GQ compiled a list of the windbags who qualify as the 25 least influential people alive. Among the useless: Hosni Mubarak, Harrison Ford, Amy Chua, and Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus. (Oh, and the guy pictured above.)

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The coolest artists’ retreats in the world: the Fogo Island Studios.

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Some schools say computers don’t belong in classrooms.

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Bisexuality isn’t a lie.

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Environmental journalism doesn’t always have to be tragic—or does it?

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Local-food smackdown: Anna Lappé takes on economist Steve Sexton, a.k.a. the Freakonomics guy, after he crunches the numbers and determines that Big Ag should feed the world.

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Some people step on ants and vacuum up spiders. Others build overwintering structures for insects.

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Would mauve roses convince you to accept biotechnology?

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Race to the bottom: India’s maiden Grand Prix, reports Caravan, arrives in the middle of a simmering controversy over land and development.

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There’s a certain sort of sardonic humor in the visual history of the airline safety card.

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Created by the founder of PayPal and a philosopher who wears purple pants to work, Palantir is the CIA’s secret weapon against global terrorism.

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Pointlessly gendered products. Who knew women sleep better with pink earplugs?

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Science nerds, rejoice! Scientific American is offering its complete archive of magazines from 1845 to 1909 online for a limited time. Included in the issues are lists of new inventions: the December 18, 1909 edition includes an antiseptic toothbrush holder and adjustable candelabra, with an artificial foot and baby gate on the list of patents pending.

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Are scribbled drawings by the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten as important as ancient hieroglyphics and cave paintings?

Image by the Office of Governor Tim Pawlenty, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Oyster mushrooms have a taste for dirty disposable diapers. Would you have a taste for the resulting fungi? 

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Ever sassy and sardonic, The Hairpin offers a list of online dating’s pros and cons.

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“I’ve got nothing to hide” ultimately makes a poor pro-surveillance argument. Here’s how to go up against it.

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You provide the punchline: Tim Pawlenty gives a speech to a libertarian think tank . . .

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The Atlantic wishes a happy birthday to one of its co-founders, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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Super Granny.

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Discover magazine found that the phrase “blind as a bat” was more appropriate than we originally thought. “By making clicks with their tongue and listening to the rebounding echoes,” some blind people can learn to “‘see’ the world in sound, in the same way that dolphins and bats can.”

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NASA turns focus to deep space.

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These pajamas will watch you sleep.

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Are the posters in your city as cool as the posters in Amsterdam? These come from a poster initiative by Jarr Geerligs, “professional dreamer and realizer.”

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All human civilizations have collapsed. Start preparing now for ours.

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Why don’t more African-Americans visit national parks? James Mills hits the road to find out.

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The future of egalitarian parenting: male lactation.

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Big Ag is trying to outlaw farm photos taken by whistleblowing meddlers. But the Farmarazzi can’t be kept down.

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A hospital in Slovakia prescribes music therapy for newborn babies when they’re separated from their mothers.

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A high-schooler debunks the misleading physics of My Little Pony.

Fighter planes rip across the sky to a backdrop of soaring violins. Freckled, pensive children stare blankly at the camera. An American flag flaps robustly, confidently in the wind. And above it all, a man speaks urgently of freedom, accomplishment, legacy, and extraordinary strength. This trailer—clichéd in all the effective ways—isn’t for a World War II-themed blockbuster. It’s for a book called Courage to Stand—an autobiography and platform piece by former Minnesota governor and 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty. Underwhelmed?

Pawlenty is just the latest author to schlep his book with the help of an emerging visual medium, the book trailer. (Although, in T-Paw’s case, there are also some presidential aspirations thinly veiled by the commercial.) The medium gives authors a chance to defend their own book, its merits and motivations, with sleek moving images and charming anecdotes. We’ve even plugged a trailer made for experimental literature by Jonathan Safran Foer. And why not? We all pay $50 a month for broadband for a reason, right? Shouldn’t advertisements be delivered to us, not in static block of text, but in streaming high-definition video?

At least one author isn’t sold on the new sales technique. After seeing another author’s book trailer, Stuart Ross—Canadian writer, professor, and literary editor of This Magazine—puts it more bluntly: “For some reason, it just bugs the shit out of me. Not Gary [Barwin’s] trailer itself—the fact that now we have to make goddamn book trailers! It’s not enough to write a book. To do launches and readings. To tweet and BlechBook. Now we have to be movie stars too.” The quote comes from a column in subTerrain, in which Ross chronicles the production of his first book trailer.

I have ten minutes before my class starts. I scrawl “Stuart Ross Book Trailer” on a  piece of paper. I open up PhotoBooth on my Mac and hold up my sign, wiggle it around a bit, put it down, and pick up my book. “Hi, I’m Stuart Ross and this is my fucking book. It’s called Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. And it’s got stories in it. And I hope you’ll buy it.” I grimace and fill the screen with my sign again, muttering. It’s my first book trailer and it’s 25 seconds long.

The video was eventually picked up by Huffington Post for an article about the best and worst book trailers, which garnered Ross’ video about 3,200 views. He concludes: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you put your mind and about ten minutes to it.”

Source: subTerrain (article not yet available online)

Former Governor Tim Pawlenty was on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart last night. Per Stewart’s request the two stayed clear of the current debate regarding civility in U.S. politics that has dominated the airwaves since last Saturday’s tragic shooting. Instead, the interview circled around one point that Pawlenty either simply did not understand or just refused to answer. Stewart posed the question of whether the Obama administration is fundamentally something different in terms of tyranny, as many on the right would have it. Or—given examples such as No Child Left Behind, enacted under the Bush II administration—is the rhetoric around Big Government simply a tool to fire up a voting bloc, administered when it is politically helpful and otherwise ignored when it would be hurtful. In other words, where’s the consistency? The former governor somehow gets out of the 20 minute interview without ever directly answering the question. 

In regards to that discussion of civility that this interview managed to avoid, it’s worth taking a look back at Stewart’s speech at the end of his Rally to Restore Sanity late last year. Some, apparently, have been trying to talk about this for a while now.

Source: The Daily Show