If legislation passes requiring New York’s chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menu, will the city’s residents actually change their eating habits?

According to Men’s Fitness, NYC is the 19th fattest city in America. So makes for the PERFECT NEWSPEG to have Slate send out Christopher Flavelle for some man-on-the-street interviews to see whether anyone thinks having this information available while ordering will change what we feast on.

The only problem with Slate’s methodology? It’s unclear whether they asked actual New Yorkers. They went to Times Square, after all, and the people eating at chain restaurants there are, uh, often tourists. Like the guy, pictured here, wearing the ridiculous vest. (If he’s a New Yorker, we’re moving.)

CONTINUED »

Merging the Web 2.0 mantras of “user-generated content” and “don’t pay your writers,” Slate is proud to announce the June 24 release of Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, which is composed of submissions some 800 of you submitted to their Encyclopedia Baracktannica since February. All your hard work and due diligence has finally paid off, and you didn’t even need to put together a manuscript, find a literary agent, and shop it to a publisher. See you at your book party! [Slate]

Salon tech writer Farhad Manjoo, who blogged for the web magazine’s Machinist, is making a job change … to Slate, where he can feud with Jack Shafer over whether the web will kill the newspaper. [SIA]

In an article about the departure of Martha Stewart Living CEO Susan Lyne, Slate sneaks in a dig at the competition: “[MSL] is a textbook intersection of two media business lessons that should have been learned in the ’90s. One is that just because a content company makes a splash online does not mean that it needs to go public. (Departed TheGlobe.com and limping Salon.com are two other examples of content companies that held IPOs.)”

Nevermind that Slate is owned by the publicly traded Washington Post Company, which is a pure content play propped up by the enormously profitable Kaplan education unit.

Because the web magazine Slate must take all of its cues from what others are talking about in the mainstream media – though, of course, that’s how every website works – and then argue the opposite of general norms, they’ve latched on to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article about Muslim women having their hymen’s reconstructed so they can marry as “virgins.” (To be fair, the Times latched on to it to, and then wrote its own piece.)

You know how many in the West would frown on this practice, seeing the Islamic requirement that women be pure on their wedding day tantamount to anything from sexism to civil rights abuse? Not Slate’s William Saletan! (Yes, that William Saletan.)

CONTINUED »

Did the Associated Press totally get hosed with one of the most infamous journalism hoaxes of recent memory? Maybe! Maybe not!

An article making its way through the wire service today reports that “researchers say they have discovered groups of the silver-haired monkeys in Indonesia that fish. Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust. The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.”

Huh. Because back in 2001, Slate writer Jay Forman wrote about something very similar, only about monkeys in the Florida Keys, not Indonesia — and they weren’t the ones doing the fishing. Rather, locals (of the human variety) were baiting rhesus monkeys with apples. And then, in Feb. 2007, he admitted to making the entire story up.

As the Museum of Hoaxes remembers it: “The column was a colorful piece of reporting full of vivid observations about the art of monkey fishing. Who would have guessed, for instance, that oranges are the fruit of choice for baiting monkeys? But almost as soon as the article was published it attracted criticism. The Wall Street Journal didn’t believe a word of it, declaring that, “Slate Gets Hoaxed.” Michael Kinsley, Slate’s editor, fired back, insisting that his magazine stood behind the veracity of the story. But under the weight of continuing criticism Kinsley backed down. On June 25 he published an apology, acknowledging that key details in Forman’s story were fictitious.”

So now that we’ve reversed the story here – with the monkeys doing the fishing – can we trust this new monkey fishing report?

CONTINUED »

This just in: Giving children laptops to learn is bad for them. [Slate]

Mary Roach, author of the new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, knows the printed page can’t really communicate what it means to have sex. Turns out the penis doesn’t dock to the cervix! Which is why she, and her husband, volunteered to be the first people to have their intercourse recorded in 4-D via ultrasound. Not quite sure what the fourth dimension is (time? pleasure?) but the whole thing is a little creepy, especially when it appears on Slate V, which is where we’re used to seeing Dear Prudence advice letters acted out with clip art. Skip to the 2:57 for close ups of what appears to be a bladder being pushed up on.

Like a drug dealer who tells you his coke hasn’t been spliced with rat poison, Slate’s promotion of The Root’s article on crack is misleading. [Radar]

Slate’s Wesley Morris: “Between the outrage over Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton’s unbelievable mutation from American’s first black president into Karl Rove, I don’t have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn’t give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black. Maybe it’s so old it’s avant-garde—very Vogue.” [Slate, earlier]

The “Hillary Death Watch” feature Slate launched yesterday is likely to anger Clinton insiders, but it’ll be interesting to see if it has any effect on the Clinton campaign’s relations with Slate’s corporate cousins — namely, the Washington Post and Newsweek, and a smattering of local television stations, whose access to the candidate is crucial.

CONTINUED »

Even the blogs don’t care much about the western U.S., Mexico, or southwestern Africa. As shown by these heat maps from L’Observatoire des médias, which charted editorial coverage in 2007 on a regional scale, different news outlets blanket certain parts of the world with coverage, while neglecting others.

This map of the blogosphere forms fancy lava-shaped blot patterns that show we still don’t care terribly much about Africa, even with Angelina Jolie running around there.

After the jump, see who’s left out by the New York Times, Slate, and The Guardian.

CONTINUED »

Shortly after launching black-interest site The Root, Slate’s overseers at the Washington Post Co. are readying financial site The Big Money.

(No, really, that’s what they’re calling it. They’re not going to change it even if you do start an email petition.)

Edited by James Ledbetter, the new pub is “a general interest site for people who have an interest in money and financial affairs and economics … but not specifically or necessarily who work in the finance industry.”

So it’s the Fox Business Network to all the CNBC’s out there. Or maybe it’s the MainStreet.com to all the TheStreet.com’s out there?

Whatever. They’re probably going to do a story on The Britney Spears Economy, and then we won’t have to like the name or the content.

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. … At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority. In the case of Wikipedia, this authority is both organic and institutionalized. A small segment of highly active users author the majority of the site’s content; there are also elected site administrators who have the power to protect pages, block the IP addresses of problem users, and otherwise regulate Wikipedia’s operations. At Digg, active users have more of a de facto authority over the site’s goings-on (though there are persistent rumors that the site has “secret moderators” who delete content). But officially speaking, while the site’s algorithm seems to favor devoted users, no individual Digger has the power to unilaterally delete a post.

-Chris Wilson, “The Wisdom of the Chaperones,” Slate

Writing for Slate is easy. As we’ve said before, just follow these three simple steps:

1. Take conventional wisdom.
2. Prove why it’s wrong.
3. Add a dash of pop culture references for good measure.

And as excepted, Slate media critic Jack Shafer doesn’t object to the Times story on John McCain:

That the imperfect Times article doesn’t expose a raging blaze isn’t sufficient cause for condemning it. The evidence the paper provides more than adequately establishes that McCain remains a better preacher about ethics, standards, appearances, and special interest conflicts than he is a practitioner, something voters should consider before punching the ballot for him.

The only thing missing is a pop-culture reference. But to be far to Shafer, he only had a day to write it.

We’ve said it before, and apparently we’re going to say it again. If you want to write for Slate, here’s what you do:

1. Take conventional wisdom.
2. Prove why it’s wrong.
3. Add a dash of pop culture references for good measure.

So Slate came out with their list of the top philanthropists of 2007 today and guess who topped their list? Leona Helmsley. Yes, the same Leona Helmsley who bequeathed $12 million to her dogs and left a legacy massive bitchiness. But conventional wisdom was wrong. Again!

The Queen of Mean actually left $4 billion to her own charitable trust.

Wow, Slate. You just blew our minds. Seriously, there’s brain and skull all over the office. Too bad “large donations upon her death to her own charity” doesn’t rhythm with mean. Otherwise, Helmsely would be deserving of a new nickname.

Heath Ledger couldn’t have timed it worst. Not only did he have a young child and a promising career, but he died on a Tuesday. A Tuesday! Did he even consider the editorial calendars of tabloids when he took all that Ambien? Probably not.

Along with People, Entertainment Weekly’s Tuesday close put them in the unique position to be able to literally cover Ledger’s death. Their next issue (a collector’s item!) will be a “Special Tribute” to his career.

Meanwhile, Slate asks the tough questions, like was Ledger dreaming before he died? Despite all that funding from the Washington Post Co., Slate was not in fact able to get into his subconscious: “Someone who overdoses on sleeping pills probably won’t have a dream before he dies, but it’s not out of the question.”

Man, it’s going to be a long ten days until that new toxicology report comes out.

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which means the online magazines, in addition to everyone else, are in an all-out war to out-black each other. Except here, the result – a healthy discussion about race in America, not a discussion about lynching – might actually be worth your time.

On Slate.com, we’ve got the first of three excerpts from Richard Thompson Ford’s The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, where Ford “sets the stage with the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, in an effort to determine whether and in which ways his detractors were truly racists.”

And over on Salon.com? Wise words from N-Word author Randall Kennedy on … Clarence Thomas.

Stay tuned for February, when Black History Month offers a full 28 days of this.

You’re probably better off if you didn’t know that Tabitha Soren, the SuChin Pak of the 90s, is married to Michael Lewis. But they are married, have three kids and live in California.

We find this all unbelievably intriguing since we grew up with MTV news and Lewis’s book, Liar’s Poker is the only thing we can talk about with bankers.

And lucky for us, Lewis likes to write about their personal life for Slate. At Tab’s request, he recently got a vasectomy:

My wife wanted me to be here, and it seemed too transparently selfish to refuse. She’d endured three pregnancies, suffered the pain and indignity of three childbirths, changed most of the diapers, gotten up most of the mornings, and, on top of it all, given me the leisure to write many articles complaining about the inconveniences of fatherhood. The time had come for daddy to take one for the team.

Lesson: Michael Lewis is the ultimate team player, though he admits to some trepidation about having a stranger shave his balls. Weird. More importantly, what did Tabitha make Kurt Loder do back in their Week-In-Rock days?

Famous blogger and personal friend, Chris Beam, appeared on The Colbert Report last night. The best part is when they Photoshop Chris’s beard onto John Edwards. You can’t hire and compensate writers fairly for comedy like that.