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Samantha Schoech has struggled with weight for most of her life.

"I am sort of a lifelong yo-yo dieter and like many women, weight is a frustrating topic for me," she tells NPR's Arun Rath.

As a feminist, she faces another struggle — the tricky prospect of balancing society's expectations of body image, without giving into them, and also wanting to be healthy.

She wrote about this tension in a piece for Ozy.com.

"I live, as many women do, in sort of this frustrating dichotomy between wanting to be filled with self-expectance and a sense of power and efficacy and value, and being constantly told, 'All that's great, but if you're overweight, you're sort of a loser.' "

Recently, she crossed the line into clinical obesity. She'd successfully lost weight before, but felt that she couldn't do it alone this time. She sought out a diet clinic in the San Francisco Bay area, and on her first visit, she was prescribed a diet pill called phentermine.

Phentermine is one half of the infamous diet pill fen-phen, which was hugely popular in the '90s. Fen-phen was taken off of the market after multiple lawsuits and mulitibillion-dollar settlements. But phentermine remains a widely popular drug in the United States.

"I chose to take it, because I felt like anything that might help was welcome," Schoech explains.

"The truth of the matter is, you know, I have a certain amount of vanity and I care about how I look to a certain extent. I am not trying to be a supermodel, by any stretch of the imagination. I am trying to be a healthy 43-year-old mother of two."

All this week, Majority Leader Harry Reid declared over and over on the Senate floor that there's a downside to the recovering economy.

"It's true," he said. "The rich are getting a lot richer, and the poor are getting poorer."

That observation may not be surprising, coming from a Democrat. Less expected, perhaps, is a similar lament made the same day by the Senate's Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.

Nevada's big casinos are on a losing streak. For the fifth straight year, the state's largest casinos are reporting net losses – in this case, a total of $1.35 billion in the most recent fiscal year. That's the news from a report released by the Nevada Gaming Control Board Friday, which focuses on casinos that gross at least $1 million in gaming revenue.

The most recent data showed 263 such casinos in the state, generating gaming revenue of $10.4 billion (up 1.1 percent) and total revenue of $23 billion.

As a group, the large casinos have not reported a profit since 2008, The Las Vegas Sun reports, citing a state official. We'll note that according to the Gaming Board, the casinos' fiscal year ends on June 30. So, the newly released numbers reflect data up to last summer.

"Statewide, slot machines accounted for 64.9 percent of the gaming win of $10.3 billion. Table games produced 31.7 percent of gaming revenues," The Sun reports. "Casinos on the Las Vegas Strip produced $15.5 billion in total revenues, with 37 percent coming from gaming. The net loss on the Strip was $1.4 billion, or 13 percent less than 2012."

Gambling accounted for 45.1 percent of total revenues, with the remainder coming from hotel rooms (20.8 percent), food (15 percent), drinks (7.2 percent), and other attractions.

The major casinos paid $804 million in state taxes and fees, equal to 7.7 percent of their gaming revenues, the board says.

A French comedian whose performances authorities want to ban because of the act's perceived anti-Semitism has been given the go-ahead to perform in the city of Nantes, France.

A court ruled Thursday that Dieudonne M'bala M'bala's show Thursday night that will open his nationwide tour can go ahead. About 5,000 tickets have been sold for the performance.

Critics say Dieudonne's straight-arm gesture, known as a "quenelle," is a reverse Nazi salute, but the 46-year-old comedian says it is anti-Zionist and anti-establishment. He denies it is anti-Semitic.

But the BBC notes that:

"He has seven convictions for anti-Semitic hate speech and his latest show is also said to contain a string of derogatory references to Jews. ... The French government has made a concerted effort to stop the comedian's new tour after Dieudonne was recorded making blatantly anti-Semitic remarks about a Jewish journalist."

Human rights officials say the Syrian civil war is creating Europe's biggest refugee crisis in decades, but that countries across the continent are doing little about it.

Most European nations are refusing to take in Syrian refugees, choosing instead to send money to the United Nations and other international agencies. The few EU countries like Germany that are welcoming Syrians only offer refuge to a few thousand out of the more than 2 million Syrians who have fled their homeland.

But the cool reception isn't stopping Syrians from risking their lives to get to Europe.

To many Chinese, the place is a rust belt.

But to the few North Koreans lucky enough to make it, a visit there can be a mind-expanding experience.

One 58-year-old woman who came to visit her relatives says that on her first visit to China, the affluence and abundance she saw dazzled her. She and the other North Koreans NPR interviewed requested anonymity so as to avoid severe punishment back home.

"What I found here was unimaginable. So much food here is wasted. The roads, the cars, the electricity. It's always bright, whether it's night or day. I wondered, where is all this electricity produced? In North Korea, it's very dark at night, you can't do anything and it's very lonely," she says. "Even If you tell people, it sounds like a dream. They won't listen to you, or they'll wonder if you're telling the truth."

But in North Korea, she says, it's dangerous to talk too much about her experiences in China.

So when she returns home, she says she takes the amazement and envy she felt and hides them in her heart.

A Signal To China

On Monday, citizens in Pyongyang marched through the streets, pledging support for policies outlined by Kim Jong Un in a New Year's address.

In the speech, Kim said that the purge of his uncle had strengthened the unity of the ruling Worker's Party.

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Central African Republic's interim president resigned Friday under pressure from fellow leaders at a regional summit to end the violence in his country.

Michel Djotodia and Prime Minister Nicolas Tiengaye resigned at the regional meeting in Chad.

Djotodia, A Muslim, took power in a coup last year, almost immediately plunging his landlocked, predominantly Christian country into violence. The U.N. voted last month to send French and African Union troops in an attempt to restore stability. As Hannah McNeish reported on All Things Considered at the time:

"Brutal sectarian violence has engulfed the mostly Christian country since March, when the first Muslim leader assumed power after a coup.

"Armed gangs of Muslim extremists joined by mercenaries from neighboring countries now control most of the country. Armed Christian forces are fighting back. Slaughter, rape and torture are widely reported."

For the first time in more than 50 years, the Cuban government began selling new and used vehicles last week to anyone with the money to buy one. And as crowds gathered at state-owned car lots in Havana to check out the inventory, a consensus quickly emerged.

The cars on sale had either been priced by callous, greedy idiots, or the Cuban government had become the most incompetent automobile retailer in the world.

How else to explain 2013 Peugeot sedans priced at more than $250,000 — seven or eight times their retail value in Europe?

Or used vehicles like a 2010 Volkswagen Passat offered at $70,000?

Even Chinese-made Geelys — some of the world's cheapest cars — are listed at more than $30,000, somehow increasing in value after absorbing years of abuse as tourist rentals on Cuba's pothole-rotted roads.

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It sounds impressive: Major food companies have slashed 6.4 trillion calories from packaged foods they sold in 2012, compared to 2007, a study reported Thursday.

But for each American, that number translates to about 78 fewer calories purchased each day, or the equivalent of cutting out one apple or 3 1/2 Hershey's Kisses.

The cut in calories is part of an effort by the nation's giant food producers, such as General Mills, Hershey Foods Corp. and Kraft Foods, to curb the childhood obesity epidemic by getting more healthful items on grocery shelves.

But could cutting out 78 calories each day really make a difference in your waistline or the obesity problem in the U.S.?

The Salt

Candy Sales Are Flat; The Industry Blames The Weather

There were 330,000 first-time claims filed for unemployment insurance last week, down 15,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

The claims data are the last bits of evidence about how the labor market is doing before Friday's scheduled release of figures on the December unemployment rate and payroll growth last month.

Both Reuters and Bloomberg News say that economists expect to hear Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the unemployment rate held steady at 7 percent last month, and that 195,000 jobs were added to public and private payrolls.

On Thursday, as it released figures on the number of claims for unemployment insurance filed last week, the ETA also revised up — from 339,000 to 345,000 — its estimate of how many applications had been submitted the week before (ending Dec. 28).

Taken together, the claims report and Wednesday's news that another survey about job growth indicates there were 238,000 jobs added to private payrolls last month, signal that the labor market's slow but steady improvement continues.

If the jobless rate remained at 7 percent in December, that would be its lowest year-end point since December 2007 — when the unemployment rate was 5 percent. That's also the month the economy slipped into its latest recession.

That downturn officially ended in June 2009. The jobless rate, as often happens, kept rising afterward — to a recent peak of 10 percent in October 2009.

When an umbrella breaks, most people just throw it away — and pick up another one, from a street vendor or maybe a drugstore.

But what if you got it repaired instead? Would you even be able to find someone who could do the work?

In Paris, that's still possible ... just. What was once a thriving profession has dwindled dramatically. These days, Thierry Millet says he is the city's last umbrella repairman.

Millet's shop lies in a tiny passageway in what used to be a thriving artisanal district in Paris' 18th arrondissement. Downstairs, Pep's Maison bursts with elegant and colorful French-made umbrellas for sale.

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A new study of volcanic rocks suggests that an ancient mural may indeed depict an erupting volcano, adding new weight to a theory that this image is a contender for the world's oldest known landscape painting or map.

The mural was found at a vast archaeological site in central Turkey known as Catalhoyuk. This Neolithic town goes back 9,000 years and was a huge settlement for a time when people were first transitioning from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Thousands of people lived there in mud-brick houses that were crammed together like honeycombs.

In the 1960's, British archaeologist James Mellaart said that one mural showed the eruption of a volcano with two peaks — just like the one that lies about 80 miles away. In the mural, the volcano looms over what looks to be a bird's-eye view of the settlement's houses, laid out like a kind of schematic plan. This mural has often been called the world's oldest known map.

"In volcano textbooks or textbooks about cartography and mapping, they would always in their introduction mention this mural and that it's potentially the oldest map, and the oldest depiction of a volcanic eruption," says Axel Schmitt, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies volcanoes.

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Walk through the produce section of your supermarket and you'll see things you'd never have seen years ago — like fresh raspberries or green beans in the dead of winter.

Much of that produce comes from Mexico, and it's the result of the North American Free Trade Agreement — NAFTA — which took effect 20 years ago this month.

In the years since, NAFTA radically changed the way we get our fruits and vegetables. For starters, the volume of produce from Mexico to the U.S. has tripled since 1994.

There are several reasons why, explains Jaime Chamberlain, president of J-C Distributing Inc., a large produce importer and distributorship in Nogales, Ariz.

First, NAFTA eliminated tariffs. Cantaloupes, for instance, used to have a 35 percent tax on them when they crossed the border. No tariffs meant lower prices.

Second, NAFTA encouraged investment. So companies like Jaime Chamberlain's have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Mexican farms. That has helped create year-round supply and demand for U.S. and Canadian customers.

"Twenty years ago in tomato items alone, you did not have 365-day distribution from Mexico to the United States," he says. "And now ... every single day of the year, you will find Mexican tomaotoes in the U.S. market."

Availability is what seems to matter to shoppers like Garrett Larriba, whom I encountered at a Tucson, Ariz., Safeway.

Does he know where your produce comes from? I ask him.

"No, no I don't," he says.

Does he care? "No, not really."

But a number of other people I spoke with at the same Tucson Safeway do care — including Larribas' companion, Christine Peterson.

"I try to eat local as frequently as possible," she tells me, "and I do care where it comes from."

Peterson says she wants to support local farmers — and justified or not, she worries about food safety.

Of course, for consumers fully committed to buying local, that also means buying only what's in season.

"I don't have much fruit in the winter — bluntly," says Joan Gussow, a nutritionist and author who has been called the "matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement."

Gussow eats mostly dried fruit in winter and whatever vegetables grow near her home in New York's Hudson Valley. By selling fruits and vegetables bred to travel long distances, Gussow thinks NAFTA has helped train people to value convenience over flavor.

"It's meant that people don't know anything about where their food comes from, and they don't know anything about seasons," Gussow says. "And so they really have settled — as they have with tomatoes — for something that is really like a giant orange golf ball."

Jaime Chamberlain disagrees. He says the produce industry has made great strides in packaging and shipping more flavorful fruits and vegetables from Mexico. Chamberlain says don't knock availability — celebrate it.

"We should be teaching our children that nowadays, you're able to enjoy strawberries even though you're in the dead of winter in January," he says.

Enjoy it or not, that's what we got from NAFTA. As for getting your children to eat more fruits and vegetables — that's another issue altogether.

The White House rebuffed a largely critical assessment of administration policymaking presented in a new memoir by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, saying disagreements over the course of action in the Afghan war were part of a "robust" internal process.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, press secretary Jay Carney addressed details of the book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. It's scheduled for release on Jan. 14, but its contents have already been widely reported in recent days.

"The president greatly appreciates Secretary Gates' service," Carney said, adding that Gates "was part of a team here that helped bring an end to the Iraq war, that helped cement a far superior and improved policy in Afghanistan."

For five years, a multi-billion dollar expansion has been underway on the Panama Canal so that ships three times the current size can pass through the vital waterway. The new, wider canal will alter global trade routes and dramatically increase revenue for the Panama's government, primarily from toll charges.

The expansion is more than two-thirds done, but now a funding dispute between the builders and the canal operators threatens to bring construction to a halt.

A mostly European building consortium called GUPC issued an ultimatum saying it would suspend work on the project unless Panama's government ponied up an extra $1.6 billion to help cover cost overruns.

Pedro Alonso, a spokesman for Sacyr, the Spanish company heading the project, says there were many unforeseen problems that forced up the cost.

"For example, the exact quality of the stone, and certain geotechnical things that weren't documented ... the depth of different layers of earth," said Alonso. Those are things beyond the consortium's responsibility and "should be covered by the client," he added.

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Get recipes for Spiced Hibiscus Liqueur, Finocchio, Berry-Citrus Herb Liqueur (above), Toasted Nut Liqueur, Apple-Spiced Rye, Limoncello and Blood Orange, Quince, Cranberries And Saffron Liqueur With Thyme.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A new biography of Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes presents him as ambitious and combative (though brilliant), and claims that he used an anti-Semitic remark about a rival in 1995 and made comments critical of Fox hosts such as Bill O'Reilly, whom he allegedly called "a book salesman with a TV show," The New York Times reports. The newspaper obtained an advance copy of The Loudest Voice in the Room, by New York Magazine contributing editor Gabriel Sherman, which is due out Jan. 21. According to the Times, "Former employees cited in the book talked of Mr. Ailes's volatile temper and domineering behavior. In one anecdote, a television producer, Randi Harrison, told Mr. Sherman that while negotiating her salary with Mr. Ailes at NBC in the 1980s, he offered her an additional $100 each week 'if you agree to have sex with me whenever I want.' " The Times reports that a Fox News spokesperson responded Tuesday, saying, "These charges are false. While we have not read the book, the only reality here is that Gabe was not provided any direct access to Roger Ailes and the book was never fact-checked with Fox News."

In a new memoir, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates claims that President Obama was frustrated with military leadership in Afghanistan and that Vice President Joe Biden "has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," The New York Times and The Washington Post reported yesterday. NPR's Scott Neuman writes, "The newspapers obtained copies of Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, scheduled for release Jan. 14 under the Knopf imprint. In it, Gates — who has served every U.S. president since Nixon, with the exception of Bill Clinton, and was widely seen as an even-tempered team player — acknowledges that under the surface he was frequently "seething" and "running out of patience on multiple fronts" during his time in the Obama White House." In a statement given to journalists, National Security Council Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden responded, "As has always been the case, the President welcomes differences of view among his national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies. The President wishes Secretary Gates well as he recovers from his recent injury, and discusses his book." She added, "The President disagrees with Secretary Gates' assessment — from his leadership on the Balkans in the Senate, to his efforts to end the war in Iraq, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time, and has helped advance America's leadership in the world. President Obama relies on his good counsel every day."

Rolling Stone writer Will Hermes will write a biography of the late musician Lou Reed for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The New York Times writes. Hermes told the paper that New York City would "figure prominently," in the biography "because how could it not? Reed loved the city deeply, based his adult life here, rooted much of his work here and was a huge figure in our cultural life. I think we have yet to fully measure the loss. He was one of the greatest artists of our generation." Reed died in October at age 71.

History of Love author Nicole Krauss has a new short story in The New Republic: "The sea is different in the dark, more vast and alive, filled with intelligence. When I get to the rock jetty behind the old shuttered discotheque, I see a group of men casting their fishing lines off the end into the black water. I watch for a while, but nothing comes of it."

The Morning News' annual Tournament of Books, the contest that pits last year's books against one another with March Madness-style brackets, announced its 17 contenders yesterday. The list ranges from Donna Tartt's blockbuster The Goldfinch to Hanya Yanagihara's elegant but underappreciated novel The People in the Trees. The judges were also announced yesterday, and include authors John Green and Geraldine Brooks, critics John Freeman and Lydia Kiesling, and John Darnielle, the lead singer of the band The Mountain Goats. A pre-tournament playoff round will set the novels Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel against each other to determine the final 16 players.

If the icy blast of polar air that's descended upon much of the U.S. over the last couple of days has you reaching for the cookie jar for comfort — and ready to give up on those New Year's resolutions — then seriously? It's time to toughen up. Just think: At least you're not in the Antarctic.

That polar vortex putting the deep freeze on America comes from the Arctic, but the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth — minus 117 Fahrenheit — was actually at the other end of the world. Even so, Antarctica's vast, frozen, barren landscape has beckoned scholars and adventurers alike for more than a century. And one thing we've learned from them is: When life is stripped down to man versus the most brutal elements, bring plenty of snacks.

Indeed, the history of exploration on the continent is as much about hunger as heroism, as Jason Anthony explores in his book Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine.

"Hunger," Anthony writes, "was the one spice every expedition carried."

Think those aboard that Russian research vessel and Chinese icebreaker that just spent several days stuck in the Antarctic ice had it rough? The ordeal pales compared to the legend of what British explorer Ernest Shackleton went through.

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Millions of people are turning their thoughts to self-improvement and New Year's resolutions this week. And one of the most common resolutions, after promises to lose weight or get in better shape, is to be better about money.

A handful of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area have taken note — and they believe the time has come for you to try a different way of managing your money.

Mike Sha's dream is that one day, you will turn your investments over to a robot. "A smart robot," stresses Sha, who's behind the San Francisco-based startup SigFig.

“ If you could replace that human with a machine ... you really can build a better, more scalable, lower-cost solution.

The giant retailer Target continues to feel the fallout from a massive security breach at its stores. The latest revelation: Hackers who stole credit and debit card numbers this holiday season also collected encrypted personal identification numbers.

But Brigitte Clark had no worries as she left a Target in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, her cart full of groceries.

"I feel about as safe as we can be," she says. Things like Target's security breach just happen, she says, but she'll keep shopping.

"I mean, I'm going to check my accounts, like I always do on a daily basis, which is what everybody should be doing," Clark says. "I have not changed. I have always checked my accounts daily. The hackers are on it, so we have to be on it."

In a statement, Target says the stolen PINs were encrypted, so they're safe. They say the only people who could decrypt the PINs are at Target's external, independent payment processor. Stuart McClure, CEO of computer security company Cylance, isn't buying it.

"To me, that's fantasy," McClure says. "I'm not quite sure what makes them think that."

He says the stolen PIN data can be decrypted by the hackers. They can conduct what's called "brute-force decrypting" if they have the right tools and the time.

"It just depends on how determined the adversary is, and how committed they are to performing the fraud," he says. "You're probably talking about weeks or months."

McClure does have advice for people who shopped at Target during the dates in question.

"Either change your PIN now or just be hypervigilant about your account and all the withdrawals that are coming out of your bank," he says.

Outside the Los Angeles Target, shopper Sam Choi says he feels safe shopping there. He only uses a credit card, which doesn't require a PIN. Choi does think someone should be punished, though.

"Is this Target's fault?" he says. "I mean, somebody in their IT department probably needs to get fired, but that's about it."

Target stock has been down since news of the hack. To keep customers in stores, it instituted a 10 percent sale on all items the weekend before Christmas.

The company's quarterly results should come out in February. Those numbers might offer a clearer view into just how this episode will affect the company's bottom line.

As a Christmas gift to readers, Kitchen Window has compiled some of the most popular stories of the year for another look. As always, you were interested in a variety of subjects, from the simple procedure to the leap of faith, and showed an interest in trending topics — like gluten-free and DIY.

You liked Susie Chang's story on the many uses of buttermilk — biscuits, fried chicken, waffles, pork chops, cornbread, ice cream, panna cotta, okra — as well as her story praising the humble lentil in soup, with rice, in hot stews and cold salads.

Many of you also liked Chang's piece on Brussels sprouts, with its recipes for sprouts sauteed with spinach, roasted with balsamic vinegar and braised with cream.

You also were taken with Chang's story on how to make and use preserved lemons, including a recipe for chicken with preserved lemons and green olives that she says is their best-known use.

Nicole Spiridakis apparently made a convincing case for making your own yogurt, with recipes for plain and Greek-style, and for using homemade yogurt in a fruit-and-almond cake, banana-cocoa bread and a pasta sauce.

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In the comments section of a recent Code Switch post, a reader named Aboubacar Ndiaye gave a long but thoughtful explanation for the many reasons why housing costs are rising, and why there's no easy solution to the problem. He was gracious enough to expand on his thoughts in this commentary.

A report released last month by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that in an environment of increasing rent and home prices, low- and middle-income Americans were seeing a larger portion of their take-home pay going to cover the cost of rent, making their dreams of homeownership seem like a mirage.

Many commentators used the findings to highlight the need for relief and to offer explanations for the increasing cost of housing in American metro areas.

But while the problem of both rental and buying prices squeezing middle- to low- income earners is complicated, there's one issue in particular that is the main driver of unaffordable housing.

But first, here's a list of some of the other factors that contribute to this problem.

Government Regulation

Many well-intentioned policies like housing-choice vouchers, affordable housing mandates, rent control, height regulations, historic designations, and protective zoning laws contribute to the creation of a bifurcated, distorted market — one in which a $500 apartment can exist next door to a $3,000 one. Though housing choice vouchers — also known as Section 8 vouchers — allow millions of low-income people to stay out of poverty and stave off homelessness, they also gobble up a huge portion of a city's affordable housing stock. Most perniciously, Section 8 users are likely to be concentrated in a city's most marginalized neighborhoods, contributing to economic and racial disparities between white and minority residents of a city.

Affordable housing mandates, which usually require a developer to set aside a small percentage of new units for affordable housing, sound good in theory. But developers simply pass on the cost of the affordable units to other residents, driving up the cost of market-rate rents. And in cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., height regulations — which forbid buildings from surpassing certain thresholds in height — make it tougher to create more housing through denser development.

All of these raise the costs for renters in the open market, but rent control, at least as it is practiced in New York, Washington, and San Francisco, is the most inefficient. In San Francisco, it's leading to a wave of evictions as landlords convert their rental units into condominiums to get around rent-control legislation. In Washington, the system is so dysfunctional that an Urban Institute study could not find the total number of units subject to rent control. In New York, a lottery-based system, as well as a large contingent of legacy residents, leads to "housing misallocation" — that is, where one person lives in a three-bedroom apartment and pays little for it. Instead of instituting city-wide rent stabilization, cities now have a patchwork rental market: The very poor live in public housing, the rich pay exorbitant rents and middle-income earners vie for the few affordable apartments left over.

New Mortgage Rules

After the last financial crash, new tighter lending standards made it next-to-impossible for people with middle incomes to afford to buy homes. Even for government-backed loans from the Federal Housing Administration that sometimes only require small down payments, the new rules make it harder for people with recession-battered credit scores to obtain mortgages. Even if their post-crisis incomes could support a mortgage.

In a report released last year, Shaun Donovan, the secretary for HUD, emphasized that "only those with stronger credit scores are eligible for FHA-insured mortgages with the minimum 3.5 percent down payment." Ironically, because of historically low interest rates and lower home prices, buying is much more attractive than renting in many places. But because of the newly raised barrier of entry for homeownership, cities are full of relatively high-income renters who might have otherwise owned a home. That's another reason there's so much demand for rental units.

Less Crime

As crime rates have plummeted, more people are willing to live within cities. Even in cities and neighborhoods where the poverty rate stayed the same, where every other factor stayed constant, the crime rate dropped. Crime rates have been dropping internationally at rates consistent with the decreases in the United States.

That decrease in crime, coupled with a cultural move away from suburbanization, reversed the wealth/population flight that marked the second half of the 20th century. (Many cities are now close to, or exceeding, their 1950 population highs.) You can see a positive correlation between rising rents and house prices and falling crime rates in places like Atlanta, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (Some researchers have suggested that the influx of higher income individuals helped push crime down in cities, but as is shown here, here, and here, there is no consensus on just why crime rates have dropped so much.) It's likelier that the end of the burning cities of the 1960s and '70s and the violent crime epidemics of the '80s and early '90s provoked younger generations to move to newly safe central areas. A Brookings Institution study from 2005 showed that the revitalization of downtown areas coincided almost exactly with the end of the crime spikes of the Reagan-Bush era.

Social Stratification

Along with high unemployment, and stagnant and falling wages for bottom- and middle-income earners, the hollowing out of the middle class brought with it a geographic realignment. As the economy required higher levels of education, a lot of cities, especially on the coasts, became hubs for a lot of well-paid people who could afford higher rents and higher house prices. As was reported in The New York Times, hyper-gentrification in New York and San Francisco driven by the financial and tech industries have pushed average rents to astronomical levels. Cities like Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston are now magnets for young, childless, often-cohabitating college-educated professionals whose economic clout has pushed rents higher. The reason why someone in those places can afford a $750,000 house or $3,000 a month in rent is because they get paid enough to afford it. That's more of an issue of structural income inequality than simply a housing policy problem.

Hipsters

Many studies show that one of the crucial steps to gentrification — Disneyfication, some might say — is the presence or creation of artist/creative communities. In Phillip Clay's four-step model of gentrification, a form of economic succession occurs as first starving artists, "marginals," and "urban pioneers" move into low-cost communities. The first generation of artists help make the neighborhood attractive for more well-off "parent scholarship" students and creative types. Those people then attract more established professionals whose quality-of-life demands, like renovated buildings and higher-end retail and dining, drive up housing prices. That was the trajectory for places such as New York City's SoHo, Atlanta's Midtown section, Montrose, Houston; Silver Lake, Los Angeles; the Mission District in San Francisco, Chicago's Wicker Park and Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, and Logan Circle, in Washington, D.C.

Market Speculation

According to a piece in The New York Times back in November, an Australian real estate investment firm basically now owns the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is one of the most hidden factors to high housing costs: mega-landlords and investors who can afford to buy up huge swaths of the available housing stock, reducing the natural elasticity of the market. Investor-driven developments are catalysts, speeding up the pace at which neighborhoods change. Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said in The Wall Street Journal that while "it can take generations for neighborhoods to change," big investors have the means "to purchase lots of homes at once, even in tight credit markets."

Race

On a recent episode of This American Life and in an investigative series for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones outlined in meticulous detail the way the federal government essentially created and codified racial segregation in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The result of that hyper-segregation is still with us today. As Hannah-Jones said, while all-white communities are now largely non-existent, all-black neighborhoods still exist. As more well-to-do African-Americans have moved out of these all-black neighborhoods because of crime, worsening schools, or simply for the warmth of suburban suns, the populations left behind became poorer and poorer. Neighborhoods like East New York in Brooklyn, College Park in Atlanta, and Houston's Fifth Ward are full of housing projects, large percentages of people on public assistance, and higher crime rates than the rest of their cities.

So what does this have to do with rent prices? The result of all this concentrated poverty is that housing in mostly-white neighborhoods now comes at a premium. Decades of benefiting from better city services, infrastructure, better transportation, better access to financial services, better policing, better school-funding, better health services and better retail options have created a situation in which "good neighborhoods" cost much more to live in than if services had been more equally distributed.

Some might read this and think that this is the result of economic and not racial segregation. But a Brown University study from 2011 and a 2012 report from the Pew Research Center, showed that even if you control for income, communities will remain racially homogeneous. The Brown study showed that in all but two communities in the United States, black households with incomes of $75,000 lived in poorer neighborhoods than white families who earned $40,000 a year.

Another popular argument is that African-Americans might prefer to live in black communities and that this is just a case of self-segregation, but investigation after investigation has proved that Realtors show fewer homes and apartments to black prospective renters/buyers than to white people with the same income and credit scores, steering them into poorer neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders routinely charged African-Americans and Latino households higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers with the same credit profiles, making buying in more expensive, white areas harder. I can't overstate the extent to which this contributes to high rents and home prices.

But the Number One reason why the rent is too damn high and why more folks can't afford to buy a house:

People with money want to live there.

It really doesn't matter what the other factors are. We can talk all day about how San Francisco is only 50 square miles and yet every residential building is only 3 stories high. We can say that if more people were willing to move to Southeast D.C., maybe Dupont Circle wouldn't be as expensive. I can talk about the dirt cheap rent in Brownsville, Brooklyn and Englewood, Chicago or the mansions available in South Atlanta. But if you did away with every housing regulation and every rent-controlled apartment from San Diego to Sag Harbor, people with money will segregate themselves and drive up housing prices in the best parts of their cities. And as a result, they'll drive up everyone else's rents, too.

There's a reason people don't complain about the rising rents in Omaha or Pittsburgh or Buffalo. People with money don't live there. Rents will match people's ability to pay them, no matter where you are. We saw this happen in the oil and natural gas communities in North Dakota. One-bedroom apartments went for $2,100 a month in Williston, N.D. This is not an American thing. The residents of London, Paris, Moscow and Sydney can tell you about their rising rents too.

There's very little you can do about that. To paraphrase the researcher Robert Beauregard, the chaos and complexity of cities do not lend themselves to easy answers.

Aboubacar Ndiaye is a writer based in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Atlantic, and The Billfold.

In the comments section of a recent Code Switch post, a reader named Aboubacar Ndiaye gave a long but thoughtful explanation for the many reasons why housing costs are rising, and why there's no easy solution to the problem. He was gracious enough to expand on his thoughts in this commentary.

A report released last month by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that in an environment of increasing rent and home prices, low- and middle-income Americans were seeing a larger portion of their take-home pay going to cover the cost of rent, making their dreams of homeownership seem like a mirage.

Many commentators used the findings to highlight the need for relief and to offer explanations for the increasing cost of housing in American metro areas.

But while the problem of both rental and buying prices squeezing middle- to low- income earners is complicated, there's one issue in particular that is the main driver of unaffordable housing.

But first, here's a list of some of the other factors that contribute to this problem.

Government Regulation

Many well-intentioned policies like housing-choice vouchers, affordable housing mandates, rent control, height regulations, historic designations, and protective zoning laws contribute to the creation of a bifurcated, distorted market — one in which a $500 apartment can exist next door to a $3,000 one. Though housing choice vouchers — also known as Section 8 vouchers — allow millions of low-income people to stay out of poverty and stave off homelessness, they also gobble up a huge portion of a city's affordable housing stock. Most perniciously, Section 8 users are likely to be concentrated in a city's most marginalized neighborhoods, contributing to economic and racial disparities between white and minority residents of a city.

Affordable housing mandates, which usually require a developer to set aside a small percentage of new units for affordable housing, sound good in theory. But developers simply pass on the cost of the affordable units to other residents, driving up the cost of market-rate rents. And in cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., height regulations — which forbid buildings from surpassing certain thresholds in height — make it tougher to create more housing through denser development.

All of these raise the costs for renters in the open market, but rent control, at least as it is practiced in New York, Washington, and San Francisco, is the most inefficient. In San Francisco, it's leading to a wave of evictions as landlords convert their rental units into condominiums to get around rent-control legislation. In Washington, the system is so dysfunctional that an Urban Institute study could not find the total number of units subject to rent control. In New York, a lottery-based system, as well as a large contingent of legacy residents, leads to "housing misallocation" — that is, where one person lives in a three-bedroom apartment and pays little for it. Instead of instituting city-wide rent stabilization, cities now have a patchwork rental market: The very poor live in public housing, the rich pay exorbitant rents and middle-income earners vie for the few affordable apartments left over.

New Mortgage Rules

After the last financial crash, new tighter lending standards made it next-to-impossible for people with middle incomes to afford to buy homes. Even for government-backed loans from the Federal Housing Administration that sometimes only require small down payments, the new rules make it harder for people with recession-battered credit scores to obtain mortgages. Even if their post-crisis incomes could support a mortgage.

In a report released last year, Shaun Donovan, the secretary for HUD, emphasized that "only those with stronger credit scores are eligible for FHA-insured mortgages with the minimum 3.5 percent down payment." Ironically, because of historically low interest rates and lower home prices, buying is much more attractive than renting in many places. But because of the newly raised barrier of entry for homeownership, cities are full of relatively high-income renters who might have otherwise owned a home. That's another reason there's so much demand for rental units.

Less Crime

As crime rates have plummeted, more people are willing to live within cities. Even in cities and neighborhoods where the poverty rate stayed the same, where every other factor stayed constant, the crime rate dropped. Crime rates have been dropping internationally at rates consistent with the decreases in the United States.

That decrease in crime, coupled with a cultural move away from suburbanization, reversed the wealth/population flight that marked the second half of the 20th century. (Many cities are now close to, or exceeding, their 1950 population highs.) You can see a positive correlation between rising rents and house prices and falling crime rates in places like Atlanta, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (Some researchers have suggested that the influx of higher income individuals helped push crime down in cities, but as is shown here, here, and here, there is no consensus on just why crime rates have dropped so much.) It's likelier that the end of the burning cities of the 1960s and '70s and the violent crime epidemics of the '80s and early '90s provoked younger generations to move to newly safe central areas. A Brookings Institution study from 2005 showed that the revitalization of downtown areas coincided almost exactly with the end of the crime spikes of the Reagan-Bush era.

Social Stratification

Along with high unemployment, and stagnant and falling wages for bottom- and middle-income earners, the hollowing out of the middle class brought with it a geographic realignment. As the economy required higher levels of education, a lot of cities, especially on the coasts, became hubs for a lot of well-paid people who could afford higher rents and higher house prices. As was reported in The New York Times, hyper-gentrification in New York and San Francisco driven by the financial and tech industries have pushed average rents to astronomical levels. Cities like Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston are now magnets for young, childless, often-cohabitating college-educated professionals whose economic clout has pushed rents higher. The reason why someone in those places can afford a $750,000 house or $3,000 a month in rent is because they get paid enough to afford it. That's more of an issue of structural income inequality than simply a housing policy problem.

Hipsters

Many studies show that one of the crucial steps to gentrification — Disneyfication, some might say — is the presence or creation of artist/creative communities. In Phillip Clay's four-step model of gentrification, a form of economic succession occurs as first starving artists, "marginals," and "urban pioneers" move into low-cost communities. The first generation of artists help make the neighborhood attractive for more well-off "parent scholarship" students and creative types. Those people then attract more established professionals whose quality-of-life demands, like renovated buildings and higher-end retail and dining, drive up housing prices. That was the trajectory for places such as New York City's SoHo, Atlanta's Midtown section, Montrose, Houston; Silver Lake, Los Angeles; the Mission District in San Francisco, Chicago's Wicker Park and Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, and Logan Circle, in Washington, D.C.

Market Speculation

According to a piece in The New York Times back in November, an Australian real estate investment firm basically now owns the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is one of the most hidden factors to high housing costs: mega-landlords and investors who can afford to buy up huge swaths of the available housing stock, reducing the natural elasticity of the market. Investor-driven developments are catalysts, speeding up the pace at which neighborhoods change. Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said in The Wall Street Journal that while "it can take generations for neighborhoods to change," big investors have the means "to purchase lots of homes at once, even in tight credit markets."

Race

On a recent episode of This American Life and in an investigative series for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones outlined in meticulous detail the way the federal government essentially created and codified racial segregation in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The result of that hyper-segregation is still with us today. As Hannah-Jones said, while all-white communities are now largely non-existent, all-black neighborhoods still exist. As more well-to-do African-Americans have moved out of these all-black neighborhoods because of crime, worsening schools, or simply for the warmth of suburban suns, the populations left behind became poorer and poorer. Neighborhoods like East New York in Brooklyn, College Park in Atlanta, and Houston's Fifth Ward are full of housing projects, large percentages of people on public assistance, and higher crime rates than the rest of their cities.

So what does this have to do with rent prices? The result of all this concentrated poverty is that housing in mostly-white neighborhoods now comes at a premium. Decades of benefiting from better city services, infrastructure, better transportation, better access to financial services, better policing, better school-funding, better health services and better retail options have created a situation in which "good neighborhoods" cost much more to live in than if services had been more equally distributed.

Some might read this and think that this is the result of economic and not racial segregation. But a Brown University study from 2011 and a 2012 report from the Pew Research Center, showed that even if you control for income, communities will remain racially homogeneous. The Brown study showed that in all but two communities in the United States, black households with incomes of $75,000 lived in poorer neighborhoods than white families who earned $40,000 a year.

Another popular argument is that African-Americans might prefer to live in black communities and that this is just a case of self-segregation, but investigation after investigation has proved that Realtors show fewer homes and apartments to black prospective renters/buyers than to white people with the same income and credit scores, steering them into poorer neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders routinely charged African-Americans and Latino households higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers with the same credit profiles, making buying in more expensive, white areas harder. I can't overstate the extent to which this contributes to high rents and home prices.

But the Number One reason why the rent is too damn high and why more folks can't afford to buy a house:

People with money want to live there.

It really doesn't matter what the other factors are. We can talk all day about how San Francisco is only 50 square miles and yet every residential building is only 3 stories high. We can say that if more people were willing to move to Southeast D.C., maybe Dupont Circle wouldn't be as expensive. I can talk about the dirt cheap rent in Brownsville, Brooklyn and Englewood, Chicago or the mansions available in South Atlanta. But if you did away with every housing regulation and every rent-controlled apartment from San Diego to Sag Harbor, people with money will segregate themselves and drive up housing prices in the best parts of their cities. And as a result, they'll drive up everyone else's rents, too.

There's a reason people don't complain about the rising rents in Omaha or Pittsburgh or Buffalo. People with money don't live there. Rents will match people's ability to pay them, no matter where you are. We saw this happen in the oil and natural gas communities in North Dakota. One-bedroom apartments went for $2,100 a month in Williston, N.D. This is not an American thing. The residents of London, Paris, Moscow and Sydney can tell you about their rising rents too.

There's very little you can do about that. To paraphrase the researcher Robert Beauregard, the chaos and complexity of cities do not lend themselves to easy answers.

Aboubacar Ndiaye is a writer based in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Atlantic, and The Billfold.

Bloomberg News notes that:

"Shaw Brothers movies from the 1960s such as the kung-fu film The One-Armed Swordsman and the musical The Kingdom and the Beauty once accounted for more than half of Asia's box-office receipts. The Magnificent Concubine, a picture about a Tang Dynasty beauty, became the first Chinese movie to receive an international award when it won a prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival."

Shaw studio's 1972 film Five Fingers of Death (also known as King Boxer) is "considered a kung fu classic," the Times writes.

The BBC adds that Shaw "will be remembered for launching the careers of stars such as Chow Yun-fat and Maggie Cheung."

The movie mogul, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, told Signature magazine in 1981, Bloomberg News adds, that "films are an art; they are also an industry. Forget that a moment and you have a money loser in your hands."

Shaw ran the studio with his brother Ronnie, and as the Los Angeles Times says, "they churned out more than 1,000 films over more than five decades, from romances and musicals to action pictures. He even co-produced American films, including Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The legacy of Shaw Bros. films can be seen in the works of contemporary filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to John Woo and Ang Lee."

As his wealth grew, Shaw became "a generous philanthropist, especially in the education sector," CNN says. "The Shaw Prize, an international science award which he established, has become known as the 'Nobel of the East.' "

The United Nations says it can no longer verify the death toll in Syria's civil war and, as of Tuesday, will leave the figure at 100,000, where it stood in late July.

"It was always a very difficult figure," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, tells The Associated Press.

"It was always very close to the edge in terms of how much we could guarantee the source material was accurate. And it reached a point where we felt we could no longer cross that line. So for the time being, we're not updating those figures."

The AP reports that: "Colville said the total number of dead the U.N. had estimated was based on an exhaustive effort to verify six different figures supplied by a variety of nongovernmental organizations in the region."

"'Over time, they've diminished in number,' he said. 'For the past year or so, it's been down to two or a maximum of three, and we simply didn't feel that it was possible for us to continue in the same way.'"

In a combative interview from North Korea, former NBA star Dennis Rodman defended his "basketball diplomacy" in the repressive country and seemed to imply that he believed American businessman Kenneth Bae, sentenced to 15 years hard labor for allegedly trying to overthrow the Kim Jong Un regime, was guilty.

Rodman is in Pyongyang for his third private trip to North Korea, where he is joined by an entourage of former NBA players, ostensibly on a good-will mission.

As we reported last month, Rodman's visit comes close on the heels of the shockingly quick trial and execution of Kim's uncle, Jang Song Thaek, on various charges, including treason.

CNN reports "Rodman reacted angrily when pressed on whether the group should have traveled there given recent events in the secretive country."

"The other former NBA players are due to take part in a controversial basketball game on the birthday of Kim Jong Un, the country's young, unpredictable leader. The friendly contest with North Korea's team is planned for Wednesday, when Kim is believed to turn 31."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A library belonging to a Greek Orthodox priest was torched in Tripoli, Lebanon, last week, according to Agence France-Press. Around two-thirds of the 80,000 books reportedly were destroyed. An unnamed "security source" told the news agency that the fire was started the day after "a pamphlet was discovered inside one of the books at the library that was insulting to Islam and the Prophet Mohammad [PBUH]." The priest, Father Ibrahim Sarouj, told a Lebanese newspaper that he forgives the arsonists, saying, "I am looking for them to tell them that I love them."

For The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles author Jennifer Weiner, who is also known in literary circles for her kamikaze approach to promoting gender equality: "Jennifer Weiner has two audiences. One consists of the devoted consumers of her books, which have sold more than four and a half million copies. ... Her other audience is made up of writers, editors, and critics. Through her blog and her Twitter account, Weiner has stoked a lively public discussion about the reception and consumption of fiction written by women. This audience is smaller than the one that buys her books, and barely intersects with it. Yet social media have given Weiner a parallel notoriety, as an unlikely feminist enforcer."

E-book retailer Zola Books has bought Bookish, the book-recommendation site started by publishers Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Penguin. Bookish, which in news reports is rarely divorced from the word "struggling," went through several CEOs in a matter of months before it launched in 2013. Zola CEO Joe Regal told Publisher's Weekly that he would keep on about half of Bookish's staff.

The five category winners of the 2013 Costa book awards are Kate Atkinson's Life After Life for Best Novel, Nathan Filer's The Shock of the Fall for First Novel, Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter for Poetry, Chris Riddell's Goth Girl And The Ghost Of A Mouse for Children's Literature, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike for Biography. Each category winner will receive 5,000 (about $8,200). The books will now compete for the Book of the Year prize, which carries a further 30,000 prize (about $49,000).

Author Gary Shteyngart goes on a walking tour of Queens, N.Y., for The Wall Street Journal: "New York has changed," he says. "It's horrible, it's all Duane Reade and Chase. It gets so dull some days I have to mug myself."

On the detailed list of interrogation techniques

These were techniques that I had never seen before. Reduced to writing they're quite graphic and quite detailed and I have to take responsibility for that because I was determined that the Justice Department, whether they approved them or disapproved of them, would have the most no-holds-barred, almost detached description of some very aggressive maneuvers. So it was I and the rest of the CIA leadership who insisted that each of these techniques be spelled out, that there be no misunderstanding between us and the Department of Justice about how these techniques would be administered.

... [The descriptions were written by] people in the counter terrorism center of the CIA, composed of operatives, analysts, psychologists all focused on the counter terrorism target.

On one technique that was considered to be even worse than waterboarding

As you may have surmised, because my book had to go through pre-publication review at the CIA, I was told that I had to not go into detail about what that one particularly gruesome technique was. I guess what I can say to you is: When I saw what waterboarding was, I had never heard that word before, but this technique I thought was even more chilling and scary than waterboarding — which Lord knows I thought was quite chilling on its own right. It was very rough. ... something that would come out of an Edgar Allan Poe plot line.

... The Justice Department when they called me up they basically said: Look we have the opinion ready on the rest of the techniques but for this particular one we're not sure we can approve it. And with some sense of relief I told the Justice Department: Why don't we just drop it.

“ I'd been around the agency long enough to know that proceeding down this path posed extraordinary peril in the future for the institution and the people who would be involved in the program, including myself.

A generation has grown up with video games — and video games are growing up, too. Developers are using the medium to tell sophisticated, emotionally complex stories.

Take, for example, the game Gone Home. At first, it feels like a first-person shooter: It's set in an isolated house in the woods; the player walks down dark hallways as a thunderstorm rages outside.

That's where the similarities end.

All Tech Considered

Papers, Please: A Game That Puts Your Sympathy To The Test

The Senate has voted to approve the nomination of Janet Yellen as the next leader of the U.S. Federal Reserve. With Monday's vote, Yellen, 67, will become the first woman to serve as America's banking chief, heading an institution that was established in 1913.

The vote had the air of a formality, lacking the heated debates that have preceded recent Senate decisions. The initial call for senators' votes came in a nearly empty chamber; senators filtered in and out, chatting as the vote proceeded.

Yellen will succeed Ben Bernanke, whose second term as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ends on Jan. 31. She is widely expected to continue many of the policies and priorities of her predecessor, especially his efforts to rein in unemployment rates.

She is slated to lead her first Federal Reserve meetings in March.

When she's sworn in, Yellen will become "the first Fed chair appointed by a Democratic president since Paul Volcker left the post in 1987," the AP tells us. The chairmanship's term runs four years, meaning she'll be up for replacement or renewal in 2018.

The new chairman's term will begin as many analysts are watching the Federal Reserve for signs of how it will handle the "tapering" of massive infusions of money it has provided in an effort to stimulate the U.S. economy. The policy of buying $85 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month has helped keep interest rates at very low levels.

The final vote approving Yellen's nomination comes as her one-time rival for the post, former White House adviser Lawrence Summers, airs his thoughts on America's economy in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post. In it, Summers warns that "a growth strategy that relies on interest rates significantly below growth rates for long periods virtually ensures the emergence of substantial financial bubbles and dangerous buildups in leverage."

Summers, who had been named in some reports as President Obama's first choice to replace Bernanke, withdrew his name from consideration for the Fed's top job in September, citing a confirmation process that would be "acrimonious" and distracting.

Today's vote comes less than two months after Yellen breezed through a question-and-answer session on U.S. economic policy with the Senate Banking Committee. On Nov. 21, the panel voted 14-8 to approve her nomination, with Yellen gaining the support of three Republicans on the committee.

In November's meeting with the Senate Banking Committee, the Fed's policies prompted an exchange with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who told Yellen that many people believe the stimulus effort has helped wealthy Americans the most.

"Low interest rates harm savers, it's absolutely true," Yellen told Corker, noting that people who live on a fixed income also often rely on safe and steady rates of return tied to interest rates.

Yellen added, "We can't have normal rates unless the economy is normal. At the moment, we have a lot of saving, and not very much investment."

Corker later voted in support of Yellen's nomination.

Yellen currently serves as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a post she has held since 2010. Her earlier work includes a stint as the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She also chaired President Clinton's White House Council of Economic Advisers.

The Senate has voted to approve the nomination of Janet Yellen as the next leader of the U.S. Federal Reserve. With Monday's vote, Yellen, 67, will become the first woman to serve as America's banking chief, heading an institution that was established in 1913.

The vote had the air of a formality, lacking the heated debates that have preceded recent Senate decisions. The initial call for senators' votes came in a nearly empty chamber; senators filtered in and out, chatting as the vote proceeded.

Yellen will succeed Ben Bernanke, whose second term as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ends on Jan. 31. She is widely expected to continue many of the policies and priorities of her predecessor, especially his efforts to rein in unemployment rates.

She is slated to lead her first Federal Reserve meetings in March.

When she's sworn in, Yellen will become "the first Fed chair appointed by a Democratic president since Paul Volcker left the post in 1987," the AP tells us. The chairmanship's term runs four years, meaning she'll be up for replacement or renewal in 2018.

The new chairman's term will begin as many analysts are watching the Federal Reserve for signs of how it will handle the "tapering" of massive infusions of money it has provided in an effort to stimulate the U.S. economy. The policy of buying $85 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month has helped keep interest rates at very low levels.

The final vote approving Yellen's nomination comes as her one-time rival for the post, former White House adviser Lawrence Summers, airs his thoughts on America's economy in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post. In it, Summers warns that "a growth strategy that relies on interest rates significantly below growth rates for long periods virtually ensures the emergence of substantial financial bubbles and dangerous buildups in leverage."

Summers, who had been named in some reports as President Obama's first choice to replace Bernanke, withdrew his name from consideration for the Fed's top job in September, citing a confirmation process that would be "acrimonious" and distracting.

Today's vote comes less than two months after Yellen breezed through a question-and-answer session on U.S. economic policy with the Senate Banking Committee. On Nov. 21, the panel voted 14-8 to approve her nomination, with Yellen gaining the support of three Republicans on the committee.

In November's meeting with the Senate Banking Committee, the Fed's policies prompted an exchange with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who told Yellen that many people believe the stimulus effort has helped wealthy Americans the most.

"Low interest rates harm savers, it's absolutely true," Yellen told Corker, noting that people who live on a fixed income also often rely on safe and steady rates of return tied to interest rates.

Yellen added, "We can't have normal rates unless the economy is normal. At the moment, we have a lot of saving, and not very much investment."

Corker later voted in support of Yellen's nomination.

Yellen currently serves as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a post she has held since 2010. Her earlier work includes a stint as the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She also chaired President Clinton's White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Well, Mark did warn us.

Reports last week that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un executed his uncle and then fed him to dogs appear to be false. We say "appear" because the story first originated in a satirical post on Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site.

The post was picked up by Wen Wei Po, a Beijing-friendly Hong Kong tabloid, then by the South China Morning Post, and then by the Western media, turning, as the Guardian describes it, "a thinly-sourced horror story into an astonishing example of the media echo chamber gone awry."

Blogger Trevor Powell traced the story back to the post on Tencent Weibo. He wrote that the Hong Kong paper lifted a social media post by Pyongyang Choi Seongho, a widely followed China-based satirist. The background image on the satirist's Tencent Weibo account is Kim standing with both his arms and middle fingers extended.

Powell notes:

"It's amusing that given our faith in modern global news media to get to the bottom of a story, no one has actually gone back to the Wen Wei Po article and caught this. All analysis in the swaths of content that have been devoted to this report since it came out stops abruptly at a linguistic wall between the English language Straits Times story and the Chinese language Wen Wei Po article."

I have a few quibbles with this lengthy profile/evaluation of Jennifer Weiner in The New Yorker, particularly in that it makes the common error of describing her argument as primarily about why her own books are not considered literary fiction, when in fact a major part of her argument is that commercial/genre fiction marketed to women (like romance) is treated differently than commercial/genre fiction marketed to men (like crime fiction and thrillers). On the whole, though, it's a much fairer shake than she's often gotten. [The New Yorker]

I didn't share Emily Nussbaum's enthusiasm about the new episodes of Community, but it's worth reading her take to see what they look like to a genuine devotee. [also The New Yorker]

The full-page New York Times ad made from an edited A.O. Scott tweet made up to look like a direct A.O. Scott tweet is weird, and kind of bothersome, and ... did we mention weird? [The Wrap]

The Hollywood Reporter looks at "Marvel envy" and the growth of "shared universes." It's worth mentioning, of course, that Marvel hardly has a monopoly on shared/multiple universes when it comes to superheroes. [The Hollywood Reporter]

I like this piece on the enduring appeal of Bettie Page, particularly for women. [The Atlantic]

If you heard the story circulating in recent days that Jenny McCarthy was now saying her son didn't have autism after all, be aware that she vehemently denies that she ever said any such thing. [E! Online]

Hey, have you been wondering where you can buy those rad high-waisted pants Joaquin Phoenix and other dudes are sporting in the (wonderful, by the way) Spike Jonze film Her? Wonder no more! [The Guardian]

Sao Paulo holds the title of the biggest city in Latin America, with an estimated 22 million people in its metropolitan area. But when it comes to local, organic food, the pickings are pretty slim: The city has just 20 organic farmers' markets.

Organic food has been slow to take off in Brazil, one of the world's biggest agricultural powerhouses. Brazilian farmers use more pesticides per volume of crop than farmers in any other country in the world, according to the Brazilian Environment Ministry. And consumers are beginning to become aware of what those pesticides might mean for their health.

A recent study by Brazil's National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance showed that 29 percent of fruits and vegetables have pesticide levels that exceed levels deemed acceptable by the government.

Meanwhile, demand for organic food is slowly rising, farmers say.

Shoppers of all stripes visit one of the organic markets in Ibirapuera Park, from families with small children to athletes to the elderly. One man says he's here because he's concerned about the pesticide residue on other fruits and vegetables.

"We already eat so many fruits and vegetables with chemicals outside the home," says Cadmo Barbetto.

Barbetto used to have to cross the city to buy organic at one of the oldest and most famous markets at Agua Branca Park. But for the last year he has been able to go to this one in Ibirapuera Park near his home.

As demand for organic food rises, it's also getting more affordable. Some vegetables like lettuce are being sold for the same price as in a regular market. Turnip, cabbage and cauliflower also cost about the same. But if you're buying organic zucchinis, carrots, broccoli, eggs, peppers or cucumbers, you're going to pay a bit more.

The most expensive products are the ones made on a smaller scale, like olive oil, rice, wine and juices. The average price can be about $5 higher than for non-organic versions.

Among the 25 stands at the Ibirapuera Park market, the one selling finger food is the most crowded. People sit on tables under big trees to taste the typical Brazilian cheese bread, po de queijo, nut cake, cinnamon roll and coffee. And, as in every street fair in Sao Paulo, the sugarcane juice is sold there.

Vendor Ana Coutinho — known as Ana do Mel or Ana Honey — grows bananas, herbs and vegetables along the forest and also raises bees at Parelheiros, an area in the very south of Sao Paulo where there are still dirt roads and farms.

It takes her about one hour to get to the organic market at 7 a.m. every Saturday. "I can't go to other fairs because I have a lot of work to do at the farm," she says. Her products are also sold to two restaurants.

One of the stands sells food from 60 different producers from Sao Paulo state and the nearby state of Minas Gerais. They have the famous Minas fresh cheese, biscuits, croissants, sweet milk, jams, raisin, flours, pita bread, roasted coffee, chocolate and vegetables. They also show some aromatic herbs that grow naturally on farms and that are not cultivated, like purslane

And for those who are really excited about organics, one of the last stands sells equipments, soil, organic fertilizers and, of course, small seedlings that could fit in a Sao Paulo apartment.

One of the challenges of writing about China is the country moves fast — sometimes faster than the publishing business. Take Enigma of China, the latest detective novel by Chinese-American author Qiu Xiaolong.

In one scene, Qiu's main character, Inspector Chen, sits in a Shanghai restaurant scanning a hotel where government agents are holding a corrupt official in secret detention.

Recently, Qiu took me on a tour of the book's real-life settings, including the site of that eatery.

"It's a restaurant with a red lantern, so it's lovely," recalls Qiu, returning to the spot. "But now, I cannot find even any trace of it."

That's because the government knocked it down and replaced it with a tiny park.

"By the time the book comes out, the restaurant is definitely gone," says Qiu, standing on a street corner next to one of the city's elevated highways. "So, you see, it's hard to write about Shanghai nowadays."

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Sao Paulo holds the title of the biggest city in Latin America, with an estimated 22 million people in its metropolitan area. But when it comes to local, organic food, the pickings are pretty slim: The city has just 20 organic farmers' markets.

Organic food has been slow to take off in Brazil, one of the world's biggest agricultural powerhouses. Brazilian farmers use more pesticides per volume of crop than farmers in any other country in the world, according to the Brazilian Environment Ministry. And consumers are beginning to become aware of what those pesticides might mean for their health.

A recent study by Brazil's National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance showed that 29 percent of fruits and vegetables have pesticide levels that exceed levels deemed acceptable by the government.

Meanwhile, demand for organic food is slowly rising, farmers say.

Shoppers of all stripes visit one of the organic markets in Ibirapuera Park, from families with small children to athletes to the elderly. One man says he's here because he's concerned about the pesticide residue on other fruits and vegetables.

"We already eat so many fruits and vegetables with chemicals outside the home," says Cadmo Barbetto.

Barbetto used to have to cross the city to buy organic at one of the oldest and most famous markets at Agua Branca Park. But for the last year he has been able to go to this one in Ibirapuera Park near his home.

As demand for organic food rises, it's also getting more affordable. Some vegetables like lettuce are being sold for the same price as in a regular market. Turnip, cabbage and cauliflower also cost about the same. But if you're buying organic zucchinis, carrots, broccoli, eggs, peppers or cucumbers, you're going to pay a bit more.

The most expensive products are the ones made on a smaller scale, like olive oil, rice, wine and juices. The average price can be about $5 higher than for non-organic versions.

Among the 25 stands at the Ibirapuera Park market, the one selling finger food is the most crowded. People sit on tables under big trees to taste the typical Brazilian cheese bread, po de queijo, nut cake, cinnamon roll and coffee. And, as in every street fair in Sao Paulo, the sugarcane juice is sold there.

Vendor Ana Coutinho — known as Ana do Mel or Ana Honey — grows bananas, herbs and vegetables along the forest and also raises bees at Parelheiros, an area in the very south of Sao Paulo where there are still dirt roads and farms.

It takes her about one hour to get to the organic market at 7 a.m. every Saturday. "I can't go to other fairs because I have a lot of work to do at the farm," she says. Her products are also sold to two restaurants.

One of the stands sells food from 60 different producers from Sao Paulo state and the nearby state of Minas Gerais. They have the famous Minas fresh cheese, biscuits, croissants, sweet milk, jams, raisin, flours, pita bread, roasted coffee, chocolate and vegetables. They also show some aromatic herbs that grow naturally on farms and that are not cultivated, like purslane

And for those who are really excited about organics, one of the last stands sells equipments, soil, organic fertilizers and, of course, small seedlings that could fit in a Sao Paulo apartment.

A U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker is sailing to Antarctica to rescue more than 120 crew members still aboard two ice breakers trapped in the frozen continent. That's after the news that 52 scientists and paying passengers trapped aboard one of those vessels — the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy — were on their way home.

The Polar Star, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, left Australia Sunday following requests last week from Australia, China and Russia to assist the trapped ice breakers – the Akademik Shokalskiy and China's Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.

"The U.S. Coast Guard stands ready to respond to Australia's request," Vice Adm. Paul F. Zukunft, commander of Coast Guard Pacific Area, said in a statement. "Our highest priority is safety of life at sea, which is why we are assisting in breaking a navigational path for both of these vessels."

Australia's Maritime Safety Authority said the Polar Star will take approximately seven days to reach Commonwealth Bay, where the ships are stranded.

As Mark has reported, 52 scientists and paying passengers were ferried last Thursday by helicopter from the stranded Akademik Shokalskiy to an Australian icebreaker nearby. They were told Friday that their voyage to Australia had to be delayed. "The hitch, as Mark wrote, "[was that] the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long — which had assisted in the passengers' rescue, was itself stuck in ice.

"So the Aurora Australis — the ship to which the passengers had been flown — was asked to stay in the area in case its assistance was needed."

But the Xue Long is no longer in distress, and so the Aurora Australis and its passengers are on their way again to an expected mid-January arrival at the Australian state of Tasmania.

Officials said the 101 crew members on the Chinese vessel and 22 on the Russian ship are in no immediate danger.