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Yesterday, David Brooks wrote a column on relationships and happiness that gave me a lot to think about yesterday. I was quite taken with it at first, but the more I thought about it, the less impressed I was. In it, he argues that a successful marriage trumps a successful career when it comes to the pursuit if happiness: Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled. ...

The Washington Post today talks about the logistics of handling White House correspondence: Here is the filter between the public and its president: a sprawling floor in an ordinary office building, its location kept secret as a security precaution, where the cubicles remain spare and doughnuts and cookies sit on a counter in the break room. Want to call the president? The phone rings here. Want to e-mail him? The message arrives on one of these computers. Want to send him a gift? It might be stored temporarily in a closet next to the break room. ...

Tim O’Reilly offers a definition of the Internet operating system: This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We’re entering a modern version of “the Great Game”, the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them “points of control”.) This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends. ...

I was just reading an old issue of National Geographic and came across a story about the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the last groups of true hunter-gatherers left on earth. Before I started reading the article, I noticed the byline – Michael Finkel. Finkel is a freelance journalist who was famously busted in 2001 for fabricating large parts of a story about a young worker on a cocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. In 2007, Slate media critic Jack Shafer wrote about Finkel’s past in the context of his having written the July, 2007 National Geographic cover story. Shafer questions the judgement of the editors: ...

Eating is now a major moral issue in America, and whatever choice you make is wrong. Jessica Gross

I’m excited about the iPad. Not enough to have pre-ordered one or anything, but I think it’s going to be a cool device, and I find it easy to imagine myself reading stuff on one during a flight or using it to post to Twitter while I’m watching TV. It’d be nice to have a device for surfing the Web with a decent-sized screen that doesn’t get hot enough to fry an egg. ...

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto shows that fast food makes us impatient: Eating habits have shifted dramatically over the last few decades–fast food has become a multibillion dollar industry that has widespread influence on what and how we eat. The original idea behind fast food is to increase efficiency, allowing people to quickly finish a meal so they can move on to other matters. Researchers at the Rotman School of Management, however, have found that the mere exposure to fast food and related symbols can make people impatient, increasing preference for time saving products, and reducing willingness to save. ...

I’ve been captivated this week by the ongoing Pwn2Own security competition. Pwn2Own offers prizes to security researchers for demoing zero-day exploits for popular software. On Day 1, researchers demonstrated holes in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and the iPhone. The unwritten rules of legitimate security research demand that before disclosing security holes publicly, security researchers notify the vendors so that they have a reasonable opportunity to release patches. The story I linked to says as much: ...

National Geographic provides the most straightforward and understandable explanation of global warming that you’ll find, using the bathtub as a metaphor. It explains why atmospheric carbon levels are rising and why it’s going to be very difficult to get them to fall.

Chris Dixon explains why Facebook isn’t making more money: Facebook has tons of visitors but they generally come to socialize, not to buy things, and they rarely click on ads that take them to other sites. Facebook is like a Starbucks where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything. The thing that’s most telling is that the ads you see on Facebook are almost always very low quality ads. ...