Headlines from January 9, 2013
- Virginia’s governor wants to remove the state’s gas tax and begin taxing alternative-fuel cars.
- The world’s largest scale model of the solar system actually covers all of Sweden.
- Money can’t buy you happiness, though it will get you 2/3 of the way. Map of the best and worst countries to be born into today.
- Writer calls Richard Marx “shameless,” prompting Richard Marx to meet him at a bar for a showdown. #longreads
- On the unlikely campaign to reclaim the scariest word in Islam: jihad.
- Richard Blanco will be America’s first Latino inaugural poet.
- Electoral-prediction guru Nate Silver does Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” and talks burritos.
- Majority of economists believe we should tax people for doing annoying, damaging things.
- “And now I’m going to tell you exactly how to get onto The Price Is Right.”
- As new allegation surfaces, Lance Armstrong says he’ll go on the Oprah Network next week.
- New York’s 3,100-mile “self-transcendence” race requires contestants to run 5,649 laps around a half-mile block in 52 days.
- Guide to the norovirus— “transforming ordinarily carefree human beings into spluttering, sulphurous geysers of molten waste.”
- Enormous internet appreciation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
- This past year was the hottest ever recorded in the U.S., and the second-worst on the Climate Extremes Index.
- Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology adds an extra color code at the top end of the temperature scale.
- Tennis players protest being forced to play in Australia’s extreme heat.
- Wall Street Journal reporters reconstruct the life and attack of the New Delhi rape victim.
- Minting a debt-correcting trillion-dollar coin is illegal and stupid, and can we please stop discussing it. #opinions
- Krugman: We all hope the coin’s prospect will simply take the debt ceiling off the table. But if not, mint the darn coin.
- Pictures of Kim Jong-Un being presented things to look at, including socks, escalators, children.
- It looked to me like it was rather lonely. First film of a giant squid in its natural habitat. #video
- Cheap places to visit this year on the U.S. dollar: Costa Rica, India, Vietnam, Bulgaria.
- Now that more than a hundred Michelin-starred restaurants serve Nespresso coffee, four coffee snobs blind-test push-button espresso against the handmade variety.
- Six children handicapped like race horses. #tmn
- “In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ Wifi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.” via
- New fork begins vibrating when it catches you eating too quickly.
- To overhaul an old Chicago cold-storage building, the entire inside had to be defrosted. #photography