Slate

A new cattle drug called Zilmax is being widely used in the industrial feedlots where most of America’s beef comes from, but not because it produces a better sirloin. In fact, it has been shown to make steak less flavorful and juicy than beef from untreated cattle. Many feedlot owners, big meatpackers, and at least one prominent industry group resisted the drug, worrying that the beef industry would turn off consumers if it started churning out lower-quality steaks. ...

Everything about the online world encourages sharing—share your recent purchase on Amazon, share your dining experience on Yelp, share your thoughts about Beyoncé on Twitter. But what about the things you would rather not share with everyone in your social network, such as the cheesy pet name you call your boyfriend or the startlingly high number of romantic comedies your wife forced you to watch on Netflix last month?

Imagine you’re a 4-year-old girl. You’re strolling through Disney World when Cinderella—whom you have worshiped from afar for most of your young life—sashays up to you, greets you by name, and wishes you a happy birthday.

If you knew that your favorite local eatery failed its latest health inspection, would you still eat there?

Most of us don’t have to consider that question because restaurant hygiene scores are hard to find—we would have to go out of our way to locate the information on lousy government sites. But that may be about to change. Yelp announced Thursday that health scores will now appear on the site’s listings for San Francisco and New York City restaurants.

When Sarah AbdelHafez was 12, her older brother brought home a cutting-edge piece of technology: a modem. Sitting around the family computer in Cairo, “we used to listen to the sound of the phone dialing … holding our breaths until we heard the sweet sound of successful connection,” she recalls. Now, a 27-year-old AbdelHafez has launched her own Internet-based business called EduKitten. It’s a series of Arabic mobile apps that teaches kids reading, math, and vocabulary with interactive cartoon-based books, games, and puzzles.

On Monday, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt arrived in North Korea, a country that is almost completely cut off from the Internet. Schmidt, who is traveling with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, is part of what has been termed a private humanitarian mission. The State Department has nonetheless expressed dissatisfaction, saying that the timing of the visit is not “particularly helpful.”   

The early case for telecommuting—made most prominently by Alvin Toffler in his best-selling The Third Wave in 1980—had a strong romantic flavor to it. For futurists like Toffler, the home office would be an "electronic cottage” that might “glue the family together again,” provide “greater community stability,” and even trigger a “renaissance among voluntary organizations.” Forget about bowling alone: In Toffler's future, we'd all be telecommuting together! (Toffler, it must be said, was only popularizing ideas that had been aired many decades earlier.

N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most well-known economists in American politics. A Harvard professor, he chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005 and served as a senior adviser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Many observers saw him among the top contenders to replace Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve in a Romney administration.

The latest battle over who governs the Internet is taking place right now. Representatives from more than 150 nations gathered in Dubai last Monday for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, a two-week meeting hosted by the International Telecommunication Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations. Their mission: to renegotiate International Telecommunications Regulations treaty, which governs global interconnection and interoperability of telecommunications traffic. The outcome could change how the Internet works.