[Yahoo! News]
FedEx matches UPS's purchase of Mail Boxes Etc. by buying Kinko's.

[New York Times]
The year's most overrated and underrated ideas.

[Chicago Sun-Times]
Roger Ebert lists his top movies of 2003. The Return of the King is noticeably absent.

[My Way News]
The market for internet domain names may be heating up again.

[upc.es]
Excellent speech given by Orson Scott Card at the 2003 UPC SF Competition ceremony in Barcelona on the role of art in society and in individual lives, and on why the exclusivist aesthetic is misguided.

[Portland Press Herald]
A seventh-grade social studies teacher in Presque Isle, Maine sues his school district to overturn ban on teaching about non-Christian civilizations in the classroom.

[The New Republic]
Dale Peck on literature: Before there is fiction's much-vaunted truth, there is the lie—the invention, the fabrication, the prevarication, the fiction. That lie is the engine of history, of love and capital and science. The poet's dream is a carrot we all chase at one time or another—and history is a story, at least the way we tell it. Setup, rising action, climax, dénouement. The basic elements are borrowed from fiction in a chronological syntax as rigid as grammar itself. But chronology is just a mental conceit imitating time, and linearity is a narrative conceit imitating chronology.

[New York Times]
In the beginning, there was wine. And there were wine tastings and wine snobs and wine-of-the-month clubs. Then olive oil, vinegar, cheese, coffee and butter followed into the American culinary consciousness. Now the appreciation of fine chocolate seems poised to become the next gastronomic parlor game.

[playingsafely.co.uk]
The 12 STIs of Christmas.