It's hard to imagine a time when it was common for American women to try to put on weight. But thanks to this awesome 1934 ad we know it happened. Yep, body image here isn't all that much different than in Fiji—the transition just happened a lot earlier. As a skinny person myself, I've always found it funny how 80- and 90-year old women will tell me how much weight I need to gain.... which, granted, may have as much to do about them being 90 and no longer bothering with social niceties as pre-television-era standards of beauty. But I remember meeting the 90-something friend of my man Charles's family for the first time. Upon being introduced, she told me I was too thin, then turned to Charles and said, incredulously, "You like her like that?!?"

If watching TV really makes you smarter, as Steven Johnson argued in an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine (an excerpt from his forthcoming book) then I guess I need to watch a lot more of it, because try as I might, I could make no sense of Johnson's piece.

Geek activism has not taken off yet, but it should. With the gamers recognizing the need for a louder voice, EFF gaining momentum and Linux taking on the mainstream on the one hand and recent severe losses in privacy, freedom of speech and intellectual property rights on the other, now seems to be the best time to rally around the cause.