Found on Ask MetaFilter: “When asked for dessert recommendations, my friend

The NYT’s annual booklist is out, in case you missed it.

(BTW, Rex’s annual list of lists is also in process.)

If you want to make your entire house smell amazing for two hours, make this. Exactly as the recipe says. It’s brilliant.

Note: The jalapenos seem like a lot at first. Just go with it. I was also tempted to put in a little more water, but I’m happy I didn’t. The recipe is perfect. Trust the recipe.

Also: My other contribution to Thanksgiving dinner is creamy potatoes au gratin. I diced the onions like a few of the other reviewers did, sprinkled over a dusting of garlic salt-and-pepper seasoning, and topped the whole with bread crumbs and a handful of shredded cheese before putting it into the oven.

Does this abstract come from The Onion or The New York Times?

Modern pentathlon has been cut from five events to four in a bid to boost its popularity and stay in the Olympics, combining shooting and running into a single event.

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The Two-Disc Special Edition and Blu-Ray Edition of The Dark Knight ships with a digital AVI copy of the movie; if you buy it on Amazon, you can stream it right away as an Unbox video-on-demand.

Explain to me again why Amazon couldn’t make the same model work for books?

Sin against the Holy Spirit: I’m debating buying a fast sheet-fed scanner and cutting up my library so I can have it with me all the time as PDFs.

Insane? Genius? Should I just get a Kindle instead?

We did Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, because we went shopping on Monday and couldn’t wait. (It also worked out better with our work schedules.) We opted to try Mark Bittman’s 45-minute roast turkey, with the following results:

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Rachel Leow with a letter to a young historian:

Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately… Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”…

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I’ve got two fun US transit infrastructure data visualizations for you.

(Beat.)

OK, everyone that’s still here, check this out: a highway system map done in the style of a subway system map (from mathowie) | a hypothetical high-speed rail map with transit time estimates.

Amardeep Singh on teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses:

The encyclopedic quality of Joyce