Newsweek

Newsweek has outdone itself in the funny department by creating a faux-Obama reality show filled with voice-overs, stares, and close-ups — just like MTV's The City. The District will chronicle President Obama's first 100 days as reality TV.

Just like Whitney Port, President Obama has a new career to promote, but first he must learn the rules of his new hometown. Unlike The City, the drama in Washington, DC is a bit less manufactured. Enjoy!

Interested in getting the lowdown about green architecture? Then I suggest you read the Newsweek article, "The Bad News About Green Architecture." For a good while now, the reporting of green architecture practices has been nothing less than greenwashed, and I've been waiting for a mainstream publication to address our country's problem with its perception and definition of "green" architecture. In "The Bad News About Green Architecture," writer Cathleen McGuigan points out that "LEED rating" is an over-trumpeted catch phrase these days ("more than 16,000 projects are now registered with the U.S. Green Building Council as intending to go for a LEED certification"), and LEED isn't stringent enough with its awards — a long-held truth.
But more importantly, she stresses that building green if you're building big (i.e. McMansions), or unnecessarily, isn't green at all. There are various plans to build green resorts in Las Vegas, including the 8.3-million-square-foot Palazzo Resort Hotel and Casino, likely motivated by the tax rebates that come with passing LEED certification. While that makes a great talking point in local papers, it still takes "tons of jet fuel that will be used to deliver millions more tourists to Vegas each year," and countless un-green materials to keep the place up and running once it's built. To hear more of my thoughts, read more

Newsweek's cover story pits two men against each other that I have to confess, I'd never really considered in the same breath: Lincoln and Darwin. As next year marks the 200th birthdays (both were born on February 12, 1809) of both men whose independent ideas have have formed our modern world, Newsweek asks the tricky question, who was more important: Lincoln or Darwin? Are we more influenced by the man who preserved the concept of republican democracy or the man who brought forth the idea of evolution? The ideas they pioneered were as disparate as the men are surprisingly similar.

Here's how: Both men lost their mothers in early childhood, both suffered depression and both struggled with religious questions. The two also had poor relations with their fathers and each lost a child in early childbirth. Lincoln and Darwin both share "late bloomers" disease: Neither found real success until their middle years — Darwin published The Origin of the Species at 50 and Lincoln was elected President one year later. To see the most surprising and possibly inspiring shared trait, read more

The eHarmony dating site bills itself as the ultimate uniter, but a piece in Newsweek shows that the very practices that make it so successful — 236 eHarmony users marry every day — could get them sued.

The roots of the site have long been speculated about. It was founded by 72-year-old Christian self-help author Neil Clark Warren, who published several of his books under the imprint of Dobson's Focus on the Family, and then consummated that relationship when eHarmony started out by peddling eHarmony the service on Dobson's radio show.

Adding to the buzz, and a fact successfully exploited by competitor Chemistry.com, is that eHarmony rejects about 20 percent of its applicants and doesn't fully explain why. Their official statement says that the site rejects people who are underage, already married or dishonest—as well as those whose answers raise flags about their mental health. Some don't see it that way. To see who, read more