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Romantic Outdoor Idyll? Hah!
by Charles Perry, Los Angeles Times
What's happening to the picnic is a real offense against nature. A plea for the blithe elegance of the past starts with the basket.

River People
by Paul Gustafson, Washington Post
The cool, verdant banks of the Potomac have always beckoned us. But for some people, the river is more than a place to while away an afternoon. Like a home, the river sustains them.

After The Flood
by Joseph Kahn, New York Times
The biggest dam in the world is remaking the Chinese countryside.

Turn Back The Spam Of Time
by Brian McWilliams, Wired News
Busted in 2001 for spamming, Robby Todino turned to mass e-mailings in his quest for time-travel technology. While netizens have had fun with the bizarre messages, Todino is serious. He's just waiting for the right intergalactic courier to come through.

DVDs Are For Losers
by Bill Maher, Salon
Good movies are like good sex — and resale-happy Hollywood has long since gone frigid.

Suspended Animation
by David Koenig, MousePlanet
Pencils down. Disney terminates traditional animation.

Vendela Vida Floats Amid S.F. Literati But Keeps Feet, Attitude Firmly Planted
by Joshunda Sanders, San Francisco Chronicle
While they are admired for their work and for leading a renaissance of literature, publishing and philanthropy in San Francisco, they are also major snark targets, annoying others for seeming to have so much brilliance, youth and charm.

At Ease In Vietnam, Asia's New Culinary Star
by R.W. Apple Jr, New York Times
In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, restaurant cooking of real excellence has evolved in the last 10 years.

Scholars Perform Autopsy On Ancient Writing Systems
by Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post
In the first study of its kind, three experts in the study of written language have described the common characteristics that caused three famous scripts — ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern cuneiform and pre-Columbian Mayan — to disappear.

Good Sitcom Is Rare, And Actors Know It
by Bill Carter, New York Times
The networks' version of hardball has usually prevailed in recent years. But this year's preseason ritual has a twist.

Burning Man Never Gets Old
by Xeni Jardin, Wired News
Ask any participating "burner" what Burning Man is, and you're likely to hear the same response: The event is more than the sum of its art cars, kinetic sculptures or suntanned bodies clad in body paint and glitter (and sometimes not much else). You just have to experience it in person, they always say.

Disney Fini? Don't Take The Mickey
by Philip Delves, Telegraph
For those who think Disneyland Paris has never been anything but a Trojan horse pouring toxic American culture over Europe, its woes will be a source of pleasure.

Ghost In The Machine
by C.J. Bahnsen, Los Angeles Times
He met her in a world of endless fantasy. It wasn't her real address.

On The Roof, Another New York, Above It All
by Michael Brick, New York Times
Even in these days of computer games, conditioned air and liability lawsuits, the people of New York still go to the roof. They charge through security doors and climb up fire escapes, and nervous landlords or busybody building superintendents are no match.

We're All Connected?
by Rob Walker, New York TImes
Flash mobs could change the way we come together, unless they are co-opted by consumerism — or unplugged by an old-tech blackout.

Lunch In L.A.: It's Nearly Extinct
by David Shaw, Los Angeles Times
The sprawling nature of our megalopolis — and the local obsession with health and diet — have long made lunch a dicey proposition, especially for fine-dining establishments. But it's worse now than I can ever recall.

In Los Angeles, Strip Mall Food Is Way Cool
by Janelle Brown, New York TImes
Little-known hole in the walls, lurking on just about every major intersection in town, are the antidote to everything flashy and velvet-roped, which is why they remain so popular with Hollywood's next wave, even as trendy boites come and go.

'The Race' Puts Global Spin On Reality TV
by Duane Dudek, Journal Sentinel
Its serial and treasure-hunt qualities give the show the page-turning appeal of a beach book, while its global scale is as grandiose as a summer blockbuster.

Glass With Class
by Linda Hales, Washington Post
For design merchant Murray Moss, the future is clear.

Cultural History Of The Night
by Jeet Heer, National Post
In history, nocturnal urban darkness was the norm.

Those Amazing Animals!
by Heather Havrilesky, Salon
Who knew Jerry Bruckheimer had the vision to back a show that's basically a relationship compatibility quiz from a women's magazine, set into live action?

Low-Carb Version Of French Fries
by Teresa Riordan, New York Times
Can there be such a thing as a healthy French fry? Randy Blaun, a writer and self-proclaimed foodie living in Manhattan, claims to have invented just that: French fries that have as many nutrients and as much fiber as a serving of broccoli.

Golden Oldies
by Alice Holstein, Boston Globe
A car radio is like a time machine, taking you back to those lazy days of carefree youth.

Everyone's A Film Geek Now
by Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
For the movie industry, the DVD has become so important that the tail now appears to be wagging the dog.

Slow. Quiet. Courtly. You Say It's In New York?
by Felicity Barringer, New York Times
The United Nations borrows much from its 191 member states and very little from New York. Outside, there is rudeness. Inside, there is calm, translated into six languages.

Dark City
by Virginia Heffernan, Slate
My night in blacked-out New York.

Fiddling With The Reception
by Jason Zengerle, New York Times
Jim Walton, CNN's president, made his mark by dropping Connie Chung. Now he has to figure out what to do with Paula Zahn and, while he's at it, solve his network's continuing identity crisis.

Dog Days
by Jonathan Reynolds, New York Times
Even as it goes haute, the dog remains hot.

Looking Up An Old Love On The Streets Of Vietnam
by R. W. Apple Jr, New York Times
Pho, an aromatic noodle soup, is a national passion in Vietnam. In Hanoi, it is a cult.

A Comatose Transit System Awakens, Slowly
by Randy Kennedy, New York Times
In fits and starts, the region's transportation system began to stagger back to life yesterday, as traffic lights suddenly picked up where they had left off, cabbies switched their meters back on, packed buses substituted for subways and roaring diesel trains rolled to the rescue on powerless commuter lines.

What Do Dogs Want?
by Jim Holt, Boston Globe
Food? Love? A job? A walk around the block with the new dog literature.

A Race To Master The Art Of French Cooking
by Amanda Hesser, New York Times
Julie Powell is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Call It Starbucking, The Fine Art Of Hating Your Local Outlet Of The Seattle Coffeehouse Chain. Why Is Starbucks The Brand We Love To Hate?
by James Sullivan, San Francisco Chronicle
Perhaps more to the point, the company has come to represent an insidious sort of big-business inexorability and a particular brand of "lifestyle" marketing epitomized by the company's own chief product. They're not selling coffee so much as the "Starbucks Experience."

Mostly Not Mozart
by Tara Pepper, Newsweek
Few orchestras play the works of contemporary classical composers, and almost no one buys their albums. Is their music uninspired — or do we simply not get it?

The Girl Next Door
by David Sedaris, New Yorker
How much trouble could a nine-year-old be?

For Flight Attendants, Stress Comes With The Job
by Francine Parnes, New York Times
You think your business travels have become more stressful? Put yourself in the shoes of flight attendants (and even they sometimes have to take them off for the security guards).

Who Built The Pyramids?
by Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine
Drawing on diverse strands of evidence, from geological history to analysis of living arrangements, bread-making technology, and animal remains, Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Gilt Trip
by Blake Gopnik, Washington Post
How great works of art are presented can border on sacrilege, but some cruators are changing their frames of reference.

One Tall Cappuccino Conundrum, To Go
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
Going to Starbucks is one of the most challenging and worrisome things an urban person can do. It is not for the faint of heart or the indecisive of mind. It is an exact science, like human space flight. The slightest misstep can mean disaster.

Gregory Hines, Dancer And Actor, Dies At 57
by Jennifer Dunning, New York Times
Gregory Hines, the genial, suave dancer, singer and actor who for many personified the art of classical tap in the 1980's and 90's, died late Saturday on his way to a hospital from his home in Los Angeles. He was 57.

Straight From THe Spleen
by Jack Shafer, Slate
The Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes gives the entertainment-information industrial complex hell.

The Truth About Polygraphs
by Charles P. Pierce, Boston Globe
A National Academy of Sciences study validates long-held doubts about the reliability of polygraphs. So why does the government still rely on them to screen applicants for jobs?

Year In Japan Was A Study In Subtlety
by Naomi R. Kooker, Boston Globe
When Victoria Abbott Riccardi returned from a stay in Kyoto, Japan, 17 years ago, friends stopped her, wondering how she had changed. Did she cut her hair? some asked. "They couldn't really pinpoint it," says Riccardi, as she prepares a Japanese lunch in her home here.

A Laboratory Of Taste
by Arthur Lubow, New York Times
Barcelona, not Paris, is now the vanguard capital of Europe — not least because of its wildly experimental cooking. And no one there is cooking more daringly and ingeniously than Ferran Adria.

The House Filmgoers Love To Hate
by Jesse McKinley, New York Times
In a city famed for both fierce devotion to its cultural landmarks and critical cultural consumers, the love-hate relationship between audiences and the Angelika is one of the most pungent. And the griping about the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street in Greenwich Village — "the centerpiece of independent film exhibition in NYC," as its Web site advertises — remains one of many moviegoer's dirty pleasures.

Why It's A Wide Wide Wide Wide Screen
by A. O. Scott, New York Times
Old movies look better than new movies on your TV because TV scared the Hollywood studios into making screens wider.

Sexed Texts
by Charles McGrath, New York Times
A study says that prose style reveals an author's sex. But what exactly does that reveal?

NBC Misfires On LeBlanc
by Marvin Kitman, Newsday
Good ideas can come in a nanosecond. Bad ideas can take a year, two years, forever.

Food Shopping In The Fastest Lane
by Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times
The founder of FreshDirect, the hot online grocery business, believes he has seized on the heavy lifting problem, by speaking to a city's passion for good food minus the unpleasantness of actually shopping for it.

Stuck In The Present
by Josie Appleton, Spiked
If the past is a foreign country, some history students seem to be finding it difficult even leaving their home town.

CBS Reporter Finds The Drama In Ordinary Lives
by Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Sun-Times
Today a fixture on "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather" as well as a biweekly essayist on "60 Minutes II," Hartman has ascended at CBS News without reporting from a war zone, the White House or the latest Trial of the Century. He did it by hanging out with the Cabbage Patch Kids.

A Life Well-Read
by Dan Harder, Los Angeles Times
For decades her passion was the Beverly Wilshire — and her books. Now at age 90, Helen Chaplin can still out-think just about anybody.

616 Cheeses, 22 Judges And 2 Days
by Emily Green, Los Angeles Times
San Francisco—We came to judge cheese.

No Sputtering Aloud
by Linton Weeks, Washington Post
Okay, reader. Perhaps the best way to understand this little story about the trials and trip-ups of making audio books is to read it aloud. So have a seat, grab a bottle of water and let's begin. You take the regular text; we'll handle the italics.

What's Happened To Sex In Movies?
by Elivis Mitchell, New York Times
Is there a fear of dealing with grown-up sexuality in movies? Absolutely. A foreigner judging the United States by its films would think Americans spend more time running from exploding fireballs than having sex.

For Wines, The Paradox Of Global Warming
by Eric Asimov, New York Times
For winemakers, especially those in historically cool grape-growing regions, the changing climate has already markedly affected their lives and wines.

Winning Combini
by Jim Frederick, Time
The rise of 7-Eleven is a welcome victory for corporate Japan.

What's Right With Japan
by Jim Frederick, Time
Forget about salarymen, gridlocked politics and zombie corporations. Japan is transforming itself into Asia's cultural dynamo — and might be reinventing its economy in the process.

Slot Machines Cha-Ching No More
by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News
Casinos love coinless slot machines: no dirty coins to count, fewer moving parts to maintain, up-to-the-second tallies. For gamblers, though, it's a different matter. Purists miss the lovely sound of quarters hitting the pan.

The Washington Post Lite
by Jack Shafer, Slate
If you find news radio too intellectually taxing or wish CNN would slow down its news ticker, the Washington Post Co. has just the thing for you.

NBC Hopes Short Movies Will Keep Viewers From Flipping
by Bill Carter, New York Times
NBC thinks it has come up with a new way to get people to sit through blocks of commercials: Break up the ads with minimovies.

Looking Backward And Ahead At Continent's End
by Timothy Egan, New York Times
Swimmers, artists, historians and legions of the curious follow Lewis and Clark's route and still discover something about the land, themselves or the nation's history.

The Children Who Won't Grow Up
by Frank Furedi, Spiked
The alarm bells started ringing a few years ago. I was showing a friend around my campus when we encountered a group of undergraduates absorbed in watching Teletubbies in the bar.

Filmflam
by Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe
Going to the movies used to be fun. Nowadays it's work — just to figure out what's happening onscreen.

The Photo Booth: A Portrait Studio Of One's Own
by Vicky Goldberg, New York Times
It was Andy Warhol, a crucial figure in the art world's love affair with the vernacular, who saw the grander possibilities of the photo booth and turned it into a portrait studio that furnished him with models for his paintings.

Farewell, Beloved Bug Of My Heart
by Thane Peterson, BusinessWeek
Now that the very last VW Beetle has rolled off the production line, I can't resist taking a quirky, air-cooled drive down Memory Lane.

Would You Like Fries With The Endive?
by Bill Barol, Slate
Taste-testing fast food salads.

Jury Duty Is One Of The Prices We Pay For Justice
by Cathy Curtis, Los Angeles Times
Selective Citizens never know when they might need a jury of their peers. And what a pity if none of their kind bothers to show up.

Sunken Treasure Points To Forgery In Gold Collection
by Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post
A gold bar at the National Museum of American History, long thought to be a sample from the 19th century California Gold Rush, is a fake, according to a well-known geologist.

The Probability That A Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (And Other Riddles Of Modern Life)
by Stephen J. Dubner, New York Times
Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently, too, than the average economist.

Picturing A New Webster's
by Rory Evans, New York Times
The illustrator for the 11th Collegiate Dictionary explains why streetcar, skeleton and skunk made the drawing cut and botox and dot-commer didn't.

Sword Of Honor
by Paul Robinson, The Spectator
America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason-Dixon line, and the crucial difference now, as at the time of the American Civil War, is honour.