If we discount the difficulties in accurately estimating the current value of the Jolie or the Kardashian, we find ourselves with a helpful new calculus to understand attention and aid. If Somalia is receiving $72 per capita in aid, but needs much more to prevent famine, how much aid could we expect if Kim Kardashian testified about hunger in the Horn of Africa?

Assume that the relationship between attention and aid is linear. If Angelina Jolie registers at 0.35 Kardashians of attention, and can command a 27x increase in aid, we can expect Kim Kardashian to generate 2.85 times as much, or $5554 per capita. Obviously, spending Kim Kardashian’s attention on such a cause would be overkill – we might be able to solve Somali hunger with a mere Jimmy Kimmel (roughly 4 centiKardashians.) Once we refine this methodology, I hope we can calculate exactly which celebrity needs to be deployed to address which global crisis – I will keep you posted as our research in this space progresses.

Adrian Ortiz, a former lawyer, teaches kindergarten in Houston. HOUSTON — Wearing brick-red scrubs and chatting in Spanish, Miguel Alquicira settled a tiny girl into an adult-size dental chair and…

Mother around the world all want the same thing: happy, healthy children. Mercy Corps' Mothers Support Groups help new moms with skills and support to be the best for their kids. Photo: Jennifer…

The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing.

Ninkasi, you place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat.

George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went. It was a historic run—and now that it’s over, he might just pull off the greatest escape of all.

A 2009 Stanford University study found that people who routinely receive information from multiple sources don’t pay attention, control their memory or move from one project to the next as well as workers who handle one task at a time.

The FHWA report is full of data showing how a small down payment on active transportation can lead — quickly — to dramatic improvements in air quality, traffic levels, and public health.

And yet it’s road traffic – itself a marker of progress and prosperity in emerging economies – that in 2004 killed more children around the world between the ages of 5 and 14 than malaria, HIV/AIDS, or diarrhea

What is the basic concern – the destruction of religion? Or, more specifically, the destruction of the poor patterns of thinking, communication, and practice supported by theistic religion?

Well you wake up late for school and you don't want to go...

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.

Every hack poses the same basic challenge: how to make something function in a way for which it wasn’t designed. In one respect, hacking is an act of hypnosis. As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes. After weeks of research with other hackers online, Hotz realized that, if he could make a chip inside the phone think it had been erased, it was “like talking to a baby, and it’s really easy to persuade a baby.”

Color forecasting is almost as old as the fashion industry itself. In the late 19th century, color cards issued by French textile mills were snapped up by their American counterparts, eager for ideas and direction. As Regina Lee Blaszczyk, a historian and author of the forthcoming book The Color Revolution, notes, Margaret Hayden Rorke, an American actress, suffragist, and the country’s first color forecaster (heading the Textile Color Card Association for four decades), traveled to the Paris shows each summer to soak up the latest tints, like the brownish-green Vert Amande— ven employing an American foreign correspondent, Bettina Bedwell, to act as a “spy.” (Intel from Bedwell, in 1936: “Many Frenchwomen are getting away from black.”)

This idea—that color trends begin on Paris runways, still holds a certain sway, at least in the popular imagination; witness the “cerulean blue” monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, in which Meryl Streep as an imperious fashion editor describes how a color that begins life in gowns by Oscar de la Renta in 2002 is then copied by other designers and is ultimately “filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner.” But Paris may not be the ultimate source; as Blascyzk points out, cerulean blue was tapped by Pantone in 1999 as the “Color of the Millennium.” Coincidence?

The hacker’s eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find—even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of the biggest players in Hollywood. He had daily access to hundreds of messages between his victims and their managers, lawyers, friends, doctors, family, agents, nutritionists, publicists, etc. By now he knew more dirt than almost anyone in L.A.—the secret romances, the hidden identities, films in all stages of development. Still, this photo, a private self-portrait of one of our biggest stars, was something new, something larger than life, especially his. “You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see,” he says. “But you’re the only one that’s seen it.”

My suggestion? Own your distractions, resist fiddly half-measures, and never for a minute allow yourself to believe that productivity systems, space pens, or a writing app that plays new age music while you stare at a blank page in full-screen mode can ever teach you anything about how to care.

I wonder how we got to this point, where cars are a status symbol and bicycles are an embarrassment. I wonder if it's pride or just laziness, or a combination of both, that drives people to drive everywhere.