Fast Company, on how Starbucks has tried to eliminate the biggest source of waste from their stores:

Starbucks’s first problem was defining the term recyclable. “Early in the process, we all had a belief that there was going to be some silver-bullet material out there we could magically change our cups to, and it would be recyclable or compostable,” says [Jim Hanna, the company’s director of environmental impact]…Senge calls this the “happy cup” fallacy. “Everybody gets so excited holding a cup that says biodegradable or compostable,” he says, “when the fact is, you’re going to dump it in a trash can, and then it goes in a landfill sealed in an airtight bag. That cup will never break down.” Hanna notes that for the FTC, which regulates environmental marketing claims, to consider a material worthy of being branded with those famous triple chasing arrows, the majority of the public has to actually have access to recycling facilities. “Once we started understanding the full system, we realized that what our cups are made of is the least important factor.”

News Corp. is pooling its considerable resources together to screw over any film whose stars won’t give interviews to its outlets. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

‘Before we were quite disjointed as a company … but we are really getting together now to say ‘OK, if you don’t want the help of the Fox network then let’s see how your film goes’. We are really starting to push back,” Devlin said…What it will mean for the rest of the Hollywood studios – Sony, Paramount, MGM and Disney – remains unclear as they face the prospect of being denied any air time on Sky, Fox News and Foxtel or coverage in The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in Britain or Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

The wonders of media consolidation at work.

A report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, about pilot programs that will reduce the cost of college courses by using e-textbooks instead of regular books:

The real champions of the change are the college officials signing the deals. They say they felt compelled to act after seeing students drop out because they could not afford textbooks, whose average prices rose 186 percent between 1986 and 2005, and continue to shoot up each year far faster than inflation. “When students pay more for new textbooks than tuition in a year, then something’s wrong,” says Rand S. Spiwak, executive vice president at Daytona State, who is leading the experiment there. “Our game plan is to bring the cost of textbooks down by 75 to 80 percent.”

The idea is that instead of forcing students to obtain the books individually, each student would be charged a flat fee that’s dramatically lower than what they would otherwise pay. Of course, using e-textbooks introduces a whole new set of problems. As the article points out, many professors make their own books part of their courses. What are the ethics of a professor essentially having the ability to force people to buy her book? Furthermore, there are numerous advantages that physical books posses over e-books, advantages that are amplified in the textbook realm.

Still, any initiative that tries to allow more people to get a college education is one I can get behind. I wish them the best of luck, and I’m sure the industry will be monitoring them closely.

[Also, kudos to the Chronicle on the ridiculously hyperbolic title, not that I’ve never done something similar before.]

Katey Rich has written up a brief, loving tribute to Back to the Future:

Back to the Future is the oldest kind of movie magic, a story both wild and innately familiar that’s so confident it captivates the audience as a whole; it is that rare experience of sitting in a room full of hundreds of people, all feeling and thinking the same thing in unison. Seeing Back to the Future in a theater is proof that a great movie is both intensely personal– the way I felt so desperate to time travel as a child–but universally appealing as well. Take anyone and everyone you know to see it, like I did, and get that unique thrill of discovering something you already thought you knew perfectly.

I saw the film tonight at AMC, which only screened it twice in celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary. My favorite moment by far was towards the end of the film, when Doc flipped down those opaque sunglasses and says, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need….roads.” The audience knew those lines by heart, recited them aloud, along with Christopher Lloyd, then spontaneously started applauding at the shared experience. What an awesome film.

[Also: Gawker has a nice list of 14 things from Back to the Future II that Actually Came True]

Over at Salon, Jennifer Joyner has written a heartbreaking account of what it’s like to be morbidly obese. It includes this tidbit on the difficulties of the physical act of love:

As if this weren’t enough, I now have to have sex with my husband. Michael is not the problem here; he loves me unconditionally and has stood by me for 16 years of marriage, even after I gained 100 pounds before our first-year anniversary. He actually, unbelievably, wants me. This I cannot possibly understand. He hugs me so fiercely, so lovingly, and I am repulsed for him. He is 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds. How can he stand to touch me? He kisses me with passion, and I try to lose myself in the moment, focusing on my love for him and the memory of our once insatiable sex life. But these days, our lovemaking is physically limited to one single position. You wouldn’t believe how we must contort our bodies to make sex work; suffice it to say the measures we take greatly interfere with achieving true intimacy. Once the act commences, there is no passionate kissing, no stroking of your lover’s face. Our being together becomes a perfunctory means to a physical end. The finale leaves me devastated.

No joke: I think that description left me devastated.

Youtube and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have collaborated to create “the ultimate Youtube playlist,” a series of videos selected by an 11-person panel of extremely talented and respected individuals. Unifying factors of this list, in my opinion: uniqueness, technical virtuosity, and occasionally, brilliance. Here’s a sample:

Find the whole list here.

Great analysis by /Film’s Adam Quigley on the recent Inception-inspired episode of South Park:

Regardless of what your stance is on the matter, nothing changes the fact that the South Park creators watched an internet comedy sketch that already made the same joke they were planning to, had no reservations about continuing forth with the joke anyway, and then worst of all, copied lines from said video without a second thought. Simple error in judgment or not, this is clear evidence of the show’s fading creative energy and inspiration.

This article is great if for no other reason than it introduced me to this video: