Last week, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) reintroduced a bill that would end funding for abstinence-only-before-marriage sex education.

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Scientists have developed a fork that makes music when you eat off it. Called the EaTheremin, it emits a different tone depending on what kind of food you’re eating.

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Could the newly invented “flipback” book—a lightweight reincarnation of the printed book—be the end to e-readers?

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Living in L.A. has its dangers—including the risk of near-fatal snakebite.

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You can’t escape industrial pollution, even on Mount Everest.

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Quinoa is good for you—and its surging popularity is bad for many Bolivians.

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We shouldn’t fret over meltdowns, Seth Godin reassures us. Remember, coal production kills 4,000 times as many people as nuclear power. Tom Engelhardt, meanwhile, is not so easily reassured. And the interactive graphics whizzes at the Wall Street Journal show what your local nuclear evacuation zone looks like.

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The celebrity hairdo, sans célébrités.

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Photographer Chris Jordan found out what happens when plastic meets the G.I. tracts of North Pacific birds: adorable, cinematic tragedy.

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Have you read Think Quarterly, Google’s new free magazine?

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Robert Reich on the Republicans’ big lies about jobs.

The rapscallions over at The Atlantic Wire have compiled a list of subversive tricks for slipping through the soon-to-be-hoisted pay wall at NYTimes.com. Like all impenetrable fortresses, the Times’ website has a few weak girders and exploitable portals.

If you’re not a paying subscriber, the pay wall will cap your visits to articles at 20 per month starting next week—after that you’ll need to either get out your credit card or don your digital ninja suit. It seems the best way to invade will be through Facebook or Twitter—visits which, according to The Atlantic Wire, “won’t count towards your allotted monthly articles.” If you can’t wait for a dispatch or column to appear on your news feed, head over to Google and search for it. After you reach the 20-article limit, you’ll still be able to read five articles per day found on Google. When you’ve exhausted those five, try a different search engine or clear your browser’s cache. (Tedious, yes, but infinitely free). Finally, one feisty programmer made a simple bookmarklet called NYTClean that allows your browser to ignore the pay wall altogether.

If these back-door tricks make you uneasy, buy a subscription to the newspaper. “As it stands,” explains the Wire, “the deluxe, access-anywhere digital subscription costs $8.75 a week. Weekday home delivery, however, is only $6.20 per week in Manhattan (it’s a bit more expensive outside New York) and it comes with the same digital access. Additionally, a Friday-Sunday subscription also comes with all-digital access and starts at $7.60 per week.” You’re also entitled to basic, unlimited NYTimes.com access if you subscribe to the Sunday edition.

Source: The Atlantic Wire 

Image jphilipg, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Former military interrogator Matthew Alexander urges Rep. Peter King of New York to stop demonizing a group of people who’ve made sacrifices for the U.S. at home and abroad.

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Now that the shootings in Tucson are yesterday’s news, states and the federal government can continue slashing their mental health budgets without a peep from the mainstream media.

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With an NFL lockout looming, radical sports scribe Dave Zirin explains why true sports fans, labor activists, and progressives should stand proudly with the NFL players.

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The cerebral environmental writing of Loren Eiseley is too often overlooked, say his fans. Read one admirer’s tribute to the unsung eco-lit pioneer.

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Banksy meets Angry Birds in a brilliant design mashup: Angry Birdsky.

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Losers: Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Winners: rappers, ravers, and metalheads.

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Cartoonist Mark Fiore weighs in on the aggregation of aggregators in the Huffington Post-AOL merger, and what it means for what we used to call journalism.

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Have you ever seen a rapper take on greenwashing and eco-consumerism? Enter Sims, with his new video for “One Dimensional Man.” 

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A fabulous archive of the BBC's interviews with great writers. The general BBC archive itself is chockful of terrific stuff.

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Finally, the masters of heavy metal pay tribute to Old Blue Eyes.

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One of the most touching photo projects in recent years: KayLynn Devaney's The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings.

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What's an “Intellectual clutch bag,” you ask? This.

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On Libya:

The press has had a hard time figuring out what’s happening on the ground in Libya, but The Atlantic’s InFocus photo blog can give you a glimpse.

If McCain had been elected president, would we be invading Libya right now?

Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Kadafi, Qadhafi, Qazzafi, Qadhdhafi, or Qaththafi. How do you spell that guy’s name anyways?

An addictive dashboard developed by Al Jazeera tracks tweets from protestors in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain.

And, in case you missed it on our Tumblr: the sad clown Gaddafi.

After shopping himself around a bit in 2006—the year CBS decided not to renew is contract—long-time anchor Dan Rather found himself without a home and without many takers within the ranks of the mainstream due to a story he had done on President Bush’s National Guard service. Unwilling to go quietly into the night in what would have amounted to a forced retirement, Rather went looking for an independent station that might take him in.

He found an unlikely ally in Mark Cuban, the noisy owner of the Dallas Mavericks—an NBA franchise—and billionaire from the dot com era. Cuban, the owner of HDNet, home to an odd combination of programming that includes ultimate fighting and Girls Gone Wild shows, said that he “liked the fact that [Rather] was a lightning rod” in those days following his exit from CBS.

In the March/April Issue of Mother Jones, Jim Rendon tells readers how this strange marriage came to be. In a profile that is as much about Cuban as it is about Rather, Rendon shows two men driven by their own interests and just where such drive can lead today when it comes to hard-hitting journalism. As Mother Jones puts it, “the former CBS anchorman is still kicking ass and winning Emmys. But with his exposés sandwiched between pro wrestling and Girls Gone Wild, is anybody watching?”

Source: Mother Jones 

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, licensed under Creative Commons. 

According to Pew Charitable Trust’s 2008 “State of the News Media” special report on public attitudes toward the news media, “Majorities of Americans continued to say that journalists are often inaccurate (55 percent), do not care about the people they report on (53 percent), are biased (55 percent), one-sided (66 percent) and try to cover up their mistakes (63 percent).” It’s clear that much of the public deems journalists untrustworthy. As a recent grad from a journalism school, it’s painful to admit how fallible the news industry can be. One near-omnipresent snare for journalists—and a scourge of journalistic integrity—is the facile use of press releases to write stories, what has been dubbed “churnalism.”

The UK-based Media Standards Trust, “an independent registered charity which aims to foster high standards in news media on behalf of the public,” developed a website called Churnalism so that journalists and consumers can discern spin from news. “The site compresses all articles published on [UK] national newspaper websites . . . and then stores them in a fast access database,” according to the Trust’s website. “If the engine finds any articles where the similarity is greater than 20 percent, then it suggests the article may be churn.”

Expecting a snide, skeptical, uninterested response from the ostensibly guilty journalists, Media Standards Trust baited the news cycle with a discreetly published, fake press release for an unbelievable product. The Trust’s Martin Moore elaborated during an interview on WNYC’s On the Media:

Chris [Atkins, a collaborator with the Trust] invented what he called the “chastity garter belt,” which a woman would put around her thigh and had built-in technology which would record, by various clever scientific means, like her, her rising pulse rate and, and moisture levels on her leg, whether or not she was about to be unfaithful. And if she was, it would text a message to her partner warning him, so he could rush back and either forestall or catch, catch her before she did so.

Like hungry goldfish, the press gobbled the plump worm dangling before them. Chicago’s WGN-TV ran a short segment and, as Moore detailed during the WNYC interview, “The story was picked up by The Times of India, in the States, in Slovakia, in Greece, in Israel, all around the world.”

That, folks, is called egg on the face.

As an end note, just a reminder the public shouldn’t only be concerned with sneaky, unverified pitches from snake-oil retailers. “Not all churnalism comes from commercial sources,” warns the Columbia Journalism Review. “Much of it has political sources: public authorities trying to spin bad news, medical firms trying to obscure poor results, and political lobbying groups.”

For what it’s worth, 55 percent of this post was cut and pasted from various websites and not independently fact-checked. 

Sources: Columbia Journalism Review, On the Media 

Image by quinn.anya, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Fences made of cluster-bomb casings, water-buffalo wading in pools made from bomb craters, and canoes built from fuel tanks dropped by bombers. Welcome to Laos, five decades after a U.S. bombing campaign.

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 Why the uprisings in the Middle East are just the first tremor in an oilquake to come.

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 Could you quit Sarah Palin cold turkey? One reporter for the Washington Post did...and lived to tell the story.

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BLDGBLOG’s interview with China Miéville that explores the author’s socially nuanced, politically radical, concept-smashing, gristly urban fantasy.

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This week the White House released a new report on the status of women in America. The Atlantic asks, “But then what?” 

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Can’t afford a trip to Barbados but longing to see the sun? Check out this awesome solar flare, recorded on video by NASA last week. You can practically feel it.

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How one man thinks “congressional Republicans are badly mistaken in denouncing public radio as a contemptible source of liberal propaganda and snooty elitism that the nation would be better off without” but is all for eliminating funding for it.

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The Obamas make history as the first First Family to pour homebrewed beer in the White House. Will hops be the next crop in the White House garden?

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We are the frogs in the pot of boiling water that is Facebook. We never notice until it’s too late.