Tablets, e-book readers, and digital books are making us want to read again. Plus, they’re also inspiring us to read paper books too and are eating into TV time. Good news!

We know 2011 is the year of the tablet PC--they’re due in droves, from Apple and every other maker under the sun. Amazon’s also recently revealed the successes of its Kindle platform—and noted that for the first time e-book sales outstripped physical book sales last quarter. [Full Article]

Thirty-five years ago, it was the fantasy of millions of teenage boys. From now on, it will be a museum piece.

The red swimsuit Farrah Fawcett wore in an iconic 1976 poster, along with other items from her career, will be presented Wednesday to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington by her long-time partner Ryan O’Neal. [Full Article]

I have the opposite of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which therapists call not-giving-a-crap disorder. At least therapists who are my mom. Instead of checking things over and over, I do not check them even once. I have not only gone to the airport at the wrong time for my flight; I have gone to the wrong airport. One day I complimented my wife for buying a cool blue elephant-shaped footstool, and she told me it had been in our house for two years. And that we have seven more of them. The way I like things arranged is however they are right now. [Full Article]

In November 2004, during Justin Bajema’s second tour of duty in Iraq, his LAV-25 infantry fighting vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device. Surrounded by heavy machine-gun fire, he was pinned under 28,000 pounds in a drained canal for 40 minutes. “It threw my vehicle in the air like a toy,” he recalled. “I almost lost my leg, almost bled out and died.”

He endured eight operations and spent six weeks in the hospital, but doctors were able to save his left leg. He learned to walk again on a limb with no sensory nerves. “That experience made me question everything,” said Mr. Bajema, a Marine corporal. “I later dropped out of business school because they were teaching me to get a job, but I knew I was here to do more than the daily grind. So I made the decision to start this business.” [Full Article]

I always wondered how credit card companies came up with the digits on my Visa and AmEx. Random chance? Geographical location? Spending habits? Turns out all credit card companies follow the same set of rules. Here’s what the numbers mean: I also didn’t know that there was a simple method to see if a credit card was fake or not. Smart, those credit card companies are. [Full Article]

The tricky job of making Trojan’s condoms continually thinner and more pleasurable—while also ensuring their safety—is done by a mild-mannered Brit. How does condom developer and chief principle scientist Mike Harrison do it? [Full Article]

People waiting in line for days for the latest must-have product are probably a bunch of Zimmermans, Youngs, and, yes, Wilkinses, according to a truly bizarre new study. It’s apparently all the fault of elementary school teachers overusing alphabetical order.

This is one of those studies that seems way too ridiculous to be true, but let’s at least consider the facts. Researchers tracked consumer patterns in a variety of situations. They consistently found that people whose last names came later in the alphabet tended to buy items far more quickly than those earlier in the alphabet, and the effect got stronger and stronger the later a person’s name appeared in the alphabet. [Full Article]

In the last few years, nearly a dozen sports bars catering to a gay clientele have opened around the U.S. and their success is spurring entrepreneurs to open more

From the outside, Boxers NYC looks like the kind of sports bar you might find in a suburban strip mall. Large windows reveal 14 flat-screen TVs, two pool tables, and a dartboard. Inside, men in suits sit atop vinyl-covered stools, fidget with their BlackBerrys (RIMM), and swill pints of beer—served by bartenders dressed in their underwear. After all, Boxers wasn’t named for the sweet science, but for the style of skivvies its clients prefer. [Full Article]

A mainstay of early television—live commercials demonstrating products like Polaroid cameras and Timex watches—is making a comeback, updated for a new century by migrating to new media.

Hewlett-Packard is teaming up with the YouTube for a live show in the form known as branded entertainment. The program will be featured on YouTube’s home page from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. [Full Article]

Guess who’s coming to LEGOLAND California? I’ll give you one hint: It’s, uh, whoever you like from Star Wars. I mean, come on. It’s in the title. A new Star Wars miniland is opening March with 2,000 hand-built models. [Full Article]

In 1986, I was a 26-year-old college dropout and world traveler who had decided that I didn’t want a job, much less a career. What I really wanted was to get paid for my hobbies: writing, gardening and politics. So I made that my goal.

By the age of 28, I was writing freelance articles for a regional newspaper. At 32, I started a successful gardening business. And at 33, I cut off my ponytail, borrowed a suit and unseated an incumbent to gain a seat on the City Council in Durham, N.C., where I served part time for four years. [Full Article]

In prisons across the country, with their artificial pre-Internet worlds where magazines are one of the few connections to the outside and handwritten correspondence is the primary form of communication, the art of the pen-to-paper letter to the editor is thriving. Magazine editors see so much of it that they have even coined a term for these letters: jail mail. [Full Article]

A new study of American workers displaced by the recession sheds light on the sacrifices a large number have made to find work. Many, it turns out, had to switch careers and significantly reduce their living standards.

“In many cases, these people are not very happy,” said Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the study. “They’re the winners who got new jobs, but they’re not really what they want, and not where they want to be.” [Full Article]

In business, numbers usually tell the story. If you use them to judge 2010, it was probably a better year for small businesses than 2009. In the first quarter of 2010, for example — the most recent period for which the data are available — there was a net loss of 96,000 companies with fewer than 100 employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2009, the loss was 400,000 companies. [Full Article]

The Ball is a geodesic sphere, 12 feet in diameter and weighing 11, 875 pounds, built to withstand the stresses of high winds, precipitation and temperature fluctuation to brightly shine over 400 feet above Times Square throughout the year. For 2011, Waterford Crystal has designed 288 new “Let There Be Love” crystal triangles featuring a romantic pattern that blends a modern cascade of hearts with diamond cutting.

JUST after 4 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, as a dozen people clicked away on their laptops at the Atlas Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, half of a tree broke off without warning less than a block away. It crashed into the middle of Havemeyer Street, crushing a parked car, setting off alarms and blocking the street. A deafening chorus of horns rose outside Atlas’s window as traffic halted. Inside the warm confines of Atlas, separated from the chaos by only a thin wall of glass,
not a soul stirred.

“When we first started Varnish, we began sustaining a bunch of injuries,” Marcos Tello said. “I had a huge, constant knot in my forearm. Chris Ojeda developed tennis elbow. Matty Eggleston popped a tendon in his hand. We were all sidelined with all these injuries.”

Varnish is not a football team. It is a stylish, speakeasy-style cocktail bar that opened early last year in downtown Los Angeles. But in these heady days of behind-the-bar showmanship, when theatrical agitations of shakers filled with heavy-duty ice are becoming the norm, the mixologist’s physical lot is not so terribly far removed from an athlete’s.

I can guarantee that after reading this, if you are male, then you will examine the length of your fingers. Well, I did anyway. Why? Because a study in the British Journal of Cancer suggests that men whose index finger is longer than their ring finger were significantly less likely to develop prostate cancer.

A fly-by of a comet went off flawlessly Thursday morning, giving giddy scientists only their fifth close-up look at the nucleus of a comet.

NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 about 10 a.m. Eastern time. Soon after, it turned its high-speed antenna toward Earth to beam back the photos it had taken.