Presidential candidates try to connect with voters in different ways. They bowl. They attend motorcycle rallies. Sometimes they drink boilermakers. They do not, as a general matter, discuss time-management strategies. In a campaign, as in real life, such talk tends to make people wonder about you.

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The best of Web video.

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Even John McCain thinks you should inflate your tires.

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Last week, the Doha Development Round of global trade negotiations collapsed. Some of the stickiest points involved agricultural trade: Third World governments refused to open their markets further to exports from the European Union and the United States, citing the need to protect small farmers, who make up 75 percent of the world's poor. But just why are these Third World farmers suffering? We've been hearing for years that cheap food makes it tough for them to make a profit. But food's not so cheap anymore: Global food prices have increased 26 percent from 2004 to 2007, according to the World Bank, and are expected to remain above 2004 levels at least through 2015. Now that we're all paying higher prices at the grocery store?meaning more visits to food pantries or fewer to Whole Foods, depending on your situation?shouldn't the farmers' fortunes be improving?

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The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston. "I believe your ? profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts That Make the Holiday a Time to Party" by Mark Williams, a feature pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolons?a hallmark, I would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was largely unaltered. For example, my Slate piece began this way:

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A roundup of Slate's coverage of China and the Beijing Games.

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When I first started swimming competitively, in junior high, we took pride in the sheer, tattered swimsuits we'd wear layered one atop another for extra drag in practice. It was, after all, the Flashdance era, when droopy layers had no small cachet. But come meet day, we'd do anything to be sleek?shave our legs and squeeze ourselves into too-tight Lycra suits, at the time still a newish technology. The goal was to minimize turbulence and to maximize forward momentum in the water. If the look intimidated a few competitors, so much the better.

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Plus, why not Kathleen Sebelius for VP?

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Gas prices dropped to an average $3.871 a gallon on Tuesday after a two-week stretch of declining prices. Is it possible to stockpile cheap gas before the prices go up again?

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Pineapple Express is this summer's precise equivalent to Superbad: a Judd Apatow-produced buddy comedy directed by a proxy from the indie world (last time around, it was The Daytrippers' Greg Mottola; this time it's All the Real Girls' David Gordon Green). Both movies follow three marginally functional man-boys through a day and night of substance-abuse-related mayhem. The two movies were even released in the same part of the season, as a dog-days follow-up to the big Apatow comedy of early summer (in 2007, Knocked Up; this year, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

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A daily video from Slate V.

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To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, click the arrow on the player below.

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A combination yesterday of falling commodity prices and the Federal Reserve holding its nerve helped alleviate the fear of inflation and sent Wall Street soaring, with the Dow Jones Industrial index jumping 330 points, its biggest one-day gain in more than four months. Traders came not to praise commodities but to bury them and, with oil wounded by the dagger of decreasing global demand (crude futures have lost 5 percent in value in the last two days, closing at $119.17 a barrel) and the Fed holding interest rates at 2 percent, the markets dreamed once more of cheaper gas and easing inflation, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

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No, I don't want to use Twitter. I'm way too busy?and, let's be honest, too uninterested (and uninteresting)?to spend all day thumb-typing status updates from my cell phone. That's the problem with Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and the rest: They expect me to eagerly upload, type, click, and tweet my life onto the Internet so these tidbits can be served to others. What I really want is to be able to reap the advantages of these sites without having to lift a finger?to see what my friends are up to without having to write anything myself.

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