Perhaps you were wondering what Wired editor Chris Anderson is up to, after putting forward ideas called “The Long Tail” and “Free”? Well, now we know! His new idea is called “Atoms & Bits.” He will be giving it away… for free. (Oh and a book deal. And some speaking gigs. Whatever.) But what is “Atoms & Bits,” besides a good name for a futuristic dog food brand? You can find out at a breakfast coming soon!

JOIN US FOR A SPECIAL BREAKFAST PRESENTATION

CHRIS ANDERSON, WIRED EDITOR IN CHIEF
Best-Selling Author of The Long Tail and Free

PREVIEWING HIS NEXT BIG IDEA: ATOMS & BITS

Transformative change happens when industries democratize. In recent years publishing, broadcasting and communications have undergone a cataclysmic shift, increasing the range of participants and participation in everything digital. Now the innovation models from the universe of bits are extending to the world of atoms, too. Thanks to low-cost DIY factories in China, anyone with a good idea and bit of expertise can create products for users anywhere in the world. The entrepreneurial potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on global markets-no tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a web startup. Now it describes a company that makes things, too.

Friday, December 11 | 8:30–10 AM
The WIRED Store
415 West 13th St, between 9th Avenue & Washington St
RSVP to [redacted]

Sponsored by: American Airlines
This event is complimentary. Space is limited.

My mind is certainly blown.

Here’s a story about yet another campaign aimed at convincing theists that you can have a fulfilling and moral life without believing in some sort of divine overseer. I’ve already expressed my feelings on this issue, but, really, can’t the atheism movement try a little harder to make sure that their spokesfolk don’t look exactly like the actors that would be cast in the Onion version of this clip? You’re asking people to give up their gods; at least show up with someone who looks like Brad Pitt or something.

If you’ve got tissues nearby, get them out now: A 13-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome ran away from home and spent nearly two weeks in the NYC subway system before being found by a MTA worker who recognized his face from a missing-person poster. Apparently afraid of being scolded for not concentrating at school, Francisco Hernadez Jr. ducked into a subway station near his home in Bensonhurst and rode the D, F, and No. 1 trains for 11 days, surviving on snacks bought at newspaper kiosks.

His parents scoured the boroughs by subway and bicycle, and posted more than 2000 home-made signs imploring their son to come home. “Franky come home,” one pleaded in Spanish. “I’m your mother I beg you I love you my little boy.” (Excuse me, I seem to have a speck of dust or something in my eye.) He’s back at home, back at school, back to drawing and playing video games. But still friendless and rarely speaking, still, as his neurologist put it, struggling with situations that demanded a “verbal or social response.” Asked by the Times’ Kirk Semple how he felt about the efforts to find him, Francisco said, “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “I don’t know how I express myself sometimes.” Asked what he took from the fact that no one approached him during his time on the trains, he said, “Nobody really cares about the world and about people.” His mother said, “I tell him: ‘Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me.’ I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”

Oh, that’s not a speck of dust after all. I’m sobbing hot tears.

Howie Kurtz knows that it’s always good to get the early jump: “Is it conceivable that Barack Obama won’t run for reelection?”

In the 1960s, the African-American unemployment rate in New York City was nearly identical to the white people unemployment rate. But by 1990, black people were well more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white people. Ever since, black unemployment has been the leading edge of unemployment trends; when unemployment shot up in 1992 to a New York City-wide average of 11%, unemployment among black men went to 17%. (Of course these are state Department of Labor numbers; they indicate people actually enrolled in the system, not the further mass of the jobless.) Let’s take a look at the trending since the early 90s!

Well, and: those were the good times.

When we talked about the faces of recessioning yesterday, we were mildly chafed at an in-depth look at the decline in opportunities among expected white top-earners. Today, the Washington Post takes a look at the nation’s 34.5% unemployment among African-Americans:

Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions — 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population…. Young black women have an unemployment rate of 26.5 percent, while the rate for all 16-to-24-year-old women is 15.4 percent.

In adorable form, the Post says that “Some studies examining how employers review black and white job applicants suggest that discrimination may be at play.” Oh, really?

“Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men,” said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. “Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison.”

It’s the first new Tumblr in ages with photos about a certain kind of thing in a certain kind of way that hasn’t offended me! (I’m looking at you, Black People at Wal Mart on Facebook on Public Transit.) Thank God for Face Ahoy, where life is more gentle.

Continuing signs of the recession: “A nude photo of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy — identical to one sold last year for $91,000 — has been withdrawn from a Paris auction after bids failed to hit the reserve prices. Bidding for the black and white shot, showing Miss Bruni standing pigeon-toed and covering her crotch with her hands, began at €4,000 (£3,600) but reached only €5,800, less than the undisclosed reserve price, the Drouot auction house said.”

A historian of recent presidential Thanksgiving proclamations finds Barack Obama’s maiden effort wanting.

The New Yorker gets mail about its review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s vegetarian book. Including someone who said he was writing from the parking lot of a slaughterhouse: “I wonder if Foer has ever visited, or considered the impact of, a thousand-acre soybean monoculture. We have demanded cheap food, and so we have received cheap, destructive food production. Second, vegetarian moralism denies an essential fact of living: death. Everything dies, and not always in its due time.” The great beyond eagerly waits for all forms of meat, including the writing kind of meat!