“Rock Center’s” big-get interview with Mimi Alford — in which she shared with viewers the details of her fling with President John F. Kennedy while a teenage intern in 1962 — attracted only 5.1 million people to the NBC newsmagazine Wednesday night. Read full article > >

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On ‘Rock Center,’ a yawn affair with Mimi Alford’s JFK fling

NEW YORK — A second senior citizen is claiming the Transportation Security Administration made her pull down her pants as part of a search at New York’s Kennedy Airport. Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, Fla., told WCBS television (http://cbsloc.al/sD3xsS ) that agents were suspicious about her colostomy bag and asked her to pull down the waist of her pants so they could see it on Nov. 28. Read full article > >

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2nd elderly woman complains about having to lower pants for TSA at New York’s JFK airport

But will want other GOP demands.

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Boehner: We’ll Pass Payroll Tax Cut

Former New York Times Washington Bureau Chief covered JFK assassination.

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Journalist Tom Wicker Dies at 85

The recently released 1964 interviews of Jacqueline Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger Jr . make for fascinating reading . But if the one subject on which I have some detailed knowledge is any indication, historians will need to be careful about putting too much stock in what Mrs. Kennedy said. The subject is President John F. Kennedy’s writing partnership with Theodore Sorensen, his close aide and White House special counsel, once referred to by JFK as his “intellectual blood bank.” Mrs. Kennedy portrays her husband as the principal author of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “ Profiles in Courage ,” as well as his inaugural address. Sorensen is depicted as having untruthfully claimed credit for the book, and then having greedily and ungratefully accepted all the proceeds it generated. Read full article > >

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Jackie Kennedy’s flawed memory

Talks JFK, Cuban Missile Crisis on new tapes.

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Jackie O. Was ‘Happiest’ at White House

Millions of people are suffering in the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa, but help is on the way thanks to relief groups from around the world.

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Feeding the youngest famine victims

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Dallas defeats Heat in Game 2

A former leader of the Shia Muslim community in Trinidad is convicted of taking part in a failed plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s JFK airport.

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Man convicted of JFK airport plot

Travelers survived a close call at JFK International Airport Monday, when the wing of an Airbus 380A-the world’s largest jet-clipped the tail of a smaller plane. The Paris-bound 380A was headed for the runway, while the smaller plane had arrived from…

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Jumbo Jet Clips Plane at JFK

If a new Kickstarter project gets funded, Japanese citizens will soon have access to radiation data by, for, and of the people. Building on other crowdsourced radiation maps , a volunteer team is trying to assemble a network of up to 600 geiger counters that will provide independent measurements of radiation in Japan. Citizen scientists would be responsible for setting up and monitoring the stations, but that data would be fed back to RDTN.org . The accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant has highlighted the trust gap that exists between official data sources and people. It was apparent after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and in dozens of smaller incidents that people just don’t know if they can believe the radiation measurements coming from governments or the entities who run nuclear reactors. In the past, there was no way to systematically build a citizen scientific network that could provide a check for official numbers. But now there is. RDTN is running a Kickstarter micropatronage campaign to raise the $33,000 necessary to purchase 100 geiger counters, which would jumpstart the network. So far, 21 backers have contributed $2,125, but they’ve got 26 days left to reach their goal. “This site is not meant as a replacement for government nor official nuclear agencies,” RDTN notes on its website. “Our hope is that data sets from various sources can provide additional context to the official word in these rapidly changing events.” Really, what a citizen science effort like this could add is trust in or skepticism about the data provided by official sources. And as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted last month , it’s institutions we can trust that has stalemated our nuclear question.

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The Open-Source Project to Build a Citizen Radiation Detection Network in Japan

The AirTrain shuttle system at New York’s JFK airport has so many security flaws that “among the cops it’s commonly referred to as a possible weapons delivery system,” a Port Authority Police official says.

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Airport shuttle raises security concerns

In Silicon Valley, any time a company gets big and successful, some of its most talented employees leave to found their own ventures. In the old days, that used to happen after an initial public offering, which allowed the best and brightest to sell their stakes in the company and use the proceeds to build something new. While Facebook’s rise hasn’t culminated in an IPO, employees have found ways to cash out and start new companies. With each wave, Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch notes, those employees take certain values and perspectives with them as they create the next generation of companies. In her excellent post, she discusses what she sees as the salient features of the new ventures: Quora , Cloudera , Jumo , and Asana . Here’s her list : Not for Sale by Owner Engineers Are Gods and Education Isn’t What Made Them That Way Rejection of the Lean Startup Model Efficiency and Organization at the Expense of Free-for-All Controlled Pacing, Not Cheap Viral Hacks Solving Big Messy Social Problems Others Have Failed Trying to Solve Before I think if you take a step back from all of these qualities she ascribes — mostly rightly to these companies — you see a generation of serious, social organizations. Even more broadly, I think Cuda’s doing fascinating work trying to understand how being at Facebook shaped the worldviews that people leaving it take with them. I think we underestimate the texture and value of culture at technology companies because they all kind of look the same from the outside: a bunch of guys hunched over keyboards coding. But the individual ideologies and ideas that power companies matter a lot, as myriad works in science and technology studies have shown for other fields (Cf. Richard Hirsh’s work on the electric utility industry in the 20th century ). Knowing what ideas shape these companies — and Facebook itself — also helps us understand where people using the tools in new ways are likely to find conflict. Activists on Facebook, for example, want to be able to use pseudonyms, for example, but have been confounded by Facebook’s corporate belief that people should use their real names .

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How Facebook’s Children Think

by Mark Bernstein I like to eat, and so I like to cook . I used to be a chemist, though I never really liked bench work. The kitchen is a wonderfully transgressive laboratory, a place where you can measure things precisely if you want to, but you are also free to use a three-finger pinch of salt. The odd Erlenmeyer makes a delightful cruet, and graduated cylinders are ideal for cocktails, but if you don’t feel like measuring today, nothing terrible will happen. “How many potatoes are sufficient for a meal?”   Roger Ebert asks his aunt . “One potato For every member of the family. One potato for the pot. And one last tater, honey, For fear of later company.” Roger Ebert is no longer able to eat, but that doesn’t prevent him from writing eloquently about the pleasures of the table. This is a very good era for thoughtful cooks , and a wonderful time for reading about cooking . When a technical fellow like me blogs about food, we call it a “cheese sandwich” and right-thinking people often think this is a sad and silly spectacle, and also a great waste of your time and theirs. This is a mistake. In my experience,   cheese sandwiches are not principally about the cheese . DEFENSE ATTORNEY: …you people can’t order a cheese sandwich… DEFENDANT: Fuck you. DEFENSE ATTORNEY: … without mentioning the Holocaust. DEFENDANT: My people do not eat cheese sandwiches. DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Oh. Oh, what?  It isn’t kosher?… DEFENDANT: It isn’t tasty!  Tasty, you mindless Nazi… ( David Mamet, Romance ) Our host, of course, is a master of the cheese sandwich because nobody is entirely certain which topics are his metier and which are cheese sandwiches. One nice things about today is that I met Linda exactly 37 years ago. We’ve shared many meals. “The art of dining together,” Michael Bywater reminds us, “is one of the great cornerstones of civilization.” Commensality too often gets lost in  discussions of how we ought to eat , but finding good ways to eat together can be as important as finding good things to eat. Sharing bread matters. When we talk about things at dinner, we are often saying several things at the same time. When we write, on paper and on the Web, we are always saying several things at once. Writing with links makes this more evident, but writing has always been multivalent. What’s new is that, in choosing which links to follow and which to consider later, you are explicitly reshaping the work for yourself in ways once reserved for writers and editors. The reader has always been a writer too , but hypertext links make this manifest . When we write software, I think we are also saying a lot, both about our vision of the work and our opinions of the people who will use it. Some of the software I use has a low opinion of humanity. Back at my usual writing space , I am wringing my hands that the dark forces of search-engine “optimization” — the people who are gaming Google to benefit their sites — have completely corrupted recipe searches. It’s a very disturbing trend that could, if left unchecked, seriously damage the rest of the Web. Lizzy Bennett was right when she wrote here that Foodily might help out by letting people vote for their favorites, but I fear the bad apples are so common that even Farmville fans will discover they have something better to do before they find a recipe worth praise. The Web we possess is not everything it could be , but powerful forces are working tirelessly to make it worse. This puts me in a bad mood, but in my kitchen I find I have a few cups of chicken stock. It is free, since I made it from chicken bones that I would otherwise have thrown away, and in any case I am not saving it for a museum. I thicken it with some roux cooked with some diced onion, and then simmer some broccoli in the broth. I whizz it with the immersion blender, season it with some salt and some lemon juice, and serve two warm bowls of it with crème fraiche and a cold Last Word  and we sit down to a nice long talk about Lev Grossman’s The Magician s  (which Linda is reading) and now I am feeling somewhat better. Mark Bernstein is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems , where he crafts software for new ways of reading and writing.

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‘Cheese Sandwiches’: Blogging Beyond the Lab

Artist Agathe Snow teams up with Mykita on a pair of “monumental” sunglasses for her Guggenheim Berlin show Aliens might’ve constructed Egyptian pyramids (or it could be the more likely story of slave labor), but the more urgent question according to artist Agathe Snow is our relationship to these towering structures. She takes up the question in her current show, an homage to monuments at the Guggenheim Berlin dubbed “All Access World.” Corsica-born, NYC-based Snow has already made a name for herself with artfully messy sculptural works and a penchant for interactive art, with this show exploring “a more democratic approach to monument ownership and distribution.” Filled with an array of mobile sculptures, large-scale wall collages, video works and more, the exhibit examines the identifying factors that bind people to places. Accompanying the monumental mixed-media works, a pair of sunglasses designed by Snow and Berlin-based framemaker Mykita plays off the theme with subtle references to iconic landmarks. The neon pink- and black-hued shades feature a handpainted silhouette of either Manhattan’s skyline or the Pyramids of Giza, applied so finely to the inner side of the lenses in gold that the wearer barely notices. The sunglasses, limited to an edition of 200, play off Snow’s idea that visually omnipresent monuments should be “available as products” sold through her fictional company All Access World. Snow explains in an interview with Deutsche Guggenheim magazine , “Monuments are a contradiction. Things that depend on the act of remembering cannot be static. How can you be of a moment in history yet speak of timelessness?” Nailing the point home, the Mykita model that Snow chose for the project (called Cyrus) riffs off the classic Clubmaster style that everyone from JFK to surfers has sported. Assembled entirely by hand at the Mykita workshop, each pair is individually numbered on the temple and comes with a certificate of authenticity signed by Snow. They sell from Museum Shop of the Deutsche Guggenheim (and within the next few weeks at Mykita stores and other dealers) for €370 each.

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