Word of Mouth

Widespread obesity among Native Americans has led to spiking diabetes rates among young people in the current generation. The phenomenon partially blamed on the lack of access to healthy food on reservations. Edible Idaho’s Guy Hand recently looked at what a food coalition on the coeur d'alene reservation of North Idaho is doing to connect the people there to better eating, starting with their nutrient-rich roots. 

Today’s report from the USDA’s economic research service upends the notion that healthy food options are more expensive for consumers than sweet and fatty junk-foods. The report points out that price depends on how you measure it. When factored by calorie, a chocolate doughnut will often cost more than a tomato.

Price is the chief concern of Hank Cardello. 

In those gin-soaked days of yesteryear, a beautiful woman on the arm was an executive’s secret weapon for landing the deal.  A young knock-out by your side signaled power, style, and proof that you had it all. Just ask all those Mad Men...

That was then.

Charles Wheelan’s unconventional advice for graduates got us talking about the twists and turns of our own post-graduate lives. The path life takes, as we know, zigs as often as it zags…so Virginia Prescott asked a few colleagues to record what they wish they’d been told on that expectant day.

An investigation into yet another growing financial bubble…this time, within the gas industry. Last week’s admission by J.P Morgan chase CEO Jamie Dimon that the company lost a staggering two billion dollars on one bad trade has revived the debate over more stringent regulation of Wall Street.

CHARLES WHEELAN, professor at Dartmouth College and the University of Chicago and is author of 10 ½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said and Naked Economics, veered off the motivational script when addressing the 2011 class at Dartmouth, telling the graduates “your worst days lie ahead.”

Wheelan on Talk of the Nation

A Soviet news reel shows teary mourners shuffling past the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.  The Bolshevik leader and chair of the soviet state in its early years died of a he died of an apparent massive stroke in 1924 at age 54. His embalmed corpse still throngs of visitors to his tomb in Moscow’s Red Square, and was the topic of an annual clinicopathological conference held at the University of Maryland.

America loves amateurs. The country was founded by dilettantes and enlightened rebels. Cities, farms and businesses were seeded by adventurous greenhorns and neophytes. Writer Jack Hitt argues that the DIY spirit that generated untold number of patents and subscriptions to Popular Mechanics drives the country’s success and identity. The popular TV shows The Voice and Project Runway continue a long tradition of discovering and rewarding talent.

 Five years ago, the New York Times moved into a gleaming new office tower in mid-town Manhattan. The shimmering structure by Starchitect Renzo Piano was commended for being green and digital-ready. Half a block away, the paper’s archives could not be more dissimilar. The sub-sub-basement -- affectionately known as the Morgue --  is cramped with hundreds of cabinets, stuffed with twelve million clippings and more than six million photographs from the paper’s 160-year history.

It’s a fiction writer’s job to create authentic worlds  and suspend disbelief. One of the more time-consuming techniques in their toolbox? Inventing new languages – like the two forms of elvish used throughout J.R.R Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings. Michael Adams is a professor of English at Indiana

TV is big right now. Premium channel series like Mad Men, Girls, and Game of Thrones are the stuff of water cooler and Twitter conversations, leaving those without access to cable in quandary…do they patiently await the iTunes, or Netflix release? Or give in, and illegally download fresh episodes? Even law-abiding viewers admitted to pirating Downton Abbey from British television before it made it to PBS.

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All that "40 is the new 30" boosterism aside, midlife is not the start of a downward spiral. David Bainbridge is a clinical veterinary anatomist at Cambridge University, and the author of several books including Middle Age: A Natural History. He believes middle age might be a pivotal part of the human evolutionary process, and potentially the most productive years of our lives.  

and

An online dating site that caters specifically to doomsday preppers. 

by Danielle Lima

Most people know how we should be eating: more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, fewer candies, fats, and calories. But putting that into practice can be tough.

When you walk into the convenience store and a bag of potatoes chips is a dollar, and a salad is six, which are you going to buy?

Novels, movies, TV and games engage the human imagination with tragedy, comedy, sex, violence, twisted families, rapacious gangsters, mysteries and monsters. But could all this fantasy be good for us?

Jonathan Gottschall is author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. He wrote about research into how fiction influences our views for The Boston Globe.