You've heard of the French paradox — red wine apparently helps keep the arteries clear despite all those cream sauces and buttery croissants. But how about the Asian paradox?

The term was coined in 2006 by Yale researchers to explain the low rates of heart disease and cancer in countries with high rates of cigarette smoking. One theory: The average 1.2 liters of green tea consumed daily by many people in Asia offers antioxidant protection.
—Gigi Lehman, The Supermarket Sleuth: Green tea, The Miami Herald, June 17, 2008

The main focus of the new anti-plastic bag laws are ultra-thin bags less than 0.025 millimetres thick, which are generally disposed of without a second thought and which litter the highways and byways of the country causing "white pollution".
—Clifford Coonan, "Innovation in brief," The Irish Times, June 9, 2008

David Axe ... is a 30-year-old freelance war correspondent. On Saturday, he'll be getting on a plane and flying to Chad, where refugees from the Darfur genocide in neighbouring Sudan have been streaming across the border. His reporting will wind up in a handful of major news outlets, as well as on his blog. And he'd like you to help pay for his trip.

"As attention gets diverted elsewhere, you have to scream a little bit louder," he tells me from Columbia, S.C. "So I'm just going to go and scream."

To get that scream out, Axe has partnered with an online news outlet called the Guerrilla News Network (guerrillanews.com) to try Web-based fundraising for his online reporting. The word for it these days is "crowdfunding." He's looking for $2,000 (U.S.) in donations to help offset the cost.
—Ivor Tossell, "The Catch 22 of 'crowdfunding' war correspondents," The Globe and Mail, June 13, 2008

Nearly every James Bond film has been requeled at least once, and "Star Treks" 7 and 10 were both requels of "The Wrath of Khan."
—Roger Ebert, "Wake up and smell a secret," Chicago Sun Times, December 7, 2007

A mask seized by police was not, as police alleged, a device to "disguise face with intent to commit an indictable offence", Mr Gibson said.

Brandishing photos of his client wearing it, he explained that Sanders was into "urban caving", that he and his mates went exploring under the city in sewers and tunnels.
—Neil McMahon, "Light at the end of the tunnel for a man up to his neck in it," The Age, December 21, 2005

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
—Nicholas Carr, American writer and editor, Atlantic Monthly, July 1, 2008

In days of yore, a ruralpolitan might have been called a "gentleman farmer" — think of Eddie Albert's character Oliver Wendell Douglas on the 1960s show Green Acres. But in modern parlance, a ruralpolitan is a professional who has abandoned the urban dwelling for a rural lifestyle and lives on three acres or more, typically within 40 miles of a city.

Be he — or she — a corporate lawyer, hedge-fund honcho, or other well-paid business type, a ruralpolitan might commute to work by rail or car or, if he embraces technology, telecommute from the comforts of a lavishly appointed home office. A ruralpolitan doesn't typically work the land he owns but does profit from it emotionally through the pleasures of gardening, small-scale livestock raising, or just watching his kids gambol through a field of wildflowers.
—Daniel DiClerico, "Buzzword: Ruralpolitan," Consumer Reports, December 13, 2007

Certainly, 'hyperwhite' seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds. While a stereotypical black youth, from the zoot-suit era through the bling years, wears flashy clothes, chosen for their aesthetic value, nerdy clothing is purely practical: pocket protectors, belt sheaths for gadgets, short shorts for excessive heat, etc. Indeed, 'hyperwhite' works as a description for nearly everything we intuitively associate with nerds, which is why Hollywood has long traded in jokes that try to capitalize on the emotional dissonance of nerds acting black (Eugene Levy saying, 'You got me straight trippin', boo') and black people being nerds (the characters Urkel and Carlton in the sitcoms 'Family Matters' and 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air').
—Benjamin Nugent, "Who's a Nerd, Anyway?," The New York Times, July 29, 2007

Arjun N. Murti remembers the pain of the oil shocks of the 1970s. But he is bracing for something far worse now: He foresees a 'super spike' — a price surge that will soon drive crude oil to $200 a barrel.
—Louise Story, "An Oracle of Oil," The New York Times, May 21, 2008

Senior moments are not just for seniors. Did Hillary have a middle-aged moment about the sniper attack in Bosnia that never was? Did Barack have a junior moment when he wrote about reading a Life magazine article on a man who tried to lighten his black skin? An article that never ran.
—Ellen Goodman, "McCain's 'senior moment' opens up a new -ism," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 28, 2008

Aides to Bill Clinton last week vehemently denied speculation that the former president's intemperate remarks on the campaign trail were due to mild cognitive damage from his quadruple-bypass surgery in 2004.

"This theory is false and is flatly rejected by President Clinton's doctors, who say he is in excellent shape. . . ." the statement said.

But the condition dubbed "pump head" or "bypass brain" has long been recognized by doctors, even if they seldom warn patients about it.

Symptoms include short-term memory loss, slowed responses, trouble concentrating and emotional instability. In a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, researchers at Duke University Medical Center tested 261 patients before and after bypass surgery and found that 53% of them had significant cognitive decline when they were discharged — and 42% still suffered from it five years later.
—Melinda Beck, "'Bypass Brain': How Surgery May Affect Mental Acuity," The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2008

Pluto is finally getting its day in the sun, after being stripped of planetary status by astronomers two years ago.

From now on all similar distant bodies in the solar system will be called "plutoids." That's the decision by the International Astronomical Union, which met last week in Oslo, Norway, and announced the decision Wednesday.
—Seth Borenstein, "Pluto's namesakes: Similar bodies are 'plutoids'," The Associated Press, June 11, 2008

Twitter has been taken up so exuberantly by the connected community that it's now used by the MTV Music Video Awards, presidential candidate John Edwards, and even some news organizations and fire departments to communicate their urgent messages. Its own vocabulary has even emerged: As mentioned earlier, a Twitter post is called a "tweet," and "tweetups" have taken place where "tweeps" have met up in the real world for social gatherings. You can find a glossary of Twitter terminology at the Twitter Fan Wiki.
—Michael Muchmore, "Twitter," PC Magazine, October 15, 2007

Amid growing concerns about large-scale meat production fuelled by such recent books as The Omnivore's Dilemma and The 100-Mile Diet, some consumers are bypassing supermarket meat aisles and even the local butcher shop in favour of cowpooling — clubbing together to buy half or whole carcasses directly from local farms.
—Wency Leung, "You take the ribs, I'll take the rump," The Globe and Mail, May 21, 2008

In his book, Reynolds describes a group of London anarchists who engaged in 'guerrilla benching,' installing their own wooden benches on sidewalks when a local government began removing benches from public space. In France, guerrilla repairmen built a clandestine workshop under the dome of the Pantheon and, over the next year, refurbished its clock. Recently, guerrilla knitters in New York and elsewhere have been wrapping traffic light poles in colorful, leg-warmer-like cozies.
—Jon Mooallem, "Guerrilla Gardening," The New York Times, June 8, 2008

The Yoda puppet in the second and third "Star Wars" sequels turned in a performance, a performance that Mark Hamill could watch and react to and play against. The CGI Yoda in the prequels was great for light-saber battles, but when it came time to bandy words with Samuel L. Jackson or whomever, "there was no there there," to misquote Gertrude Stein. I guess I am just suffering from CGI fatigue.
—Steve Penhollow, "CGI tops marks against 'Skull'," Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, June 1, 2008

Hydrogen trains, or hydrail, are not subject to many of the barriers preventing the mass adoption of fuel cell transportation, and their deployment could provide a transportation infrastructure around which additional hydrogen and fuel cell applications may be built. The first hydrogen-powered train models are currently being demonstrated in Japan and Europe.
—"Appalachian State University co-hosts International Hydrail Conference in Spain," US States News, April 14, 2008

Since an e-book can be short, you probably don't need a ghostwriter. If you do, ghostwriters like myself will do the job for anywhere from $5,000 [for 35 pages] to $9,000 [for 85 pages]. Having a traditional book ghostwritten could run from $20,000 to $60,000. Formatting it into a PDF is free. Copyrighting it through the Library of Congress [downloadable forms online] is $45. What about laying it out? That's not absolutely necessary since your audience is hungry for content, not beauty. But I advise clients to scout out a low-cost graphics pro to make the manuscript look professional.You're not asking anyone for anything. Most likely you will offer the e-book free. Actually, freeconomics is the way to go in this market. Provide something free and you are halfway there to hooking that fish.
—Jane Genova, "Hedge Legal Careers — Do a 35-page e-book," Law and More, March 30, 2008

A reader wrote to say that, in his house, they use the word "hectivity." "My three daughters cause too much hectivity in our house."
—Jay Nordlinger, "Cohen of Memphis, etc.," National Review, September 6, 2007

A decade ago, those monotonous minutes were just a fact of life: time ticking away, as you gazed idly into space, stood in line, or sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Boredom's doldrums were unavoidable, yet also a primordial soup for some of life's most quintessentially human moments. Jostled by a stranger's cart in the express checkout line, thoughts of a loved one might come to mind. A long drive home after a frustrating day could force ruminations. A pang of homesickness at the start of a plane ride might put a journey in perspective.

Increasingly, these empty moments are being saturated with productivity, communication, and the digital distractions offered by an ever-expanding array of slick mobile devices. A few years ago, cellphone maker Motorola even began using the word "microboredom" to describe the ever-smaller slices of free time from which new mobile technology offers an escape.
—Carolyn Y. Johnson, "The joy of boredom," The Boston Globe, March 9, 2008

Today, many European cities are doing away not only with traffic lights, but also sidewalks, curbs, signage and painted markings of any kind. The concept, known as naked streets, was pioneered by Dutch engineer Hans Monderman. One of the first municipalities to implement the system was Drachten, a small city with a population of 45,000 and a notoriously congested main intersection. The results have been lauded in progressive urban planning circles: the average car speed dropped, as did the number of accidents.
—Philip Preville, "All the Rage," Toronto Life, June 1, 2008