Smoking, obesity, and happiness can be contagious. More …
How Kate Roiphe silenced a serious discussion about sexism.
When Kramer hailed the joys of smacking golf balls into the ocean in a season five episode of Seinfeld, he failed to mention the damaging environmental effect of submerging plastic golf balls into oceans that are already heavily polluted. Enter the Ecobioball, a new golf ball from Spanish company Albus Gold S.L. that allows... 
The Tata Nano, the diminutive automobile that retails for an even tinier $2,000, made a big splash when it was released in India last year (might it destroy the world, we pondered). Now there's speculation that the vehicle might be making its way to the streets of America. It boasts a mere 35 horse power, but manages a very... 
Ever since I met Ruby, stories about autism have taken on new meaning.
Her family's struggle to find an appropriate school where Ruby's needs can be met is at the crux of the dilemma our nation currently faces. And as more kids are diagnosed with autism (1 in 100 American 8-year-olds), the issue takes on a greater sense of... 
A designer tries to understand the disparate images of Dubai’s financial troubles and its skyscrapers.
design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday.
“Dubai Shares See Biggest Fall This Year” read the headline in the business... 
We all know Washington Wizards point guard Gilbert Arenas screwed himself by brandishing a gun in his team's locker room late last year. What many outside the Beltway probably don't know is that D.C. public schools are getting screwed, as well.
Since the 2006-2007 NBA season, Arenas has donated nearly $400,000 in money to D.C. schools... 
We need a new generation of young, local butchers to take up the cleavers and get to work.
By now, you’re probably tired of hearing about bacon explosions, bacon cocktails, and the big bad bacon backlash that’s been launched against overly pious eaters everywhere. It’s time to get down to the belly of the matter: If we want to... 
You don't have to own a Prius to have a fun, distracting dashboard display that tells you how you're driving. Garmin is going to release the ecoRoute in 2010. It will use your car's computer and GPS information to give you real-time feedback on braking, acceleration, and other factors that affect the efficiency of your driving. 
When people champion transformations in urban areas, they often words like "renewal" and "revitalization," as rundown buildings get gutted, repainted, and reincarnated as sparkly lofts. But what's sometimes ignored is the forced removal of the people who inhabit those rundown (and often historic) spaces. Two years ago, the... 
Yesterday on Twitter and Facebook we asked our friends what startups we should keep a lookout for in 2010. We collected some of our favorite responses below. We ask a question to our Twitter and Facebook faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD or a fan, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.
Check out... 
An interesting graphic over at The Economist. It chronicles the number of overseas students that study in America.
With all this talk of changing security procedures—with extra checks required of passengers from 14 countries—I can't help but wonder if going forward, the same will apply to students that want to study here.
We saw it after... 
According to number crunching and pretty visualizations by PoliticalMathBlog, Cash for Clunkers was big for Japan.
"As I was looking through the Cash for Clunkers data, I was fascinated by the extent to which it seemed that the clunkers being turned in were disproportionally from companies based in the US. So I dug into the data and found... 
Morning Roundup:
From the Los Angeles Times: Governor's Call For Giving Colleges Priority Over Prisons Faces Hard Political Tests
Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to save money by privatizing prisons and the wisdom of linking the funding of universities and corrections facilities present formidable obstacles in Sacramento.
From The... 
Tracing the slow-food movement back to its feisty Italian roots.
Like so many other aspects of modern life, slow food can trace its roots to McDonald’s. It was 1986, and the world’s largest fast-food chain had just opened its 9,007th location—at the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. This was a square with a fountain that dated back... 
Some crafts don’t benefit from modern conveniences.
Collodion process
Somewhere between the daguerreotype and the Polaroid on the timeline of photographic technology you’ll find the wet-plate collodion process. Collodion photography involves coating a piece of glass with a chemical solution, exposing it to light through a... 
James Fowler explains how smoking, obesity, and happiness can be contagious.
In their pioneering research, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have shown how happiness, obesity, and smoking travel through our social networks. Their work has captured the media’s attention. In September, The New York Times Magazine devoted a... 
I'm en route to the promised land—otherwise known as Sausalito, California—to attend a three-day conference on envisioning the future of higher education.
This year's DGREE summit, sponsored by Lens Ventures and the Lumina Foundation, will bring together forces that don't normally converge when the topic is education—venture capitalists and... 
The Biosphere 2, a closed environment built in the late 1980s in Arizona to study how humans and ecosystems worked together, was beset by all manner of problems from the moment it opened. The project was abandoned and the property sold to a developer in 2007. Now the structure is in a state of decay, being taken over by the forces of nature it... 
After a series of bike-auto accidents, including several deaths, the city of Portland, Oregon, took action, installing 14 green bike boxes at city intersections to raise driver awareness of cyclists on the road and to ease some of the hostility. The question is, do boxes actually make any real difference? The short answer, according to research... 
I would totally drive one in and around my city of Philadelphia.
Wendy, fanfiction, by its very definition, is fiction written by fans of a particular subject, and using themes, characters, settings, and …
I suppose I'd need more time (!) to think about this, but something I always notice is the lack of "ruins"/older architecture in America. I …
Young chefs/butchers are popping up all over the food scene. Check out Food & Wine's 'Best Chefs of 2009' list …
A very refresshing article to read. In today's world, we need to understand that interfaith dialog is not dialog between faiths, it's a …
