Love Me, Love My Mix Tape | Newsweek Periscope

HOLIDAYS
Of Prophets And Profits
Eric Pape 10/4/2008 12:00:00 AM
For the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims have long indulged in nights of earthly pleasures after daylong fasts. But as the 2008 holiday draws to a close in Europe, participants and experts there say those pleasures are becoming decidedly more commercial. Many families have replaced traditional at-home dinners with fast-food feasts and decadent restaurant affairs. Some Muslims even spruced up the revelry with Christmas-like touches: decorative garlands, bottles of Cham'alal Ramadan sparkling wine (nonalcoholic) and holiday catalogs offering Holy Qur'an Digital Books and the Islamic iPod Qur'an.
TECHNOLOGY
New Software Turns PC Into TiVo TV Recorder
9/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
Farewell, Election Day
George F. Will 9/27/2008 12:00:00 AM
The sentiment expressed by a sly bumper sticker this year (EVERY DISASTER IS A CHANGE) is a cousin of this axiom: Most improvements make matters worse. That axiom is pertinent to this election season because, for many years now, improvers have been toiling to perfect voting procedures.
HEALTH FOR LIFE
Sad Brain, Happy Brain
Michael Craig Miller, M.D. 9/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
The brain is the mind is the brain. One hundred billion nerve cells, give or take, none of which individually has the capacity to feel or to reason, yet together generating consciousness. For about 400 years, following the ideas of French philosopher René Descartes, those who thought about its nature considered the mind related to the body, but separate from it. In this model—often called "dualism" or the mind-body problem—the mind was "immaterial," not anchored in anything physical. Today neuroscientists are finding abundant evidence of an idea that even Freud played with more than 100 years ago, that separating mind from brain makes no sense. Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist-neuroscientist Eric Kandel stated it directly in a watershed paper published in 1998: "All mental processes, even the most complex psychological processes, derive from operations of the brain."
R.I.P., Dear DVD
N’Gai Croal 9/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
There's nothing like having a new housemate (in this case, my sister, who's attending graduate school in New York) to motivate a proper apartment cleaning. My CDs will be sent off to iPodmeister.com, where you can exchange CDs for a new iPod (the site even converts your old discs to MP3 as a free bonus). As for my 600 or so DVDs, I've taken them out of their cases and stored them in a set of Case Logic binders. But I'd like to find an easy way to store them digitally, much like I'll be doing with the CDs.
One Bad Apple
Daniel Lyons 9/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
A former lieutenant of Steve Jobs's once told me something surprising about his ex-boss. "Steve is a monopolist at heart," he said. "He's just like Bill Gates. He just hasn't been as successful." Well, Jobs is getting there. This summer, Apple's market capitalization surged past Google's, making it the financial king of Silicon Valley. True, Apple still holds only 11 percent of the U.S. consumer PC market, according to researcher NPD, but its influence is far greater than that market share suggests. The iconic iPod dominates its market, and the iTunes music store has sold more than 5 billion songs, making it the No. 1 music retailer in America, ahead of Wal-Mart, according to IDC. Apple's iPhone is the No. 3 smart phone in the United States, according to NPD.