To lose a parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose and find a mother in the same week looks downright irresponsible.

But this is the predicament of April Epner, unassuming grade-school teacher, age 39. No sooner does April's adoptive mother pass away than her bio-mom comes forward.
—Carrie Rickey, "Mother-daughterhood movie tests limits of maternal bond," The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2008

Making it harder for people to discharge their credit-card debts has other drawbacks as well. Homeowners would once do almost anything to keep up payments on their homes, even if it meant falling behind on other debts. In the past year, though, economists have reported an increase in the number of people who are just walking away from their homes, because it's now often easier to abandon a mortgage than a credit-card bill. (The practice has even been given a name — "jingle mail," because people simply send their keys back in an envelope.)
—James Surowiecki, "Going for Broke," The New Yorker, April 7, 2008

From locating a gay-friendly rabbi to finding a smokin' tuxeda for you and your wife-to-be, planning a same-sex wedding can present many hurdles not found in the hetero world.
—Caroline Ryder, "We do, too!," LA Weekly, February 10, 2006

Facebook have now made it possible to load all these other websites directly into your Facebook profiles. Now users can display their blog posts from their blog, they can display the drunken pics that they uploaded to Flickr, show the embarassing videos they have from their YouTube profile and so much more. In the world where people never pledge full allegiance to one site, it made sense to drag display them all in a single scrapbook. This is the idea behind 'lifestreaming' and is a dream come true for those that gloriously show off every facet of their life and the millions of lurkers who are willing to tune into such dross.

Lifestreaming, like the movie Being John Malkovich, will allow you to climb inside the head of someone and experience their day via a digital smorgasboard of public text messages, blog posts, GPS-tagged photos and (thanks to mobile broadband and tiny videocameras) a live video stream of them as they move around their world.
—Damien Mulley, "Being Damien Mulleyvitch," Sunday Tribune, July 22, 2007

The resulting profile of a boreout victim is remarkably similar to characters such as Tim in the Ricky Gervais BBC comedy series The Office, and Homer Simpson. Boreout, it appears, is such a profound taboo that it can only be shown in a comic context.

Boreout works like this: a boss re-fuses to delegate work, frustrated underlings ask for more to do but are trusted only with mind-numbing tasks. After a while they stop asking and enjoy the free time at their desk, stretching out the low-intensity tasks with a series of strategems.

But mimicking work day after day erodes self-esteem. Result: the boss hurtles towards burnout while at least some of his staff edge towards boreout. The symptoms are almost identical.
—Roger Boyes, "Forget burnout, now it's boreout," The Times (London), September 15, 2007

I don't need to care what sort of world we pass on to our children — I don't have any, and I'm not terribly concerned about yours — but I do anyway. Not enough to go to extremes of effort or expense, but if I can give a beer bottle or hummus tub a second life by putting it in an orange bin rather than a trash bag, you can count on me.

I'm not a true scuppie — a Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person — because newspaper people are not so much upwardly mobile as backwardly noble. I can't afford to blow the rent money at Whole Foods on organic cruelty-free, hand-churned onion dip or imported free-trade hemp dental floss.
—Samantha Bennett, "How Green Is My Footprint?," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 27, 2008

When Susan's son was 7, a classmate smeared peanut butter on his arm. A harmless prank, perhaps, for many kids. But for her son it was potentially life-threatening, due to his severe peanut allergy. ...

Call it allergy bullying. Whether it's an extension of garden-variety bullying or a backlash against greater restrictions on peanuts in schools, parents of children with severe allergies say their kids are increasingly facing threats of being touched or, worse, forced to eat the food they have spent their lives avoiding.
—Tralee Pearce, "Bullies use peanut butter to threaten kids with allergies," The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2008

In addition, more density means better chances of getting mass transit. State Del. Elizabeth Bobo said state Transportation Secretary John D. Porcari told her that Columbia is not likely to be linked to a Metro Green line extension to Laurel or BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport for up to two decades.

George Barker, a 35-year Columbia resident, said he wants more development. He is an IMBY — In My Back Yard — not a NIMBY, or Not in My Back Yard, he said.
—Larry Carson, "Differing views on Town Center," The Baltimore Sun, November 2, 2007

In Pakistan, the prohibitive price of tea became an election issue; the Chinese Communist Party's politburo frets about how long it may be before its poor can afford to eat pork again; Mexican housewives have rioted to protest against the shortage of affordable tortilla; Swaziland is facing famine, even as it exports cassava to feed the rich world's hunger for biofuel.

Rising agricultural inflation, or "agflation", is a global phenomenon that touches everyone, and almost every day it seems to intensify. This week, the price of prime spring wheat rose by 25 per cent on the American exchanges, while Russia and Kazakhstan announced fresh curbs on exports to protect domestic supplies.
—Sean O'Grady, "A recipe for inflation," The Independent, February 27, 2008

The latest buzz term in IT circles is the "mullet strategy". It's a technique the big internet sites such as CNN, Youtube and MySpace are now turning to — "business up front, party in the back".

Which, when Billy Ray Cyrus is not in the picture, essentially means real, researched information is now posted up front, and all that indulgent user-generated opining and sledging is being shoved back to the secondary pages.

What's interesting about the mullet strategy is that it represents the first signs of backlash against that heaving mass of people out there who think a domain name gives them licence to share what they ate for breakfast.
—Sarah Wilson, "Sympathy for the devil," The Daily Telegraph, April 5, 2008

In many parts of the country, walking has become as quaint a pastime as spinning yarn or playing the bagpipes. Between 1977 and 1995, the number of daily walking trips taken by adults declined by 40 percent — while more than a quarter of all car trips are now shorter than a mile. Those under-a-mile journeys fall into the zone that new urbanists call 'walkshed': the area a person can reasonably cover on foot. People whose walksheds teem with shops and restaurants have more reason to walk than those whose don't.
—Dashka Slater, "Walk the walk," The New York Times, April 20, 2008

[Felice N.] Schwartz (1989) introduced the term "mommy track" to refer to an alternative career path that allows a mother flexible or reduced work hours, but at the same time tends to slow or block advancement. A newly coined phrase, the "daughter track", refers to a late-in-life version of the mommy track where women are leaving their jobs to care for their aging parents.
—Elizabeth F. Cabrera, "Opting out and opting in," Career Development International, January 1, 2007

A new business word is getting traction in Arizona. (No, it's not "sanctions.")

It's the term "groceraunt."

That's how Rose & Allyn's Chief Marketing Officer Stacy Pearson described the newest concept from Whole Foods Market.

The company's second prototype store in Arizona to feature such additions as a restaurant and a sit-down wine bar opened in Scottsdale last month.
—Chad Graham, "Whole new word," The Arizona Republic, March 14, 2008

You slept last night, but was it the sleep you see in bed advertisements — calm slumber with a slight smile suggesting sweet dreams — or the toss and turn, frequent-waking, what-must-I-do-tomorrow brand?

And when you woke, were you bushy-tailed or just bushed?

Rest assured (if you can) you are not alone — there are millions of semisomniacs like you out there.

And the combined effect of your drowsiness is having a huge impact, experts say, on the economy, productivity, public health and your personal wellbeing.

The term semisomnia — describing people who do not sleep well and experience low-grade exhaustion — entered the lexicon last year.
—Ruth Callaghan, "Why forty winks isn't enough," The West Australian, April 16, 2008

In these places, accepting a government "bailout" that pays them, say, 90 percent of the value of the house to keep from foreclosing will be very tough for lenders, who (if the appraisers don't fudge the numbers) could be forced to take 36 cents or 45 cents on the dollar for their loans. On the other hand, any plan that makes them pay more if they can afford it is hugely disadvantageous for the borrowers, who have option ARMs about to reset and are much better off handing the keys to bank-and maybe even scooping up the foreclosed house down the street.

If you're one of the "homedebtors" ... in this position, you might start thinking very seriously about just how attached you are to the wisteria vine snaking over the basketball hoop on your garage. That's what a lot of other California borrowers will be doing.
—Mark Gimein, "Here Comes the Next Mortgage Crisis," Slate, April 15, 2008

Some might accuse Byron of tilting at windmills — but one under-reported section of the report [Safer Children in a Digital World] does try to get to grips with one of the web's great taboos: regulation. It's a subject that usually elicits screams of angst, rather than whoops of excitement. Digital immigrants tend to throw their hands up in the air and proclaim the internet a sort of 21st-century Wild West, while digital natives blast the hubris of those trying to exert influence over the internet's uncontrollable force.
—Bobbie Johnson, "Parental advisory," The Guardian, March 31, 2008

Philanthropreneurs talk a lot about "intelligent money", "social investment" and "risk and return", but can charity giving really be measured like profit and loss? It seems it can. "We provide rigorous, analytical research into the performance of charities to show our donors, many of them giving more than £ 1 million, that their money has the greatest impact," says Martin Brookes, once an economist for global asset management company Schroders, now head of research at New Philanthropy Capital. "Our research shows us, for example, that the cost of a truant to society is £ 45,000 a year," adds Brookes, 44, "but there's a small charity we support in the North West called the Learning Challenge that works with truants and can get them back to school at a cost of £ 500. That is an extraordinary return."
—Tom Bouquet, "The new face of Philanthropy," The Times (London), February 24, 2007

But the effects of diet on cancer are more subtle than the effect of smoking , so traditional ways of controlling consumption may not be appropriate. The prospect of cancer warnings on sausages or punitive taxes on salamis has the distinct feel of a sledgehammer taken to a nut.

To generate a proportionate response, governments should be prepared to look at other ideas. The new science of econophysics could help. This discipline uses physics-like models to explain the habits, fashions and the behaviour in crowds of ordinary people and is being applied to everything from trading strategies in the money markets to rioting behaviour. The approach could give insights into the kind of strategies that might change eating — and smoking — habits in appropriate ways.
—"Unravelling the link between diet, lifestyle and cancer," New Scientist, November 3, 2007

When the bell rings, dozens of strangers pair off and size each other up.

They shake hands and start talking about life goals, past experiences and future dreams.

Some feel a spark, while others suffer through awkward silences. A few minutes later, the bell clangs again and they move on to the next potentially life-changing stranger.

Speed dating? That's so 2003.

This is speed mentoring, the new way to jump-start your destiny.

The goal is career-building, not courtship, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: Rather than waste hours with a mentor who's just not that into you, spend a few minutes with a variety of people in hopes of finding that special someone who truly understands your career aspirations.
—Rebecca Dube, "Career inspiration, five minutes at a time," The Globe and Mail, March 31, 2008

If the day comes that oil grows so scarce that Austinites can't afford fruit hauled in from California and brownouts roll across Texas, Lester Germanio will live high, wide and cool in his West Lake Hills villa.

Germanio and other Austinites who have banded together to trade information and survival tips are preparing themselves for what they see as inevitable deprivations as oil production declines past its peak. Some call them "Peakniks." ...

As the anticipated peak oil crisis unfolds, Peakniks foresee a period in which the U.S. would devolve into the stone age. The economy would tumble; cars, even hybrids, would be useless; day-to-day goods would be hard to come by.
—Asher Price, "Should oil wells start running dry, Austin's 'Peakniks' will be prepared," Austin American-Statesman, February 10, 2008

Numbers tell us people don't participate in outdoor activities the way they once did. ... Visits to national parks are down, as are fishing, hunting and even watching wildlife. Only 25 percent of the population — down 18 percent — participates in an outdoor activity.

Scientists call it "videophilia" — a way of life connected to computers, video games and TV.
—"Encroaching spring bids us head outdoors," Grand Rapid Press, March 16, 2008