Tuesday!

* Five Amazing Buildings of the Future (And How They'll Kill You).

* Also via Gravity Lens: the death of handwriting!

* David Cronenberg will film DeLillo's Cosmopolis.

* Nicholson Baker says the Kindle 2 isn't all that. I think I'm going to stick to fantasizing about the hilariously expensive Apple tablet coming this winter.

* Also in the New Yorker: an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about The Left Hand of Darkness.

* And The Daily Show says goodbye to Sarah Palin.

Ways you can tell I bought Apple stock today: Steve Jobs just announced he's taking a six-month medical leave. Best wishes to him and his family.

Speaking of Apple MacBooks, I have to say Apple has won my loyalty forever. I took my computer down to the Apple Store today to get the DVD drive fixed after a completely inexplicable *cough* hardware failure. I also requested that the keyboard be replaced (the 'M' key had become sporadically nonresponsive) and asked if the small number of hot pixels on my screen was past Apple's threshold for replacement. For whatever reason—frankly I didn't want to push the issue—the genius at the Genius Bar with whom I was dealing concluded that the best option for everyone would be to replace my machine with a completely new unit, meaning that my six-month-old MacBook Pro is now being swapped out for one of the brand-new MacBook Pros completely free of charge.

Conclusion: Apple is the greatest company in the world.

Calvin and Jobs.

Upon seeing the top 15 "green brands", my first response was "There's no such thing as a green brand." But that's not true—there really are companies with superior products and decent practices, it's just that consumers have no ready access to reliable information about them. And the high social importance of ecology in recent years has actually made matters worse, not better, with the greenwashing that is increasingly common across all industries only further muddying the waters.

Apple, for instance, and despite its many other virtues, may be greener than it used to be but it's still not especially green. But it feels green, so it makes the list.

This is a failure of the culture, and really a failure of our government—in both cases by design. Simple labels work; they worked in Britain for nutrition, and they could work here, not only with regard to health but along any number of ecological and social-justice vectors as well.

It may be that consumers would still make bad choices even if they were well-informed, but the evidence from Britain suggests otherwise. I think you'd see a significant shift in consumption practices almost immediately.

I think I've mentioned before how much I've come to appreciate my MacBook's Dashboard feature. Today's addition was the Say Cheese widget, which throws up a new Calvin & Hobbes strip for me daily.

Last week I installed Vista on a small corner of my MacBook in part so I could play Windows-only games like the (very fun) Portal. Little did I know it had already been ported to Flash. (Warning: Not a real port, though it's pretty fun all the same. You'll still have to buy the real deal.)

Just about the only complaint I have about my precious, precious new MacBook is the requirement to manually eject flashdrives and iPods rather than just yanking them out as you can on a Windows machine. The Eject All Volumes widget for the Dashboard is the solution to 75% of my prayers—now at least I only have to push one button.

Presenting the new Macbook Air. When it's finally time to upgrade, I'll still probably spring for the Pro for the extra processing power—but having a laptop this light is pretty tempting. (UPDATED: The good people at Gizmodo feel pretty strongly this just isn't worth the money.) This link via Cynical-C, but everybody's talking about it.