snowfall
snowfall - Ranking of biggest cities by their record snowfalls. Philadelphia ranks first with 30.7 inches in1996. See graphic at: NYT 06Feb11 - Biggest Cities' Snowfall Records
Indie Rock/ Mali
Everywhere you turn these days, it seems that the indie rock world is exploring African sounds. Labels like Dead Oceans, Secretly Canadian and True Panther have also begun releasing new recordings by African musicians, those acts have begun playing American gigs, and African music regularly gets attention on the indie-minded Web sites of Pitchfork, Mojo [...]
authenticity
"Authenticity is like authority or charisma: If you have to tell people you have it, then you probably don't." --Andrew Potter "Whenever you find something described as authentic, you know that you are already in the realm of fake authenticity," says Andrew Potter in his recent book "The Authenticity Hoax." It's not unlike [...]
currywurst
a popular fast food dish in Germany made from pork sausage, ketchup and curry powder. [C]urrywurst [is] the most popular fast food in the city [Berlin], some say the nation. The dish, generally eaten from a paper plate with a tiny disposable fork while standing up, is itself a culinary contradiction: a greasy pile [...]
grapes/ sex
For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex. This unnatural abstinence threatens to sap the grape’s genetic health and the future pleasure of millions of oenophiles. [Italics added.] . . . [M]erlot is intimately related to cabernet franc, which is a parent of cabernet sauvignon, whose other [...]
gut brain
-- the nerve cells in the esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines that communicate hunger to the brain. [There are] sophisticated processes that take place in our digestive tracts to let us know when we're hungry. There, a collection of nerve cells work together and communicate much as the neurons in our brain [...]
union workers
11.9: The percentage of American workers in unions last year, the lowest proportion in more than 70 years, according to the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of workers in unions fell by 612,000 last year, to 14.7 million. About 20 percent of workers were in unions in 1983; the figure was [...]
BRIC
acronym for the four large, rapidly growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China Jim O’Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management . . . is perhaps best known as the economist who nearly a decade ago coined the acronym BRIC — for Brazil, Russia, India and China — developing economies that, [...]
Dodo effect
when two or more psychotherapies seem to yield results with little or no difference. [W]hen two different types of psychotherapies [for the same condition] have been directly compared -- and there are more than 100 such studies -- it has often been hard to find any differences between them. Researchers aptly call [...]
Apple/ cash
[Some Apple investors have] deep frustrations over Apple's cash pile, a $50 billion lode that is expected to swell to $70 billion by year-end. The vast sum exceeds the gross domestic product of two-thirds of the world's countries—and all but 36 of the market values of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock [...]