Hanging homemade banners from overpasses—"freeway blogging" is the catchphrase—is also popular with political activists. States seem to have less tolerance for them, as two protesters in DuPage County, Ill., found recently after suggesting impeachment on a bridge over Interstate 355. A disorderly conduct hearing is set for this week.
—"Getting the Message Across," U.S. News & World Report, December 17, 2007

"I had to do something because I feel that there is no place in my hometown of Houston for unchallenged haters," Bleiweiss said. "This group has taken on a life of its own, and it has become time consuming for me, but I would rather be an 'upstander,' and do something about the hatred, than be a bystander."
—Arlene Nisson Lassin, "Taking matters into his own hands," The Houston Chronicle, November 6, 2009

Dr Janette Vardy from the Sydney Cancer Centre, told the Clinical Oncological Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting 'chemofog' had previously been assumed to be temporary, but for 20 to 30 per cent of patients, it had been shown to be ongoing. "It is only in the last 10 years that we have recognised 'chemofog' or 'chemobrain' as a condition," Dr Vardy said. "For a long time some oncologists didn't believe it was real and it was all in the mind.
—"Chemo may leave brain fog," Science Alert, November 18, 2009

What is a mancession, you ask? It's not this. It's a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history. Eighty percent of job losses in the last two years were among men, said AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers, and it could get worse.
—Derek Thompson, "It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession!," The Atlantic, July 9, 2009

This seems straight out of a Terry Gilliam film. The guy flying with the two really big birds is Scott Mason, who uses them to detect thermal currents to fly his paraglider through the skies of Nepal. It's called parahawking.
—Jesus Diaz, "Flying with Hawks," Gizmodo.com, October 18, 2009

While Tyson emphasises the things that set Pluto apart from the eight official planets, like its cluttered and elongated orbit, he does not argue against calling it a planet. We should spend less time classifying objects as planet or non-planet, he says, and more time thinking about the myriad ways to group them, from size and composition to formation history and weather. He makes a good case for moving beyond the definition debate, but it is unlikely to sway the hordes of devoted Plutophiles — especially the angry correspondent who told Tyson: "Pluto is a planet because I say so."
—David Shiga, "Fighting over the underdog (subscription required)," New Scientist, January 24, 2009

The clichés are that women shop, men buy. But when I went shopping with people — and I went shopping with a lot of men and women — I found that a lot of women are what men are supposed to be, which is the 'grab and goers,' who hate shopping. When a man spends hours and hours and hours online looking for the right cellphone or something like that, he's shopping. But the culture tends not to notice that.
—Lee Eisenberg quoted in Sarah Boesveld, "Q&A: Good news — it's okay to shop," The Globe and Mail, November 9, 2009

The pugilist was one Henry Allen, a renowned writer and an editor with the Style section. On the other end of Allen's ire (something between a clenched fist and a slap, say eyewitnesses) was Style writer Manuel Roig-Franzia, co-author of a "charticle" (an appetizer-sized combination of words, images and graphics) that Allen called the second-worst story he'd seen in 43 years.
—Kathleen Parker, "A spark of passion in the newsroom," The Washington Post, November 8, 2009

Palin is a paradessence, and hence a wildly popular commodity, because she combines the family-centeredness of the ideal suburban Mom with the ruthlessness of a corporate "warrior" in the dog-eat-dog neoliberal economy, or of a hard-core ideologue/foot soldier for the Far Right. She is sort of a perfect combination of June Cleaver and Ilse Koch. She both energizes the GOP's fundamentalist-Christian base (which was previously very suspicious of McCain), and appeals to non-fundamentalist, independent white voters (who find her even more charismatic than Obama — with the added advantage that she's white, to boot). It is probable that, given how gender formations work in America today, so powerful a paradessence would have to appear in the form of a woman, rather than a (heterosexual) man.
—Steven Shaviro, "An Issue That Won't Go Away," The Pinocchio Theory, September 13th, 2008

A key to understanding those consequences is the notion of the "fire regime", where different vegetation has characteristic fires in terms of recurrence, intensity, seasonality and biological effects. Indeed, fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates. In other words, Earth has a "pyrogeography".
—David Bowman, "Scorched earth: Wildfires will change the way we live," New Scientist, October 7, 2009

Americans are born with the consumption gene, and borrow, not earn, their way to the American dream of home and business ownership. Chinese, on the other hand, have the thrift ethos drummed into them from birth. Their Government has continued to pour money into investment in infrastructure and industry for export to drive growth and raise living standards. But the Chinese Government has not built the kind of social safety net and retail financial system that would lead its citizens to save less, consume more and build a vibrant and sustainable domestic market-led model of economic development. Whether they like it or not, China and the US will be stuck with Chimerica for a long time.
—Geoffrey Garrett, "The challenge of Chimerica (PDF)," Sydney Morning Herald, October 31, 2009

Chorus, which is free, allows you to see which apps that your friends have downloaded and rated highly. It then uses algorithms to make recommendations based on those preferences. The idea, Mr. Jha said, is that app suggestions aren't too far off from film or restaurant recommendations — people want informal endorsements from people they trust have good taste.
—Jenna Wortham, "Friendsourcing the Quest for iPhone Apps," The New York Times, November 3, 2009