“Do you know what the ____ this is?” asked legendary rapper Tupac Shakur from the stage of Coachella this weekend, inserting an expletive appropriate for the moment.

Jaws opened. Shivers ran. Heads shook. No. No, 2Pac. We don’t know what this is.

As every hip-hop fan knows, the perplexing problem with Tupac’s appearance at the music festival is that he’s been dead for fifteen years.

 

by Larry West

Texting may be the most popular form of communication since pillow talk. Some 83 percent of American adults now own cell phones and about three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Yet the rapid increase of spam texts now appearing on cell phones is starting to make texting feel like a good relationship gone bad to a growing number of users.

 

by Larry West

Two current trends in U.S. business, reported in seemingly unrelated news stories during the past week — one about CEO compensation, the other about lack of funding to train jobless workers — paint a disturbing picture of the widening gap between the people at the top of the economic pyramid and the rest of us down below. 

This weekend mirrors the dates 100 years ago when RMS Titanic sank in the waters of the North Atlantic. It was late on the night of Saturday, April 14th, 1912, when the luxury liner struck an iceberg, its stern finally disappearing below the surface in the next morning’s early hours. As we remember the lives lost, here are some little-known facts from the disaster a century ago.

 

by Maggie Mallon, Glamour

This is Maggie Mallon with an MTV News brief...kind of. Wait! Before you run away thinking that the next words waiting are "Snooki" or "Teen Mom", I'm actually talking about MTV's recent report on the "No-Collar" workforce — y'know, those people who like things chill in the office (we're talking BFF with bosses, and Casual Friday every day). But who makes up this demographic of the working world? You may know them as young adults, Gen Y, the Millennials, or the Boomerang Generation —(there are 80 million of us, after all, with about half in the workforce)! 

A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that niceness may be programmed into your DNA. Do you have the makeup to be nice, or are your genes all mean?

 

Guitarist Ronnie Montrose had a career and a talent most people only dream of. He played music to adoring fans in packed concert venues, traveled the world on tour, and created well-loved songs as a solo artist and arm in arm with the likes of Van Morrison, Herbie Hancock, Edgar Winter, and Boz Scaggs.

But this week, news has surfaced of a distressing undercurrent to his life that ultimately proved tragic.

 

Obesity rates in developed countries have been picking up speed like they’re rolling downhill. They would run, but they get tired too fast. In an effort to slow down the fattening up of our populations, researchers have sought to trace patterns from childhood obesity. As the thinking goes, we can begin addressing obesity as an epidemic when we get to people early enough. But what chance do we stand if they’re on a path to obesity even before they’re born?