9 October 2009: Weekend

  • Barack Obama becomes third sitting president to win the Nobel Peace Prize; see full citation.
  • Q&A with the man who telephones Nobel Prize winners to tell them they've won.
  • Stalin's grandson sues Russian newspaper to protect dictator's reputation.
  • Chart: Where in the world are the WMDs.
  • Federal Housing Administration may need a bailout; Fannie and Freddie have swallowed $96 billion, and may still need more.
  • Op: Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.
  • States should now accept that all death information is public information, no matter who the victim was or how they died.
  • Highlights from 100 years in British intelligence (the spy kind).
  • The literary journal is dead; long live the literary journal: A history of modernist British magazines.
  • The newspaper book critic is dead.
  • New in #drac: Battle of the sexes.
  • Efforts being made to curtail annoyingly loud television commercials; how fiber optics changed a photographer's work.
  • Photos of breaching white shark off Sunset Beach.
  • Super 8 has reemerged as a valid, if not fetishistic, medium.
  • Planned domed community in Vermont was too good to be true.
  • Test run, with photos, of the electronic 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport induces panting on this editor's part.
  • Fawning profile--no really, fawning--of Jamie Oliver's nutrition adventures in West Virginia.
  • Breakdown of kaiseki, a Japanese eating style so complex it has a scholarly following.
  • When drinking tea, just drink tea. Twenty of Michael Pollan's favorite food maxims.
  • Video: Staircase becomes a piano, and more people take the staircase.