Global capitalism has worked many wonders, but where in the free world can one see 10,000 children dancing in synchronisation, dressed as eggs?

Sun, sex and Stalinism: Holidays in North Korea

I doubt there will ever be a stick-shift revival in the United States, no matter how much gas prices and temperatures soar. Gearheads will always adore manuals, but they're in the minority—most Americans prefer the ease of an automatic, especially on gridlocked freeways. Fewer than 9 percent of new cars in the United States are manuals, and that figure is set to drop to 6 percent by 2012. And rare is the driving school that teaches teenage newbies how to work a clutch.

Bear in mind:

Drivers apply their brakes between 10 and 25 percent more than they need to!

A single solitary driver, if they stop "competing" and instead adopt some unusual driving habits, can actually wipe away some of the frustrating traffic patterns on a highway. That "nice" noncompetitive driver can erase traffic waves. I suspect that the opposite is also true: normal competitive behavior CREATES the traffic waves.

From the recent archive:

Although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

Jesus Would Drive a Stick Shift

'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' has become an almost unquestioned mantra of our time. It is claimed that recycling will save the planet. Less energy and fewer resources would be used in manufacture and disposal, and recycled or composted food waste would reduce methane emissions from landfills. More pressing from the government's point of view is the need to meet landfill reduction targets. ... Finally, it is claimed that recycling saves money, therefore increasing economic competitiveness.

It can be questioned, however, whether municipal (household) recycling is worth it.

Recycling: Reducing waste or waste of time?

This essay is what makes "Omnivore's Dilemma" so great.

Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions about what we're really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.

So this is the biography of my cow.

Power Steer, by Michael Pollan

Creep everyone out in your guest bathroom. Each soap is shaped like a little hand!

The soaps range from 1/2” to 2”. You will get at least 10 hands (at least/about 100 grams of soap). This soap is made from goat’s milk and vegetable glycerin with a light scent. Your hands come packaged in a pretty bag ... all ready for gifting to a friend with dirty paws!

Hand Soap

From David Dobbs, writing in the New York Times.

"People often ask me about the significance of small first studies like this," says Dr. Thomas Insel, who as director of the National Institute of Mental Health enjoys an unparalleled view of the discipline. "I usually tell them: 'Don't bother. We don't know enough.' But this is different. Here we know enough to say this is something significant. I really do believe this is the beginning of a new way of understanding depression."

This essay appears in The Best American Science Writing 2007.

A Depression Switch?

From Atul Gawande, writing in The New Yorker.

How childbirth went industrial.

...

In a sense, there is a tyranny to the score. Against the score for a newborn child, the mother’s pain and blood loss and length of recovery seem to count for little. We have no score for how the mother does, beyond asking whether she lived or not—no measure to prod us to improve results for her, too. Yet this imbalance, at least, can surely be righted. If the child’s well-being can be measured, why not the mother’s, too? Indeed, we need an Apgar score for everyone who encounters medicine: the psychiatry patient, the patient on the hospital ward, the person going through an operation, and the mother in childbirth. My research group recently came up with a surgical Apgar score—a ten-point surgical rating based on the amount of blood loss, the lowest heart rate, and the lowest blood pressure that a patient experiences during an operation. We still don’t know if it’s perfect. But all patients deserve a simple measure that indicates how well or badly they have come through—and that pushes the rest of us to innovate.

This essay appears in The Best American Science Writing 2007.

Annals of Medicine: The Score

A respected scholar and USC law professor reveals her journey through the horrors and demons of mental illness. She has schizophrenia.

Elyn Saks has written a memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, about which Publishers Weekly wrote:

In this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California, demonstrates a novelist's skill of creating character, dialogue and suspense. From her extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer (diagnosis: Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation; prognosis: Grave), Saks carries the reader from the early little quirks to the full blown falling apart, flying apart, exploding psychosis. Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, as Saks shows, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on.

This is heavy reading, but Saks's account will certainly stand out in its field.

Kirkus sums up its book review thusly:

Worthy, but often a snooze.

A secret life of madness

Baby Einstein makes you stupid! Science says so.

Buyer beware: Videos aimed at improving infant and toddler language skills are not as beneficial for language learning as they claim to be, according to a new study.

Rather than helping youngsters, such products may actually hurt their vocabularies.

Watch out for sharp edges on DVDs!

Update: Full text of the paper, Associations between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children Under Age 2 Years, is freely available.

Einstein Drains Baby Brains

Among the most expensive meals in America is the perfectly crafted sushi at Manhattan's Masa. But sushi is also one of the country's most workaday meals—found in corporate cafeterias and delis alike. Sushi has saturated nearly every level of our food economy: How did this ostensibly Japanese food come to be so dominant? This season, two serious-minded books examine how sushi got to be one of our reflexive dining options, and how our taste for rice and fish affects our oceans.

Talking sushi with Trevor Corson and Sasha Issenberg