This helpful ad appeared alongside my gmail:

I think English is the real barrier here.

This week’s award goes to the NYT for the following:
Center of E. Coli Outbreak Is Also Center of Anxiety
I assumed it was real calm and laidback there.
Seriously, contaminated spinach has made 170 people sick and investigators have yet to determine the cause. In response, national news outlets have resorted either to speculation or to […]

In a truly groundbreaking piece of reporting, NYT’s Julia Moskin reveals today that you might be able to get some food at a supermarket. It may seem impossible, but if you follow Moskin’s instructions carefully, you can enter a supermarket and exit safely with some pickles, or spreadable boursin cheese. If you don’t mind dropping […]

NYT’s Readers’ Comments feature offers an odd hybrid: all the vitriol of a blog, with the staid design of an NYT letters section. I’ve been following the comments more closely lately in the wake of Harvard’s decision to eliminate early admission. Some have applauded Harvard — and Princeton, which has followed suit — for removing […]

Why don’t young women want to be feminists? I’ll tell you why not: they think feminists have to be ugly. To put it less crudely, they think that the feminist movement has no place for a woman who cares — as many women do — about being attractive. I always thought those young women […]

Some scientists object to CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider because it might create black holes that would eat the world. In addition to these mini-black holes, the LHC could conceivably produce stable strangelets — balls of tightly-packed strange quarks that might gobble normal matter like Pacman — or even quantum vacuum collapse, in which the […]

As a character trait, it’s admirable. It can keep a kid in school or sober up an addict. But in the arena of political rhetoric, it’s touted as the solution to poverty, crime, low graduation rates, and even sexually transmitted diseases. And this is where things get ugly.
First of all, it’s very difficult to […]