Word of Mouth

Our series, Shifting the Balance, is focused on exploring the positive impact environmental and policy changes can make on the fight against obesity. For those of us who struggle to carve out an a few hours a week for the gym, healthy living can seem out of reach– but for kids, it’s often less about finding time to play than finding a place to play.

A recent study in the medical journal Health Affairs found that more than ten percent of doctors admit to not telling patients the complete truth about their medical conditions, with one in five also confessing to not disclosing medical errors. Danielle Ofri is Associate Professer at NYU. She’s also attending physician at New York's Bellevue Hospital, and a regular contributor to The New York Times' Health section.

Painter Jon McNaughton doesn’t do subtle. in his latest painting, a barely recognizable President Obama peers from the canvas with narrowed eyes, clutching a burning copy of the Constitution. It’s not something you’d find at the Whitney Biennial…but it is all over Fox News and YouTube.

Michael Hastings wrote about the art market’s reaction to the controversial painter for Buzzfeed.

From the competitive scribbling of after-dinner Pictionary, to the endurance-test that is a family game of Monopoly, board games often reveal a great deal about the players around the table...

Think about the workplace perks that keep you a contented employee. Maybe there's free coffee in the kitchen, or, perhaps, your pooch is allowed to wander among the cubicles. 

Part 1: The Weird World of Stock Photography

We’ve heard the story over and over again in these hyperconnected digital times…boy meets girl, they fall in love, become blissfully partnered until one day, girl finds boy’s photo on a dating web site…

Before we go today, we wanted to leave listeners with a little taste of Easter magic to come.  Last month, we spoke with Erika Eichenseer, she’s the cultural curator of Prinz Rosszwifl, a recently published personal collection of five-hundred lost fables and fairy-tales discovered in a German archive.  Most of us are well acquainted with the tradition of the Easter Bunny, Erika regaled with the tale of supernatural animal we don’t usually associate with the April holiday - we’re calling it “The Legend of the Easter Weasel”.

Any idea how many calories are in a 64-ounce double gulp soda from a convenience store? 800, how about one of those big cookies? For a society fixated on weight-loss, very few of us know how many calories we’re taking in and what is a calorie, after all? You can’t see taste, or smell them, but they are everywhere. Your brain knows if you’re getting too much or too little. And the more you take in, the more the food industry makes.

Pinterest is the new darling of the social media world. Users—over 10 million of them—‘pin’ digital images they like to their site, where others can browse and comment. Pinterest has run into recent issues surrounding potential copyright infringement, and now, a new problem has emerged: what should they do about a wave of pro-anorexia images and comments on the site?

We’ve all heard of a lending library, you go in, pick a book, give the librarian your library card and take it home to read, but what about an art lending library? A museum in Chicago is doing just that, they’re letting residents fill out an art library card and take home real, original works of art to hang in their home. And it’s free! It started just two weeks ago at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Heather Rabke is here to tell us how it’s going.

New England based conceptual artist F. Marek Modzelewski is no stranger to going against the grain –his work explores exile, ritual, denied expectations and passions unrealized – mostly through installations using a limited pallet of materials, including animal hides, resins, and wheat. Now he’s raising funds on Kickstarter to build a contemporary museum of art in southeastern New Hampshire.

Was 2012 the lamest year ever for April fools on the web?

This pretty lame and implausible prank indicates that maybe it was...

But I did like Google's prank of Street View kangaroos, and, of course, the totally awesome idea of putting Google maps on 8-bit NES cartridges.