PLAINS, Ga. -- Several hundred people are expected tonight at a resort in south Florida to attend the auction of a six-foot-long wooden bench, handcrafted from two thick pieces of maple in a small workshop here.

The bench should fetch a six-figure sum, thanks to the name of its maker burned into the seat: Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

NPR.org, February 5, 2008 · Nearly all of America's blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from a single grand misconception: that the world changed after September 11, when in fact it didn't.

Certainly things about the world changed, not least Americans' sudden awareness that they were vulnerable. But the way the world works—the nature of power, warfare, and politics among nations—remained essentially the same.

A real change, a seismic shift in global politics, had taken place a decade earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Yet America's political leaders at the start of the twenty-first century misunderstood this shift—and in a way that their misreading of 9/11 would exacerbate.

He blew past his limit in less than an hour.

By the time the three-hour auction had ended, Mr. Buck, the chief executive of the Luxembourg-based company EuroDNS, had spent $150,000 for 15 appealingly generic names, including 7th.com, chaptereleven.com, microfinancing.com and computersystems.com.

Now, he's starting to walk again with the help of prosthetic legs outfitted with Bluetooth technology more commonly associated with hands-free cell phones.

"They're the latest and greatest," Bleill said, referring to his groundbreaking artificial legs.

Bleill, 30, is one of two Iraq war veterans, both double leg amputees, to use the Bluetooth prosthetics. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion.

It's as common in Hollywood as the rags-to-riches tale: stories of stars who died young.

Actors Heath Ledger, who died Tuesday in New York, and Brad Renfro, who passed just one week earlier, join the tragic ranks of artists, actors and musicians who died before their 30th birthdays, often during the prime of their careers.

With these sloppily spelled words, sent Jan. 5 by text message by John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, did microjournalism come of age.

The encounter between Mr. O’Reilly, the Fox News host, and the campaign aide did become actual news, kind of, for a day (a brief item ran in The New York Times, for example). But it first emerged from a high school gym in New Hampshire via Mr. Dickerson’s BlackBerry.

It was Greenpa who raised the issue of the refrigerator. Greenpa is a 58-year-old father of three. He started Little Blog in the Big Woods on March 24th 2007 after reading an article in the New York Times two days earlier about Colin Beavan, a guy trying to live with his family on Fifth Avenue without making any net impact on the environment.

Six days into his blog, Greenpa announced: “If you live in a city—you do not need a refrigerator...A great deal of what's in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there.” He listed the items and their shelf lives: butter lasts two weeks, eggs one week, tomatoes four days, peanut butter months. He explained how to seal meat so it keeps for three or four days.

His post was read in Toronto by Vanessa Farquharson, a woman who was trying to reduce her energy consumption by taking one new action each day. Thirty days in, she had decided that forgoing cold yogurt, ice cream and chilled white wine was not going to be one of them. “I made that spirally motion with my index finger next to my ear”, she wrote later, “because that's just crazy talk.” But Vanessa did inspect her fridge and noticed that inside there were two dials. On April 19th, 50 days in, a picture of her empty freezer appeared on her blog, Green as a Thistle. The freezer part had been switched off.

“The Uncommon Reader” posits a scenario ripe with comedy: that, as she enters her ninth decade, the Queen discovers the joys of reading. It is a tale of the unexpected. The joke, of course, is that the Queen’s taste for sedentary pleasures is widely believed to be confined to doing jigsaws and watching the racing. She is famously, for example, no fan of Shakespeare.

A reader on the throne is as implausible in its way as the plot of Sue Townsend’s 1992 novel, “The Queen and I”. Townsend, the creator of Adrian Mole, had huge fun transplanting the royal family, dethroned after the republicans take Downing Street, to a Midlands sink estate. Here they survive on welfare, without servants or other comforts. Although she does at one point shed a lone tear of despair as she stirs Baxter’s game soup at the hob, naturally the Queen faces the trials of working-class life with a resourcefulness which lends credence to the popular idea that she really could cut it in the real world. Unheated houses certainly wouldn’t trouble a woman rumoured to throw open the windows of Balmoral whatever the weather. The novel also became a popular play.

One such group is "The Other Writers' Group", which gathers every Saturday in the bookshop's library. To reach this room, you must walk to the back of the shop, past a coin-filled wishing well, turn right at the old piano and clamber up the creaky wooden staircase to the first floor, where bookshelves threaten to topple at every turn. At the top of the staircase, someone has created a tiny writer's den, a closet-sized cubby-hole that is open to anyone who cares to write in it. The tiny library is just opposite.

The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.

Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line — and then harangued me with orders to save or reformat as you stall and splutter and assert points of ludicrous corporate chauvinism (“Invalid product key”! “Unrecognized database format”!).

Somewhere between copy-editing and serving drinks at corporate Christmas parties lies my stint at Sydney Wolfe Cohen Associates, the pre-eminent indexing service in New York City. I take a certain pride in the excellence of SWC: of the making of books there is much chazzerai, but when Knopf or Cambridge or Simon and Schuster wanted to flog one in particular—shuttling the author onto "The Today Show" or Charlie Rose—the index was always contracted out to SWC.

Printed on 25-pound bond, tapped into crisp alignment, jacketed in heavyweight cardboard. The disk, neatly labelled, enveloped and centred, four extra-heavy rubber bands gartering the stack. There you have the Sydney Wolfe Cohen index. It is a thing of beauty.

Who would throw a wake without offering the mourners a sip of booze—or at least let them bring their own bottle?

Cincinnati Post Editor Mike Philipps did just that this week as he supervised the shuttering of his 126-year-old paper. In a Dec. 26 memo, reproduced by the Daily Bellweather, Philipps forbade consumption of alcohol in the newsroom on the Post's final day, Dec. 31. Wrote Philipps:

… please do not bring any alcoholic beverages into the newsroom. Let's go out like the professionals we have been these last, difficult weeks.

An opportunity, that is, to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.

Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.

Now that three of the four major labels have decided to sell music without DRM, I've finally decided to drop it too.  I've subscribed to Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and other music services over the years, but I canceled them all on Thursday as a sort of preemptive new year's resolution.

For much of the time I've covered online music, it was necessary to subscribe to these services, but the digital music scene has largely evolved past DRM.  Services that use it are simply not where the action is.  I may consider buying (and advising people to buy) un-DRMed music downloads from these services, but paying for a monthly subscription -- even though I can expense or write off the fees -- just doesn't seem as worthwhile as it did on the other end of 2007.

As if I wasn't already freaked out enough about the planet's future, my sister just mentioned something called "global dimming." I'm not too sure what this is, but it sounds ominous. Is this dimming phenomenon worth losing sleep over? Or is this just environmental fearmongering?

The Lantern's hunch is that your sister recently caught this scary BBC documentary, which first aired in 2005. Replete with images of darkened skies and impoverished children, the film got lots of viewers panicked about global dimming, or the decline in sunlight. Though generally informative, the BBC production overplayed the doomsday angle. Not only is the Earth not in imminent danger of being cast into eternal darkness, but the planet has actually gotten a bit brighter over the past 15 years. But the uptick in sunlight may not be as positive a development as it seems.

Nearly 25 years ago, I walked into a "high-end audio" store for the first time. I intended to write an article exposing the enterprise—$10,000 amplifiers, $5,000 turntables, and the like—as a fraud. Could this souped-up gear sound that much better than mass-market stuff at one-tenth the price?

After a few seconds of listening, my agenda—and really, my life—took a new direction. I'd never imagined that recorded music could sound so good, so real. The difference between the mass-market stereos I'd been hearing up to then and the high-end gear I heard now was the difference between bodega swill and Lafite-Rothschild, between a museum-shop poster and an oil painting, between watching a porn film and having sex.

G. P. Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter-writing services.

Not long after the women would descend on this swarming, chaotic city, they would find him at his stall near the post office, this letter writer for the unlettered. They often came hungry, battered and lonely, needing someone to convert their spoken words into handwritten letters to mail back to their home villages.

Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

Dennis and Stacie Woods, a married couple from Seattle, choose their vacation destinations based on what they fear is fated to destruction.

This month it was a camping and kayaking trip around the Galápagos Islands. Last year, it was a stay at a remote lodge in the Amazon, and before that, an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.