Harvard University

Prison Terms and Essay Grading: The Technology Gap Widens

On the front page of today's New York Times, there is a story about a software program that can instantly grade essays. The system was designed by EdX, a non-profit group founded by Harvard and MIT, and it is gaining momentum. Last year, Hewlett-Packard's grant-making arm held two contests, each w ... More >>

Barred From Freedom: The Lack of Pretrial Detention Stats

Pretrial detention data is limited. There hasn't been much research to quantify specific details or tell a full story. Todd Foglesong and Christopher E. Stone at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government addressed the dearth of pretrial detention stats in a report last year. "Whatever the moti ... More >>

Go Back to School With Edible Schoolyard

Edible Schoolyard has teamed up with UC Berkeley to bring us the second year of Edible Education 103, a series of Tuesday night lectures about food and agriculture with a different guest lecturer each week. The lectures are moderated by Knight Professor of Journalism and general god-among-foodies, M ... More >>

The Return of the Winklevii

People tend to look down upon the Winklevoss twins for all sorts of reasons: Mainly, because they're greedy, overprivileged, entitled weenies who kept pursuing Mark Zuckerberg in court even after accepting a gigantic settlement for their somewhat tenuous claim that they were in large part responsibl ... More >>

Kristen Bell Goes Vegan, Ricky Gervais Loves Bunnies, and Vegan Shamrock Shakes!

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Does Groupon Hurt a Restaurant's Ratings?

Does Groupon bring out the trolls?​The selling point of daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial has long been that they bring in new customers and new revenue. Though there's concern that the online-deal market is saturated, deal sites may bring in as much as $1 billion in revenue this year ... More >>

Top 5 Reasons the Winklevoss Twins Really Are 'Assholes'

The Winklevii​Readers, we have never met Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The pair come off as douche-bags -- albeit somewhat righteously angered douche-bags -- in The Social Network, the 2010 movie that offered a very liberally construed version of Facebook's foundation myth. But was there any truth ... More >>

Taiwanese Food Blogger Gets Jail, Trader Joe's Should Stop Feeding Dumpster Divers

​Today's notes on national stories, local trends, random tastes, and other bycatch dredged up from the food media. 1. Why I'm never becoming a restaurant critic in Taiwan. The Taipei Times reports that a local food blogger was just sentenced to 30 days in jail and almost $7,000 in fines for writ ... More >>

Get Ready, Facebook: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss Will See Another Day in Court

The Winklevii just love to litigate.​The Winklevoss twins, of Facebook history fame, have just delivered what is essentially a giant "JK" to the social networking site.Aaron Sorkin, we hope you're paying attention to this. By all accounts, Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, the identical twins who say ... More >>

Young Adult

Mark Zuckerberg Becomes First-Time Homebuyer

A billionaire in flipflops ​The Social Network only perpetuated Mark Zuckerberg's image of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur in flip flops and a hoodie. He has even continued to rent his digs ever since moving from his  Harvard dorm in 2004, despite the fact that he's a billionaire. But the 26-ye ... More >>

Music Links: Kurt Vile in the Bedroom, 13-Year-Old's Benefit Show, More

Before his sold-out show tonight, Kurt Vile played in Yours Truly's bedroom. It was rad. Watch the video. [Yours Truly]Local eighth-grader organizes a Great American Music Hall show called "It Gets Indie" on Monday for a good cause. [The Bay Bridged]

List: David Chiu's Mayoral Platform

If You Live in San Francisco, You Probably Don't Say Grace Before Meals

egg on stilts/Flickr​Our favorite morsel from the Web. Pimping his book American Grace (with David E. Campbell, Simon & Schuster, $30) on Forum this morning, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam dropped a surprising statement: If you're part of the 50 percent of Americans who say grace before dinner, y ... More >>

SF Weekly Letters

Chronicle Admits No One Gives a Damn About Glossy Paper

Dogs care about the texture of a newspaper. People don't. ​When the San Francisco Chronicle announced its amazing plan of saving print journalism via glossy paper, it struck us as being a bit like actors attempting to save Vaudeville via higher-energy slapstick routines or dockworkers trying rescu ... More >>

"The Social Network": David Fincher on Facebook's unlovable creator, Mark Zuckerberg

Stanford's Trent Edwards Stays in the Picture

Never understimate the value of a Stanford degree​In the treacherous fields of high finance, politics, or international business, it's not unusual for a Stanford grad to be pushed out by a Harvard man. But in the NFL? Really? And yet, on Monday, that's just what transpired. Onetime Buffalo Bills s ... More >>

Legalize Marijuana, Says Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara

'We're doing far more damage with the war against marijuana than any good that could possibly be coming out of it,' says the chief​Ask former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara when he began to support the notion of legalizing marijuana, and you don't get a short answer. It began half a century ... More >>

@sk Jamie Varon: Is there any privacy on the Internet?

Elite College Hoaxer Showdown: Stanford Vs. Harvard

​News this week of Adam Wheeler, the 23-year-old who lied his way into Harvard and almost into Yale, brought back fond memories of Azia Kim, the dorm-squatter who was discovered posing as a Stanford student two years ago. We have to ask: Who's the better college hoaxer? TV movie-ready back st ... More >>

Snapshots in Time

Why Chew When You Can Toke? Le Whif Takes Chocolate Airborne

LeWhif.comYou can totally suck on 70 percent bittersweet.​The bar has passed. The kiss is over. Make way for Le Whif, the chocolate you puff. Available since April, Le Whif uses particle engineering to break fine organic chocolate down to a powder small enough to become airborne yet too large ... More >>

Tree-Huggers, Meet Your Redwoods! Fledgling San Francisco Football Team Signs 31 Guys ... You Likely Never Heard Of.

Joe EskenaziWho is man enough to wear this jersey?​Jerry Seinfeld once noted that, due to rampant player turnover, sports fans are "basically rooting for clothing." If so, that's bad news for any would-be fans of the fledgling United Football League's California Redwoods (I christen them "Tree-Hug ... More >>

UFL's 'Premiere' Player Draft Slips Beneath Media's Radar -- Were *You* Taken?

What if you had a pro football draft and nobody came?We're not talking about players here, but the media. The NFL draft has turned into an all-day -- and we really do mean all-day -- bonanza for anyone who's ever toted a microphone to report from parts unknown and describe each player in one of thre ... More >>

THIRDhand Smoke? Jesus, What Else Can We Regulate?

According to a study appearing in this month's Pediatrics, medical scientists have now identified "thirdhand smoke," which is: a) What you get when the kid of somebody who smokes talks to your kid; b) Only possible through a Facebook widget, or; c) The trace chemicals from smoke that hang aro ... More >>

Political Satire, Like Prostitution, is Being Ruined By Amateurs

THIS is how you make fun of progressive supervisors! I have a message for the four new Supervisors: Hello. My name is Benjamin. And my job is to say much, much, funnier things about you than anybody did last night. Last night, of course, was the "Roasted Supes" party, which is a vaguely cle ... More >>

Classified Information

SF Fringe Fest: Buzz Is Good

Look! It’s Super Comics Guy!

Pink Power

This musical stage adaptation of the movie, like, totally rocks

Woof, Daddy

Gemini Descending

A coming-of-age comedy whose dramatic structure is less than engaging

Swift Kick

Elijah Wood as a soccer thug in Britain? Not bloody likely.

New releases available this week

Gonick's Comic Creation

From his Potrero Hill studio, Larry Gonick is telling the history of the universe in a series of ... comic books. And behold, they were good.

Best General Manager

Billy Beane, Oakland A's

That Was the Wit That Was

Decades after he left the stage to teach math in Santa Cruz, the voice of legendary satirist Tom Lehrer still echoes

South to the Future

Harvard Students, Citing Record Endowment Revenue, Seek to Abolish Tuition Fees

Night Crawler

The House of Tudor

Slap Shots

Suspicious Minds

Night+Day

Slap Shots

Slap Shots

The Last Tycoon (Part II)

Walter Shorenstein's skyscrapers shaped San Francisco. His cash configured City Hall. Publicly, he's pristine. But there's more than meets the eye to the man behind the megaliths.

Night+Day

Slap Shots