My coffeehouse nightmare. - By Michael Idov - Slate Magazine
http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/?dupe=with_honor

I'm saving this for the next time I get that open-a-coffee-house/Mac-tech-shop urge.

"I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home.

An interactive inquiry about why America hasn't been attacked again. By Timothy NoahUpdated Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 8:59 AM ET

This is the first in a series of eight essays exploring why the United States suffered no follow-up terror attacks after 9/11.

Joe Biden created the group "I Love ‘I Love You, Man,' Man.".

News organizations have done an admirable job of recapping the first 100 days of the Obama administration. But rarely do we stumble across a primary source like Barack Obama's own Facebook feed. Scroll down for the full story.

Barack Obama Sent Somali Pirates a Trio of Snipers

Ha ha ha ha ha!

General online magazine by and about women

- By John Swansburg and Jeremy Singer-Vine - Slate Magazine

hat 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dove

Unresolvable

At their best they resemble found art, an index of first lines of poems that have yet to be written: mundial marching backwards toward the source of the four winds 9:45 AM Jul 17, 2007 stonelove27 I am standing behind my nose... 11:59 AM Sep 5, 2007 ladydrea Marcus Aurelius! You are loved! (I'm typing now...) 10:53 AM Jun 7, 2008 newdayrising sold your soul to Jesus for a carton of yoghurt. He doesn't even like yoghurt that much. 12:48 PM Mar 31, 2008 boustanyn Getting ready for the third phase of life on this earth.... 12:51 PM Nov 17, 2008 bkennedy weeping gently 2:47 PM Mar 30, 2007 In at least one instance, two orphan tweets appear to have been in conversation. marcbresseel getting ready for cannes - printing latest briefing - I hate folding my shirts 8:36 AM Jun 14, 2008 Kolcott @Marcbresseel You fold your shirts? 9:13 AM Jul 10, 2008 A lone call followed by a lone response; a social network of two.

Which got us to thinking—there must be a legion of Twitterers out there who sign up, tweet once, and never return. In the spirit of the great blog One Post Wonder, "a collection of blogs that have one post," we set out to find these orphaned tweets. Different people obviously have different tweet metabolisms, but we decided that any account that's been dormant for at least six months is fair game. We found several thousand of them.

"An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily"

Like a human social network, the news tends to cluster around popular topics. One clump of dots might relate to a flavor-of-the-week tabloid story (the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping) while another might center on Afghanistan, Iraq, and the military. Most stories are more closely related that you think. The Dugard kidnapping, for example, connects to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who connects to the White House, which connects to Afghanistan. To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that topic and which other topics it connects to in the network. You can use the magnifying glass icons to zoom in and out. You can also drag the dots around if they overlap. A more detailed description of how News Dots works is available below the graphic.

gre

slate article on typekit

"Typeface designers and font fanciers have new reason for optimism though. The past year has seen a surge of Web-browser innovation. Now, most major browsers—including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera—recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages."

@font-face

great overview: how to blog effectively

How to blog

Quick hints on how to get started

'I called and e-mailed a half-dozen of my favorite bloggers to ask how they blog so well, and I combined their ideas with the best advice from HuffPo. Behold—my own complete guide to blogging.'

A real-life case of using Google as an ad broker.

RT @BBHLabs: How to run a TV ad, reaching 1.3m viewers, for only $1300, using new Google TV Ads - http://j.mp/bgdxLa (via @paryshnikov) – Ben Shaw (BenShaw) http://twitter.com/BenShaw/statuses/11419964355

TwitterBot

Amid the many uncertainties loosed by the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, one forecast seemed beyond doubt: Islamist terrorists would strike the United States again—and soon.

Clear overview of the prevailing theories about why no major attacks have occurred since 9/11/01.

Totally serious - a little mad but interesting

A history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.

The closest thing to 'hello' in the Klingon language is 'What do you want?' Awesome. http://bit.ly/LPtZS [from http://twitter.com/ellaminnowpea/statuses/1803100377]

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Over the last few months, I've been trying to educate myself on our financial crisis. To that end, I dropped in on a class at Yale that examined real estate finance and the roots of the federal government's involvement in the mortgage industry. "A lot of people have the impression that home prices only go up," my professor, economist Robert Shiller, told us. But this was clearly wrong: Shiller put up a graph showing American home prices during the last 100 years. Over much of the century, the line fluctuates wildly; then, around 2000, it begins an unprecedented, inexplicable spike, even larger than the run-up in prices after World War II.* This was an eye-opener. Anyone who'd seen this graph three or four years ago should have known we were headed for trouble. Who knew school could be this useful? Perhaps Alan Greenspan should have taken this class.

Academic Earth's online video lectures - - By Farhad Manjoo -

It's like Hulu, but for nerds. Many of the professors are great teachers, and, unlike in college, I can go to class on my own time—which ensures that I'm not too sleepy to understand what's going on. Academic Earth achieves something like what Google was trying to pull off with Knol, the messy encyclopedialike project that the search engine launched last year. Both sites let you learn from recognized experts rather than from the anonymous crowds who populate Wikipedia. But Academic Earth bests Knol, because the experts here aren't just throwing up their opinions whenever the mood strikes them. Instead, they're doing their jobs—teaching in actual classrooms, at recognized universities, to real, live, students.