“We’ve talked before about the immense popularity of “sentimental” country music in Nigeria, so just for kicks I just decided to assemble a sampler pack of indigenous takes on that particular sound.”

“As the number of ambitious bars has proliferated, so have their ways of doing things. Interviews with dozens of bartenders around the country suggest that the cocktail movement is becoming so diverse and sophisticated that it encompasses several distinct approaches and philosophies.”

‘Researchers learned that ants that perform specific tasks are no more efficient than regular ants. “It turns out,” said scientist Anna Dornhaus, “that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job.”’

‘When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.’

Jack Black as Jesus!

Good question!

Do I need another food website? Probably not. But this one has some immediate appeals. I like that it knew I was in Chicago and that the “Dish Roulette” which randomly selected a review constrained the results to Chicago.

Via Sasha Frere-Jones, New Order fans obsessively document a long list of problems with a new set of remasters

“Select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot. Any Amazon EC2 customer can access this data… Common use cases for these public data sets would include scientific research, academic studies, and market research. Our goal is to provide easy access to commonly used public data sets like the human genome, astronomy data, and the United States census information.”

A series of Rube Goldberg videos.

‘There I was with the biggest hair on the planet. Oh yeah. Big, big hair. It does that in the tropics. It gets big. And I mean American big, baby. And there I was with my big, American hair, finding faith in American democracy in the unlikeliest of places. Sitting in the Salon de Protocol at the Convention Palace in Havana’s Miramar district, all I had to do was tell the five-foot-six bespectacled man who sat in the chair across from me in his khaki dress militaries, that these words would not be published until after the American election. And with that, granting his first ever interview to a foreign journalist since the beginning of the 1957 Cuban revolution, President Raul Castro smiled warmly and simply said, “We want Obama.”‘

“The Obama library will be a big “get” and I’m sure the lobbying machine is already being built in Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. But Obama’s early days as a little-known community organizer were spent on the far South Side. Back then, his strategy meetings took place at a McDonald’s just three blocks due south of the Pullman factory. The presidential library would bring the kind of investment, equity, attention–and yes, change–that the Far South Side, and Chicago, sorely needs.”