of Harrisburg, Pa. — and most, like Mr. Shoy, are struggling to stitch together a living in an industry where the median wage is $8.90 an hour. Last year, fast-food workers in Manhattan earned average pay of $19,000 — or about the cost of Mr. Shoy’s Honda. In Brooklyn, it was $15,500; on Staten Island, less.

Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.

According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.

The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/nyregion/older-workers-are-increasingly-entering-fast-food-industry.html?ref=todayspaper

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The question is, can anyone really stamp out the Dread Pirates? Like the rest of the Internet, the Dark Web is being shaped and reshaped by technological innovation.

First, there was Tor, short for The Onion Router, a suite of software and network computers that enables online anonymity. Edward J. Snowden used Tor to leak government secrets, and the network has been important for dissidents in places like Iran and Egypt. Of course, drug dealers and gunrunners prefer anonymity, too.

Then there is bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been skyrocketing in value lately. Bitcoin is basically virtual cash — anonymous, untraceable currency stuffed into a mobile wallet. The kind of thing that comes in handy when buying contraband.

It’s hardly news that there are bad actors on the Internet. People have been hacking this and stealing that for years. But the growth of the Dark Web is starting to attract attention in Washington. Senator Thomas R. Carper, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, warned recently that the authorities seemed to be playing Whac-a-Mole with websites like Silk Road. As soon as they hit one, up pops another. This, the senator said, “underscores the inescapable reality that technology is dynamic and ever-evolving and that government policy needs to adapt accordingly.

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– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/disruptions-a-digital-underworld-cloaked-in-anonymity/?ref=todayspaper

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None of the obstacles to limiting food stamps to healthier foods seem insurmountable. It is administratively simple to draw a line.

But not politically simple. It’s not just that people on food stamps are an enormous market for soda and junk food. Big Soda has unusual allies. Restricting purchases is not controversial with WIC, which exists to supplement nutrition. But it is with food stamps, which exist to supplement income.

“There are people in the anti-hunger community who support a soda tax in general because it affects everyone, but they oppose banning soda from SNAP because it affects only poor people,” said Marlene B. Schwartz, director of the Yale Rudd Center. “Their philosophical argument is, if it’s the right thing to do for everyone, then make it for everyone.”

Other approaches exist. A portion of food stamps benefits could be set aside for produce. Or states could use the guidelines they already follow — to little controversy — with sales taxes. More than half the states tax soda or junk food at a higher rate than the food tax rate — in effect, they do not consider them food.

“Instead of arguing about healthy versus unhealthy, I would almost rather say what counts as food,” said Ms. Schwartz. “States already figured out what is and isn’t food.”

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– http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/to-fight-obesity-a-carrot-and-a-stick/?ref=todayspaper

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FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program.

Now, though, the farm subsidies serve a quite different purpose. From 1995 to 2012, 1 percent of farms received about $1.5 million each, which is more than a quarter of all subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group. Some three-quarters of the subsidies went to just 10 percent of farms. These farms received an average of more than $30,000 a year — about 20 times the amount received by the average individual beneficiary last year from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, or SNAP, commonly called food stamps.

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– http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/the-insanity-of-our-food-policy/?ref=todayspaper

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It is not tipping that most needs to end, however. What needs to change is the federal law that sets the minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour, compared with an already measly hourly minimum of $7.25 for other workers. Under the law, as long as $2.13 an hour plus tips works out to at least $7.25 an hour, an employer is in compliance with national labor standards. In effect, a tip for the waitress is a wage subsidy for her employer.

In recent decades, the situation has become increasingly unfair. The sub-minimum “tipped” wage was first instituted in 1966, when it was set at 50 percent of the minimum wage. At the time, that was an improvement. Until then, the restaurant industry had successfully lobbied Congress to deny tipped workers any minimum-wage protection, leaving them to live on tips alone. Over the next 30 years, the tipped wage sometimes rose as high as 60 percent of the minimum wage, but it never fell below 50 percent, reaching its current level of $2.13 an hour in 1991.

Then, in 1996, the Republican-led Congress agreed to raise the minimum wage, but on the condition that the tipped wage remain frozen. It has not budged since, and today it is 29 percent of the minimum wage.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/tips-and-poverty.html?ref=todayspaper

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education, policy

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In Virginia, the top-ranked college based on graduates’ first-year income isn’t the nationally known Washington and Lee University, the University of Richmond, the College of William and Mary or even Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. It’s the Jefferson College of Health Sciences.

“People are desperate to measure something, so they seize on the wrong things,” Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia (PayScale, 76), told me this week. “I’m not against people making a living or prospering. But if the objective of an education is to ‘know yourself,’ it’s going to be hard to measure that.”

Professor Edmundson is author of the recent book “Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education,” which argues that education should transform students by challenging and expanding their conceptions of themselves. “Self-realization doesn’t just mean sitting around discussing Plato and Socrates,” he said. “It means figuring out what job or profession would I be best at and what I would enjoy. Too many people are just aiming for a high salary. They struggle through college, they don’t like their classes, they don’t like their job and they end up failing. If they had taken the time to discover themselves, they might have ended up happy and prosperous.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/business/economy/nice-college-but-whatll-i-make-when-i-graduate.html?ref=todayspaper

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