Jill Pantozzi, TMS' erstwhile Editor-in-Chief, tweeted about an incredible /r/relationships post that can really only be summed up exactly how you see it on her tweet.

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A piece went up on the New York Times, today titled "What It’s Really Like to Work in Hollywood* (*If you’re not a straight white man.)," which features 27 writers, actors, producers, and directors talking about their experiences being underrepresented on and off-screen.

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New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis coined "the DuVernay test," checking to see whether the people of color in a film have their own stories or are merely accessories to white stories.

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Recently, India became only the first country ever to put a spacecraft in Mars orbit on the first try with their Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM). While Mars needs MOM, no one needed the New York Times cartoon about India's maturing space program.

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It's pretty common knowledge that the amount of soap we use is probably bad for us. Sure, there's the "antibacterial products breed stronger bacteria" argument, but there's also a contingent of cosmetologists who say too much soap can strip the skin and hair of necessary bacteria. AOBiome's solution? Spray that bacteria right back on your face.

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This shouldn't surprise you, but you know that pumpkin-flavored processed food you've been eating all season? The pumpkin flavor is also processed. Michael Moss, an NYT writer, recently visited a food flavor manufacturer to figure out just how it is that the flavor we attribute to "pumpkin" came to be, and the science of it is actually pretty cool.

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If you tried to access the New York Time website over the past two hours, you might have encountered a very unusual error message saying that the site was down. It's back up now, but what happened? Hackers happened, an unnamed source at Fox Business claims. Uh oh.

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Good news, everyone! It turns out Truman Capote isn't dead after all! It seems the Breakfast at Tiffany's author is alive and well, and writing articles about abortion for The New York Times, or at least that's what Google would have you believe. Google News credited the 2010 article "The New Abortion Providers" to Truman Capote, who has actually been dead since 1984. It says so right on the plaque. So what's the deal, Google? Why you trying to get my hopes up about zombie Capote coming back to life?

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NYT poll-meister and knower of dark secrets Nate Silver took some flack last week for making bets on the outcome of the presidential election with Fox News personality Joe Scarborough. Silver was vindicated last night as his predictions for the election, on a state by state basis, turned out to be eerily accurate...almost too accurate, some might say. So as the nation looks to put a contentious presidential election behind us and move forward as a country, we can all turn to the most important question of the morning after the big night: Is Nate Silver a witch?

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It's no surprise that newspapers and other outlets of old-school journalism have struggled in the digital space. However, a collaboration between the Mozilla and the Knight Foundation called OpenNews has aimed to remedy that, by bringing developers and journalists together. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to bring the fruit of this work to the world. Now, the New York Times and other major news operations have joined the project, hoping to make their content even more relevant in the digital space.

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The New York Times' City Room blog has a fascinating post about an obituary that the paper corrected 112 years after publication. When the Times received a letter from the great-nephew of Lt. M.K. Schwenk informing the paper that his great-uncle's name had been Milton, not Melton, as the Times wrote in an obituary published in 1899. The paper hastened to correct the error, and in looking into Schwenk's life, discovered several other errors in the obituary: For instance, his hometown and graduation date from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis were both incorrect not just in the Times' article, but in other New York-area publications from the same era. This raised, for the contemporary Times writer looking into these issues, the question of how accurate we can presume primary sources to be, even supposedly reputable ones:

It is never too late to set the record straight. If journalism is indeed the first rough draft of history, there is always time to revise, polish and perfect, even if pinning down the details about Lieutenant Schwenk after so many years turned out to be less than straightforward.

(NYT via Romenesko)

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Following an article on a baseball bat humorously named for Orcrist the Goblin-Cleaver, a sword from The Hobbit that was owned by Thorin Oakenshield -- and not Bilbo Baggins, duh-- the New York Times learned the #1 lesson about writing articles about swords in Tolkien books: Be sure that you get every detail about the Tolkienian sword right, or you will hear very quickly from Tolkien fans that you did not get every detail about the Tolkienian sword right, dangit. (Related: Baseball fans are probably geekier than most other sports fans.)

(via Reddit)

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Remember when the New York Times announced its paywall? That thing that caused outrage by making most of their digital offerings hidden behind a subscription service, but then people figured out a multitude of ways to avoid having to actually subscribe and the paywall went from being totally obnoxious, to somewhat silly?

Well, turns out the paywall actually worked, and the New York Times has already managed to snag 100,000 subscribers in less than a month of the paywall's implementation. Though the number seems fairly large for something people were so opposed to--as well as figured out how to bypass in a variety of ways--that pretty 100,000 number actually includes a $0.99 four week trial, so maybe all isn't wrong with the digital world.

(Business Insider via Gizmodo)

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Google has announced a new daily puzzle, dubbed A Google a Day, in which they pose a question with an answer that is supposed to be a tad difficult to search for using the wondrous powers of search engines. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com, as well as above the New York Times crossword puzzle on weekdays, with the answers being posted in both venues the following day, along with search tips and whatever features were used to find the answer.

The difficulty of the questions will increase over the course of the week, and Google has made a special version of their search engine that puzzlers can use over on A Google a Day that excludes features that may contain spoilers, such as Google's real-time updates. Players can follow @agoogleaday on Twitter, or email the team at agoogleaday@google.com.

(via Official Google Blog)

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New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. provided some information about the media giant's new subscription service that will place much of the newspaper's digital content behind a paywall. The new rules go into effect today in Canada, in order to test the system, and on March 28 globally. The new subscription plan is being offered in a tiered system, with limitations being placed on the paper's popular smartphone and tablet apps. The highest level, $35 per month,  grants users full site access on all devices and on all apps. The cheapest plan will cost $15, giving users full access to the site, and full access through smartphone apps. E-reader subscriptions, like those offered for the Kindle, are not currently included in the plan and must be purchased separately. The Apple iPad will also be the only tablet supported at launch. But mooching, nonpaying users will not be left out in the cold.

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The USA may still lead the world in GDP and rank highly in such stats as population and human development index, but its lag in other key categories is alarming. You've heard about the education gap, but did you know that U.S. students' math scores are among the lowest in the developed world? Charles M. Blow and the New York Times put together this infographic comparing the U.S. to other countries by 9 key metrics: The U.S. comes in at "worst of the worst" in four categories and "worst" in two more, with zero "best" rankings

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The "most e-mailed list" seems like an increasingly weird metric of popularity in this age of Facebook likes and Tweets and Stumbles and reblogs and what have you, but it's still a staple on newspaper websites with older readerships. As an experiment cleverly orchestrated by The Daily Beast illustrates, e-mail is just as subject to gaming as other measurements of popularity: It took writer Thomas E. Weber and a set of compatriots just 1,270 e-mails from different accounts to push a three-week-old story on a museum exhibition featuring Sumerian mathematical tablets to the #3 spot on the New York Times' "Most E-Mailed" list.

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