Wes Phillips

The deadliest words in the kitchen: Let's double it!

An interactive New York map (that doesn't even cover my nabe, grrr). Cool though.

Doug Morris and David Geffen think we portable digital device owners are thieves. GigaOm sez just say no to UMG.

If you're tired of talking to your relatives during this festive season, may I suggest you watch Stardusthttp://www.stardustmovie.com/">Stardust; together? It came out on DVD last week and The Wire doesn't resume broadcast until January 6. Best of all—almost nobody in your family has seen it—unless I've hectored them into seeing it.

As an audiophile, one of my core beliefs has always been that, once they have heard better sounding music, everybody would want it. That's how it worked with me: My friend Bill sat me down in front of his Quad '57s and cued David Bowie's Heroes on the turntable and once I heard all of those new sounds coming out of my beloved old LP, I was a changed man.

"In the weeks after my husband moved out, I received an email from someone offering to help me clean the house or cook, an email that evokes images of dishes piling up in the sink, flies hovering around half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches, laundry accumulating. I wonder where these nightmarish visions of our domestic situation are coming from. Why would the departure of my husband launch me and my daughter into a life of squalor? Someone else writes: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved five minutes away but died."

Photographer David Burnett has posted his series of photographs of the Gulf coast, taken last January and published in the new National Geographic. It's stunning stuff. Burnett has the eye for both the big picture and the telling detail—his photo of the refrigerator-magnet–covered car of a worker at the garbage dump where they destroyed "white goods" is surprisingly touching and human, even though no people are shown.