This week’s installment of Harper’s Findings is pretty sexy. (This is their science column, not to be confused with the weekly news report.)

Half of all women were estimated to have no G-spot … An Australian study reported that college students make up 40 percent of Melbourne’s prostitutes … A sex hormone was found in the drinking water of San Francisco, and anti-anxiety medications were found in the drinking water of Southern California … A Scottish study determined that roughly half of a person’s happiness is due to genetics … Honeybees can recognize individual human faces.

It must be swarming season!

So I finally did it: I made perfectly reasonable looking and tasting vegan chocolate chip cookies without a hitch. It only took a year and a half, no big deal.

These are lightly adapted (healthified) from Dreena Burton’s Vive le Vegan recipe. If you, too, are having trouble with getting your vegan cookies to resemble cookies more than clusterfucks, I suggest using oil for the fat instead of margarine. That way you also don’t have to cream the margarine and sugar, which can be brutal on your wrists (which you should really be using for blogging).

• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup maple syrup (preferably grade B)
• 1 1/2-2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the dry stuff and wet stuff separately, then together. Add the good bits. Don’t overmix! Spoon ‘em out and flatten a bit. Bake for 12 minutes. Don’t burn them because then you’ll really feel like an asshole. Makes a dozen, should last you about three hours.

“These are your own natural curves that are still there when your clothes come off.”

Turning off the television.

Happy Saturday, America! Try to spend it doing something cheap. Like applying for jobs.

Love,
the New York Times

P.S. Dean also suggests moving to Brazil.

I’d finally emerged from my apartment at the crack of 3:30 this afternoon and was making my way up the hill to get lunch when the man in front of me prattling on his cell phone dropped a small wad of dollar bills on the ground. I yelled for him to wait and returned the money. He seemed grateful as he continued his phone call but the man with the sunglasses who’d been walking behind me snorted you’re nice, and it sounded like the most sarcastic thing I’ve heard in weeks. After I’d gotten my food and was returning home, I stopped at a light on Jones and a little Vietnamese girl in a baby pink jacket with white trim pointed at me from across the street and started yelling in a high-pitched voice that I couldn’t understand. A plaid-shirt hipster walked by and sneezed. I said bless you and then I was hit by a car. Well not hit so much as tapped I guess. The little girl thought it was funny. Or at least I think she did.

Every other day I read something about how my generation is the most self-centered and superficial, like, ever. The youngs are easy scapegoats for our cultural problems (or “quirks” if you’re PC like that). They always have been, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they probably always will be. So how is it every generation seems to forget that as soon as they turn 30?

I’ve been kind of ruminating for the past week on this Radar piece by Robert Lanham (author of the Hipster Handbook) waiting for some self-hating epiphany. But.. nope!

Lanham’s thesis is basically that Generation X had it really hard and everyone was really mean to them, and that Generation Y (by his definition, anyone born between 1982 and 2002) comparatively gets away with cultural murder.

Sure, Generation X survived AIDS, Reagan, the Cold War, Tipper Gore, and A Flock of Seagulls, but those adversities, suggest Strauss and Howe, pale in comparison to what Millennials face today. Consider the stress of having to juggle a 30-hour work week while simultaneously maintaining Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr accounts. It’s enough to make your head spin! And maybe the Millennials never faced Hitler’s forces on the beaches of Normandy, but had they been around in 1944 (and had the technology existed), you can bet they would have blogged about it.

Yeah, so would the Gen-Xers, considering they were the ones who started blogging in the first place. There seems to be a dark, plaid-flannel cloud of bitterness over Lanham’s half-assed arguments. Yes, TIME published a nasty article about Generation X in the 90s that probably hurt a lot of teenaged feelings. But they pulled the same thing fifteen years later with “Twixters,” the January 2005 cover story about twentysomethings balking at traditional rites of passage. It’s not Generation Y, Generation X or even just Americans — it’s a huge cultural shift in developed nations from Japan to Italy.

Gen-X heralded that shift; Gen-Y is only picking up where they left off. And no, Lanham, it ain’t always pretty. Our public image, thanks to the availability of candid photos online, is way douchier than Gen-X’s ever was (see above), plus we’re all unemployed and debt-ridden from college. It’s only fitting that we’d waste all our time on the Web sites that Gen-Xers created for us. I guess my question is, what do you expect from a generation of kids who learned what a blowjob was from Bill Clinton’s televised impeachment hearings and who only have hazy memories pre-GWB (who you jerks elected by the way, thx)?

The Harper’s Weekly Review newsletter always brightens my mid-week. This is just a taste of why, from the May 20th edition:

A 19-year-old college freshman was elected mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma. “Right now I’m between girlfriends,” said John Tyler Hammons, who is president of both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats at his university. “I’m looking to fill that position.” … The Vatican’s chief astronomer said that it’s not a contradiction of faith to believe in aliens and that we may have intelligent, God-created “extraterrestrial brothers.” … U.S. Air Force pilots were testing the Advanced Mission Extender Device, the result of a $5 million program to replace unhygienic “piddle packs” with a system that converts urine into a gel. Los Angeles was considering whether to turn its raw sewage into drinking water.

All right, move along, back to work.

Lindsay Robertson at Videogum brings extremely important news: Greg Pheasant, the sometimes-loveable, mostly-hateable inexplicably scab-faced, dirt-biking chicken-decapitating teen bully from last fall’s controversial Kid Nation, got a haircut (!!), and now he’s looking to make some extra scratch by selling his greasy locks on eBay to fund a trip to Australia. From the looks of his obsessively repetitive MySpace comments, there will be fierce competition. Maybe he could turn this into a side business like Jared’s souvenir Bonanza necklaces.

Either way, I’m glad to see Greg is still making himself relevant! I don’t know why there wasn’t more sustained hype around this show. Despite the Double Dare challenges, it was a cute and sincere portrait of Gen-Y middle America (there were noticeably few city folk).

And the drama! Who wants to watch the boring Hills when there are 12-year-olds running from dust storms and burning themselves with hot oil? CBS could probably charge another batch of kids for the New Mexico faux ghost town ‘Nation experience as a summer camp; I assume that would get them around at least some child labor laws…

Anyway. I agree with Lindsay: I’d love to see where these kids end up in a few years with some reunion specials. (I’m pessimistically assuming that is as close as we’ll get to a Jared Nation spin-off.)

A few days ago I added a ton of new feeds to my reader, one of which was Grist. I used to browse Grist for SuperVegan story ideas and the like, and it’s pretty informative and well-written and etc. but I always found their submissions guidelines page to be far wittier than any of the copy they pump out each day. They self-identify as “gloom and doom with a sense of humor.” I mean… I guess it’s true (kind of sometimes). There’s just no bite.

I mentioned Adrian Grenier’s upcoming project, The Green Life, back in January, but the latest scoop is that the show — billed as a makeover series wherein Grenier and “his entourage” help everyday folk go green — has been renamed Alter Eco and will premiere in June.According to LAist, one of the first renovations on the show will be the Tokio Lounge, which is being transformed into Ecco, “Hollywood’s first ecofriendly lounge.”

Expected to open in July, the new lounge will feature an organic menu, eco-friendly cement (waste materials added to pack cement), an LED lighting system, waterless urinals and air pressure toilets. Power for the club will be supplied by the LA DWP’s Green Power resources.

The first full Alter Eco episode will premiere on Planet Green Monday, June 9, at 9 p.m. (ET/PT). But you can catch a sneak peek on Planet Green’s launch night June 4 at 10 p.m.

I understand the need for celebrity coverage and page views… But the blogger can’t even crack one little joke about Grenier being famous for playing an empty-headed symbol of bicoastal excess — and that this show will copy that structure, following Adrian and his three friends around L.A.? This guy made out with Paris Hilton for Christ’s sake!

Is there no refuge from this greenwashed reblogged press release crap? Or is everyone genuinely this excited about Adrian Grenier introducing denim insulation and LED lighting to good, dumb cable-watching Americans? Is this the inescapable price we pay for trying to make people care about things: must use pretty faces and familiar names? But do we also have to take them seriously??

This clearly raises many terrible rhetorical questions. And I was having such a nice afternoon!

My dad on IM:

you wouldn’t do well, there isn’t much respect for vegans here
I learned that China has a national pork reserve
in deep frozen caves, like our national oil reserve
they keep adding to it, doomsday pork
they love their pork
the students all rush up and ask me to draw pigs for them
I ask why always pigs?
They say, we think pigs are funny.
(and tasty)