wide-eyed

The Story of Stuff is getting a lot of attention around the U.S.’s favorite shop ’til you drop season. Here’s a teaser, but you can watch the whole thing at The Story of Stuff.

Our Our Synthetic Sea is about 10 minutes and seriously disturbing. If we cut open our stomachs, shouldn’t we find a sea of synthetics?

Check out Chris Jordan on Comedy Central and Pop!Casts! He photographs the scale of consumption patterns by photographing small quantities of things and then making digital composites that add up the smaller photographs into actual quantities of the things we consume.

Thanks to the City Council’s support for Project Chess, the awesome non-profit, Chess-in-the-Schools, is training hundreds of New York City public school teachers (elementary, middle and high school) to implement chess programs in their schools in all five boroughs with their new Teacher Training Institutes.
Sign-up for one of their free two-session weekend workshop before they fill up. You’ll learn all the right moves, plus you’ll receive free chess materials to get your students started. (They’ll even train all you novices who lose before even sitting down.) Additional workshops will be scheduled throughout the school year according to demand, so if you don’t get a spot, you haven’t lost yet. And if you really want to be a knight in shining armor, you could request an in-school workshop if enough teachers in your school are interested.

Before deciding whether or not it’s worth giving up two precious weekend days, remember: successful chess programs help students master skills needed for academic success (and maybe even increase scores on standardized tests).

Just go for it! The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can get your students to one of Chess-in-the-School’s amazing chess tournaments. All you have to do is fill out their form and fax it to them. If you have any questions, you can shoot Eric Hutchins an email at tti@chessintheschools.org, or give him a call at 212-643-0225.