Shortly before he died, William Safire predicted "optics" would become one of the next great political buzzwords, writes Ben Zimmer in the New York Times (3/6/10). His vision was accurate, apparently, mainly because the word "puts a new spin on things, giving a scientific-sounding gloss to P.R. and image-making." This is not unlike what "content" has done for journalism and news-making. One of the best, most recent examples of optical spin was a widely-disseminated quote from Republican strategist Kevin Madden.

While commenting on President Obama's vacation in Hawaii when the failed airliner bombing occurred, Kevin said, "I think those images, the optics, hurt President Obama very badly." On the flipside, about a month later, Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, had to answer questions about the "optics" of the Republicans holding their winter meeting "at a beachfront resort in Waikiki." Who'd have ever guessed that Hawaii would make bad optics?

Using "optics" in this context actually dates back as far as 1978, when Robert Strauss, an advisor to President Carter, said that inviting business leaders to the White House "would be a nice optical step." The term later became popular in Canada, likely because bilingual Canadians were familiar with the French term, "optique," which "can refer to the science of optics or it can mean 'perspective or point of view.'" Optical popularity is now spreading to America, bringing with it an attractive association with technology and "an aura of brainy precision."

Leave it to Johnny Depp to re-ignite the controversy over what made the Mad Hatter mad. As reported by Pat Ryan in the New York Times (3/7/10), Johnny, who plays the Hatter in a new film (trailer), told a news conference that he thought the Hatter was mad because of mercury poisoning from hats, saying he's "this guy who literally is damaged goods." But while it's true that some hats contained mercury back in Lewis Carroll's day, the symptoms of mercury poisoning -- including "excessive shyness ... and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive" hardly fit the Mad Hatter.

Another theory holds that the Hatter was inspired by a French phrase, "il raisonne comme une huitre," or "he reasons like an oyster." The idea is that "huitre" sounds like "hatter." Seems unlikely. Logicians, noting that Lewis Carroll "was well known as a mathematician, think the Mad Hatter is really the Mad Adder. They cite this Hatter quote: "If you knew Time as well as I do ... you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." In the Hatter's defense, physicist Robert A. Millikan wrote that the Hatter wasn't mad "when he gave to Time changeable, undependable, capricious qualities which we assign to personality."

The Hatter is concerned with time "since the Queen of Hearts has accused him of being a time-murderer." This adds heft to the theory that the Mad Hatter was based on "a top-hat wearing inventor, Theophilus Carter," who, in 1851, exhibited an "Alarm-Clock Bed" that tipped "the sleeper out of bed at the correct time." But the best "Mad as a Hatter" explanation comes from Lewis Carroll himself. Why a Mad Hatter, not a Mad Tailor or Shoemaker? (viaduct, why not a goose?) Carroll wrote, "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them."

"We have a special obligation to the decaf drinker," says Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, in a New York Times piece by Kim Severson (3/10/10). "Those guys are true believers," he continues. "They're not drinking coffee because they need to wake up. They're only drinking coffee because they like the taste." The problem, of course, is that most decaf coffee doesn't taste very good. "I think there was and still is an idea in the trade that it's just decaf, so use what you can get away with," says Doug Welsh of Peet's Coffee & Tea.

It's true that most of the time, the best beans are saved for regular coffee. It's also a fact that the decaffeination process, which can involve methylene chloride or soaking the beans in water, tends to compromise flavor. Fortunately, there's now "a new breed of boutique roasters who focus extraordinary levels of attention on finding good beans" and "changing the art of decaf." Intelligentsia says its decaf La Tortuga "remains sturdy through the captivating finish of dried figs and caramel," for instance.

Sterling Mace, a decaffer at Blue Bottle in San Francisco, meanwhile "likes that the people behind the counter apply the same measured focus to her decaf Americano as they do to every other drink they make." The National Coffee Association says about 10 percent of daily coffee drinkers drink decaf, however "niche roasters say that decaf consumption is higher among their customers." Counter Culture, based in Durham, N.C., says about 18 percent of its sales are for decaf, and Jardiniere, a San Francisco restaurant, puts decaf sales at 33 percent.

James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee doesn't care how long it takes -- he wants to make sure his customers enjoy the best possible cup of coffee, as reported by Oliver Strand in the New York Times (3/3/10). He must really mean it, given his approach to making iced coffee, which takes 12 hours. For this, James uses a Japanese slow-drip device, standing three-feet tall and consisting of "a network of glass globes and adjustable nozzles that mete out liquid at 88 drops a minute."

As James explains: "You precariously take that glass sphere, fill it with cold filtered water, then you stand on a stepstool and nervously and quickly invert it over the reservoir." He adds: "It's theatrical ... It's incredible tasting, too. It wouldn't be worth the show and the hassle if it didn't taste great." His customers think it's worth the trouble; James has had a devoted -- and patient -- following since 2003, when he first started selling coffee from a puschart in San Francisco.

James now has four Blue Bottle coffee bars "and a small fleet of pushcarts" in San Francisco as well as a roaster and coffee bar in Oakland. He just expanded into Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at 160 Berry Street, where he's making 'nel drip' coffee using Japanese flannel filters (video)" James says he'd like his coffee bar to recall San Francisco, but not too much. "The thing about coffee," he says, "is that coffee is local. I'm not just showing up in New York. I'm showing up on Berry Street."

"... You find that there's nothing like picking rocks out of fields to bring people together," says Rob Jones in a New York Times piece by Christine Muhlke (2/28/10). Rob is founder of the Crop Mob, a merry band of "pop-up farmers" who band together to help "small, sustainable farms" do whatever needs to be done: "mulching, building greenhouses and pulling rocks out of fields." So far the Crop Mob has helped a total of 21 farms in the Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham area in North Carolina, donating a total of about 2,000 hours.

The idea originated "during a meeting about issues facing young farmers, during which an intern declared that better relationships are built working side by side than by sitting around a table. So one day, 19 people went to Piedmont Biofarm and harvested, sorted, and boxed 1,600 pounds of sweet potatoes in two and a half hours. A year later, the Crop Mob e-mail list has nearly 400 subscribers and the farm fests draw 40 to 50 volunteers." Most of the volunteer farmers are young and don't have farms of their own, but the events help give them an inside track on "internships, learn about affordable land and find potential dates."

Trace Ramsey, a farmer who has benefitted from the Crop Mob, sees an explosion of interest in farming among young people. "People are interested in authentic work," he says. "I think they're tired of what they've been told they should accomplish in their lives and they're starting to realize that it's not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective." For the farmers, it solves a big problem, too -- not only in terms of the free labor, but also the social aspects. Rob Jones thinks the idea could spread to gardening, even to cities, since "anywhere there's dirt, a community can grow."

"A fruit that tastes like dirt is suddenly a sweet money maker in Brazil," reports Seth Kugel in the New York Times (2/24/10). We're talking about acai, long a dietary staple of poor, rural Brazilians, and now "riding the wave of the antioxidant craze and rain-forest chic." Demand for acai, which grow on palm trees and look like great, big blueberries, is way up in recent years. Traditionally, it is served as porridge, but now it is finding its way into everything from Snapple beverages to pizza crusts and even beauty products. Surfers use it in smoothies, for an energy boost.

Leticia Galvao, a Brazilian, finds this funny, since acai tends to make her sleepy. "Generally, when you have acai here, you take a nap," she says. Maybe it depends how much sugar you add -- locals, especially older, more rural folks, like their acai straight up, which is said to "taste like dirt. Making matters worse, the manioc flour that's often mixed in to thicken it has the consistency of sand." But acai's growing popularity has been a real boon, economically, for Brazil's acai growers. "Two or three years ago, we had a lot of trouble selling the product," says Orisvaldo Ferreira de Souza, an acai farmer.

That's all changed: "Just yesterday, six buyers came by," he says. "We sold 10 baskets each to two of them." Orisvaldo can now afford to "buy meat and chicken in town," put a motor on his boat and acquire a television set. Such success has had a negative effect, however, on urban poor families, for whom acai is "a valuable source of nutrition." Prices have gone up, although for now, acai consumption among the poor hasn't slowed; they simply thin it down a bit. "Fifteen years ago, it was like beans for us," says Joao Manuel. "Now it's more expensive than beans. We eat it just the same; it's only now that we feel it in our wallets."

The notion that kids today are somehow different because they grew up with digital tools may be overblown, reports the Economist (3/6/10). Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong, writing in the British Journal of Education, argues that there could be "as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations." She says such generational generalizations "fail to recognize cognitive differences in young people of different ages, and variations within age groups."

The point is that digital natives "do not really have different kinds of brains that require new approaches to school and work." Michael Wesch, a new-media pioneer and cultural anthropology prof at Kansas State agrees that many of his students "have only a superficial familiarity with ... digital tools."His view is diametrically opposed to professors who suggest moving "classroom discussions to Facebook," for instance, or management gurus who want employers to shift from "command-and-control" cultures to more collaborative environments.

It may also upend the idea that "digital natives will grow up to be more responsible citizens" and use their digital prowess "to campaign on social issues and exercise closer scrutiny over their government." Again, "there may simply be too much economic, geographic, and demographic disparity to make meaningful generalizations ... There is also a feeling of superficiality about much online youth activism." Joining an activist Facebook group is one thing, but a Pew Research Center study "found that internet users aged 18-24 were the least likely of all age groups to email a public official or make an online political donation."

Walmart is the new Woodstock and Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman, suggests David Brooks in the New York Times (3/5/10). Clearly, there's a big difference in politics between the '60s hippies and today's tea-partiers. As David writes: "One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Walmart." But David also thinks there are more similarities than differences.

"They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor," he writes. On Amazon dot-com, observes David, the same people who are buying books such as "Liberal Fascism," are also buying "Rules for Radicals," a classic handbook of the New Left. And he thinks that "both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence ... the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Both groups "go in big for conspiracy theories ... and spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted ... have a problem with authority" and have a largely "negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment." However, says David, they have "no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation ... They don't seek to form a counter-establishment because they don't believe in establishments." Both groups, he concludes, "are radically anticonservative," because "conservatives believe in civilization -- in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities."

Insights, integration and collaboration bring retail success. A discussion featuring Tia Newcomer of Hewlett-Packard, Jay Contessa of Sun Products, Mary Goggans of Kimberly-Clark, and Al Wittemen of TracyLocke. (more)

Olivier Francois, Chrysler's brand chief, is bringing back "models wearing metallic minidresses" to automotive marketing, reports David Welch in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (3/15/10). "I am doing here what I know from [home]," says Olivier, whose home is France and claim to fame is Fiat's recent success in Italy. His goal is "to attract a younger, hipper, wealthier customer as Chrysler's traditional buyers age and dwindle in number." To accomplish this, he's not afraid to court some controversy, as well as "generate new heat around the brand's muscle cars."

During the SuperBowl, for example, he ran a "slyly sexist commercial for the Dodge Charger" called "Man's Last Stand." The spot "featured closeups of regular guys saying: 'I will shave. I will carry your lip balm. I will put the seat down." And then the voiceover, as a Charger speeds away adds, "Because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive." The spot did create buzz, including a great YouTube spoof done from a woman's perspective: "I will put my career on hold to raise your children. I will diet, botox, and wax everything ..." (video)

Whether that kind of buzz translates into sales remains to be seen, obviously. Olivier also says he's on the lookout for cars that "people want to make out in." This would be a switch "for an automaker best known for the Town & Country minivan." And it may not help attract more women to, say, Dodge, whose buyers are three-quarters male -- or soccer moms and dads, for that matter. Industry analyst John Wolkonowicz is among those doubting that what worked in Italy for Fiat will work for Chrysler in America. "Americans don't have that kind of loyalty," he says.