the buzz log

News for the silver-lining crowd: The credit hysteria has triggered an outbreak of widespread reading.

Bookseller behemoths are seeing a run on the finance and personal finance shelves, according to the Wall Street Journal. Window dressers for Barnes & Noble and Borders have been going giddy laying out tomes like "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown" and "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets."

The latter must-read is by liberal billionaire George Soros, one of many sought-after financial names on the Web: His online stock surged 127% over the past 7 days (although the jump might be due to a recent Saturday Night Live skit). He also just crunched out his latest, "The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means." You can probably get the gist of his financial prescription in his Sunday article for the Financial Times. The column advocates a stronger government role in banks, and illuminates how British newspapers spell "recapitalisation" and "programme."

With the shift from summer beach potboilers to autumn waiting-in-the-bank-line reads, book reviews are percolating within the Buzz. The suggestions below might satisfy searchers who've been going online to make "financial sense" out of the "global financial meltdown," seeing what the new "office of financial stability" is going to do about it, and what "personal finance advice" can be had at this late stage.

• The Austin American Statesman finds itself impressed with "The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough."
• The New York Observer waded through a spanking new examination of Goldman Sachs—the investment banking house that once employed Secretary Treasurer Henry Paulson and which aims to evade collapse by becoming a commercial bank.
• A biography's out on the popular Warren "Buying-Spree" Buffett (+19%), weighing in at 960 pages.
• WSJ thinks some oldies are still goodies, and lists the five best overviews with titles like "Manias, Panics, and Crashes," "Bailout," and "When Genius Failed."
• The New York Times and Slate don't think financial messes necessarily make for scary bedtime stories. NYT culls tips from the Moneyology series on teaching kids a financial education, while Slate presents a fun-filled slideshow of "Great Kids' Books About Financial Ruin." Ah, to be young and informed.

Filed under: Literature, Finance, Books, Money, Reading, Economics

Bail or no bail? Debate or no debate? In a suspenseful news week, the Buzz took some time to seek out true beauty, true courage, and true happy endings ... at least for a cat. Here are some stories you may have missed this past week. 

Makeup Stunts Your Growth?
From the same people who stirred up a tizzy over sunscreens comes a study about how cosmetics and puberty don't mix. The Environmental Working Group poked needles and took urine samples from 20 teenage girls and found what blog Ecoplay called "13 different hormone-altering chemicals in their bodies." To help girls avoid paying the price for beauty, EWG offers a shopper's guide to safe cosmetics. For ladies past puberty, Glam blogs about products that have earned Beauty with a Conscience awards.

A CEO Who Says No?
Bailout or not, many CEOs who helmed financially troubled companies have already collected their millions in severance packages. Several news outlets, including Philly.com, have singled out Robert Willumstad not for his three months as primo honcho for the failed AIG, but for rejecting a $22 million payout. His predecessor, who left in June, got $15 million plus a $4 million bonus.

A Hemingway Tale with a Happy Ending?
Ernest Hemingway wasn't what you'd call the cheeriest novelist, so who knows what kind of ending he would've planned for a colony of six-toed cats in his Florida home. However, a five-year legal catfight between the USDA and the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum ended peaceably this week. The USDA had demanded that the Home obtain an animal exhibition license for the descendants of the writer's pet Snowball, but the agency allowed the felines to remain after a fence was installed. The literary darlings can be seen here.

Also buzzing this week ...
• As "fall foliage" Web interest intensifies (+688%), scientists will be among the leaf peepers to study whether global warming puts a damper on pigment changes. For people who think less kindly of the mess autumn leaves can make, RedPlum blog scopes out power tools that sweep up after Mother Nature.
• If this week's economic news prompts comfort-food cravings, see Forbes Traveler's daring declaration of where the nation's best chocolate chip cookies are.
• Don't share chocolates with airport security dogs. NaturalNews has taken up the legal cause of chocolatiers accused of drug smuggling, after Toronto pups mistook two pounds of cacao as hashish. The blog reveals how cacao registers false positives for NIK field kit drug tests. And you thought poppy seed muffins were bad.

Filed under: Literature, Finance, Animals, Cosmetics, Autumn, Chocolate

Lots of other pressing news piled up this week in the Buzz. Take a moment to cross out some must-reads and catch up on the afterlife, an A-list donation to save gay marriage, and how a 12-year-old took one small step toward saving the world.

Figure Out the Afterlife: Check.
Time magazine ventures to ask how researchers at the aptly named Human Consciousness Project will study "out-of-body" experiences. The study, even more aptly named project AWARE (AWAreness during REscuscitation), will have scientists interviewing approximately 1,500 heart-attack survivors about their experiences during the time they were dead.

Donated $100K to Gay Marriage: Check
Brad Pitt—LEGO figure, blogger, and humanitarian. After he and Angelina Jolie gave $2 million to an Ethiopian health center, the actor kicked over $100,000 to the campaign against Proposition 8, which seeks to overturn same-sex marriages in California. The cash chunk prompted the New York Observer to recall Pitt's conditions for his own wedded bliss.

Solve Energy Crisis Before Puberty: Check.
Buzz readers felt a little bit proud and inadequate at the same time after finding out how 12-year-old William Yuan refined a superduper solar cell. The Oregonian boy genius received a Davidson Fellow Award worth 25 grand for his research, entitled "A Highly-efficient, 3-Dimensional Nanotube Solar Cell for Visible and UV Light." (In case anyone's worried he might be bullied for his brains, Yuan has a youth black belt in tae kwon do.) Feel inspired, or green with envy? Either might motivate you to to try Treehugger's DIY tips on homemade solar panels from eBay damaged goods.

Also buzzing this week ...
 • By sending junior out of the kitchen, could you be encouraging fussy eating habits? The New York Times points out six parental food mistakes.
 • Shades of Hoovervilles: The Associated Press reports the rise of homeless encampments, or "tent cities," across the U.S.
 • "Babar the Elephant" ... imperialist propaganda? A New Yorker report on a Babar books exhibit gives a sweet family history of Babar's creators, and addresses pesky leftists who see the stories of the four-legged mammal as an "allegory of French colonization."

Filed under: Literature, Celebrities, Food, Recaps, Books, Death, Brad Pitt, Environment, Energy, Wrap Up