August 6, 2012: Afternoon
- Designer of the Curiosity lander became a rocket scientist when the rock 'n' roll thing didn't work out.
- Global food prices are spiking upwards because of widespread drought in the U.S., the breadbasket of the world.
- New York restaurants' secret language.
- English-language TV networks struggle to appeal to Latinos, their biggest growth market.
- Since the June death of giant tortoise Lonesome George, the Galapagos grieves—and worries about the future of its tourism.
- Portraits of 1960s Ivory Coast.
- Read the first chapter from Kevin Guilfoile's latest book, A Drive Into the Gap, available now through Field Notes.
- A new e-book about food from The Bygone Bureau: The Biggest Yam.
- Social media is making critics too nice—and our books suffer for it.
- The New Yorker reviews R. Kelly's "auto-hagiography."
- Mark Liberman uses linguistic analysis to detect New Yorker plagiarism.
- If Cosmo readers banded together, they would form the 16th largest country in the world.
- Hasselhoff accepts his irony.
- Blow-by-blow account of Mat Honan's attack by hackers, who used social engineering on Apple employees.