The New York Times unveiled a new beta search last week that picks up thousands more results than their old search did. Benefits of the new search, I would assume, include better accuracy and more current results. More excitingly, there are more results, which, if you’re at all like me and use the Times to check up on standard spellings, hyphenations, and grammatical usages (something very few people do on a regular basis, I imagine), is a long-overdue upgrade.

These are all good reasons to appreciate the Times’s upgrade, but another significance is that every time a news site improves its search and makes archived articles easier to find, the uber-expensive Lexis-Nexis loses a smidgen of relevance.

Here’s a slideshow of the highlights of my trip to Argentina. We stayed in Buenos Aires, traveled to the Andean Northwest, and took the ferry to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. Mouse over the top or bottom to adjust the speed, pause the show, or skip to another photo. Clicking on the photo will give you more information about it.

The New Yorker’s writers are at their best when illuminating the every day objects we take for granted in essays just slightly longer than I would, under normal circumstances, care to finish. The best of them, like Nick Paumgarten’s recent exploration of elevators, make me want to read all the way through, to recover the end of the anecdote.

What’s even more intriguing than all the gee-whiz facts, though, is the video art piece accompanying the article online: sped up security camera footage of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, set to eerie yet calming piano music. This could just as easily pass for a video installation in any modern art museum, if only some aspiring performance artist had thought of it first.

(Spoiler Alert) Anna Karenina threw herself under a train because she had to settle for the confines of her dispassionate marriage. Surely her children would have been better off if she had lived, divorced her husband, and married Vronsky instead of meeting a tragic fate.

But Lori Gottlieb has news for Anna. She ought to be happier settled with the mediocre man. Gottlieb tells us 21st century women in a self-consciously lengthy Atlantic piece that if we get to be 30ish/mid-30s and are not yet married, that we should just go ahead and settle. After all, she says, “Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.” She’s trying to make unmarried women feel better, to cushion the blow of being single in our thirties and realizing that maybe we won’t find true love, to make us realize that maybe we will be happier with Aidan than with Big.

As she puts it, “Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.” She calls Will and Grace the most romantic couple she can think of. To which I say:

SERIOUSLY?!?

When I read this part, I began to wonder if maybe she wasn’t just a tad bitter about the choices she had made in passing up partners for small flaws over the years:

Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.

Don’t foist your regret on me, Lori Gottlieb.

Anyway, I’m a little late to the ballgame here, as Sarah Hepola posted a smart response to this on Salon.com’s Broadsheet several months ago (being 33, she also has a slightly different perspective from mine. Hepola also tells us of Gottlieb’s new book deal and Tobey Maguire’s acquisition of the movie rights).

Nonetheless, this is still relevant to those of us in our 20s, as Gottlieb does impart advice to youngsters. “Do it young,” she tells us, “when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods.” I’ve never actually associated the phrase “selling your very soul” with relationships, and I don’t intend to start now, or at any point in the near or distant future.

Relationships in this article become a business model: Marriage is a soul-sucking, perfunctory nonprofit; the pickiness of young women who date is akin to quitting a job because you don’t like the weird smell in your office. As always, men are on the other side of this equation, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for women to wear themselves out, when Mr. Reality Check will be waiting with open, hairy arms to sweep us into the world of check-balancing bliss.

Sign me up. Maybe I’ll understand when I’m pushing 40, but for now, I’d just appreciate if older women would stop telling all of us “unmarrieds” what to do, what to care about, and how to live our lives. What would Anna say?

These are the freshest cardamom pods I’ve ever seen, courtesy of Flickr user cfsantos. Green cardamom provides an intriguing and unique flavor that blends well with honey and other spices in sweeter concoctions like chai and equally well in more savory dishes of Indian cooking. It also makes an exceptionally subtly flavored and delicious ice cream.

At a recent dinner party, I served honey-cardamom ice cream to complement the Only Chocolate Cake Recipe You Ever Need to Know, a recipe from a bakery in San Francisco that is not Tartine but does produce French pastries better than any I’ve had yet in DC. The light sweetness of the flavor in the ice cream, from the high honey-to-sugar ratio I imagine, was a foil to the richness of the cake, which contains no flour and large quantities of melted chocolate.

Since I had no powdered cardamom on hand, and most recipes out there called for it, I used only cardamom pods, infused into the milk. Here’s the recipe I came up with, if you’re feeling adventurous and happen to keep heavy cream in the fridge and the bowl of an electric ice cream maker in your freezer:

Honey-Cardamom Ice Cream
aka Frankenstein’s Cardamomster

1 1/2 cups milk
1/8 tsp. vanilla
10 cardamom pods
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups heavy (whipping) cream
5 tbsp. honey

Crush the cardamom pods, and add them to the milk. Heat the milk, cardamom pods, and vanilla until milk is hot but not boiling. Remove from heat, cover, and let stand for 30 minutes.

Whisk the egg yolks to combine, then add the sugar slowly and beat until pale yellow. Reheat the milk, pour some of it slowly into the eggs to temper them, then mix all the eggs into the milk over the heat. Leave over heat, but do not boil, until the mixture becomes a custard, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Remove mixture from heat and add the honey while it is still warm. Lightly whip the cream and fold it into the milk and egg custard. Refrigerate the custard for several hours, then strain it to remove the cardamom seeds and pods.

Freeze in the bowl of an electric ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Slate had a contest, and Obama fans provided. Too bad Michelle Malkin–or maybe just Ben and Jerry themselves–scooped them both.

Ben and Jerry recently endorsed Obama. In the process, they lent him two ObamaMobiles that toured Vermont in the weeks before the primary, serving up scoops of a special “Cherries for Change” ice cream along the way.

Said Jerry Greenfield of the endorsement: “What we saw is that when you want real change it’s not a marketing slogan. You have to do things differently. And that is not going to be done by someone who’s been involved in the system for years and years. It needs to come from inside and Barack Obama has it.”

I do wonder at the sincerity of the endorsement, though, if, as one commenter over at the Washington Post pointed out, the “new flavor” is really just Cherry Garcia repurposed. If Ben and Jerry were really serious about an endorsement, they would have created a whole new flavor.

Which is where Slate comes in. The online magazine held a contest asking readers to name an ice cream flavor for the candidate. Ironically, their choice–Yes, Pecan!–was itself plucked from the Obama blog. My personal favorite submission was Barackadamia Nut, but perhaps it’s just too close to WALNUTS! to be palatable to the Slate crowd.

Since the Barack Obama thing has already been done, I’d like to invite Banana Karenina readers to submit names for a Hillary Clinton-themed ice cream in the comments below. I’ll make the winner a batch of their winning flavor.

Actually, it’s a pretty good truth. The Onion is funny again. From the features–”World Leaders Gather to Roast Ahmadinejad” and “Shaq Terrified of Phoenix Suns After Reading About Supernovas“–to the absurdist advice column “Ask the Stage Directions to Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” it seems as though the humorous paper of record has taken up the challenge of being funnier than the competition.

On a side note, I discovered an article about Michael Moore’s new Ben and Jerry’s flavor–”The Waffle Truth”–from 2005. It’s not as funny as the previous examples, but does hit a soft spot, especially for passages like this:

Other Ben & Jerry’s flavors slated for introduction in 2005 are Praline Kael, Noam ChompChompsky Crunch, Ché Guava, and Nelson Vanilla, an anti-apartheid flavor that consists of a dark-chocolate sorbet swirled in an equal amount of vanilla ice cream.

The FaceSpace Guy spends his time on Facebook doing useful things, unlike some of us, who really just use the site to play Scrabulous.

FaceSpace Valentine Facebook Profile Screencast from Huy Hong on Vimeo.

Health insurance, says Paul Krugman. Clinton’s plan has a mandate for coverage, Obama’s doesn’t. Turns out, there are all kinds of reasons that a mandate is necessary to achieve universal coverage.

There’s cost, as summarized in a study by a prominent health economist at MIT:

…A plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

And then the politics of it all:

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

Much to my roommates’ delight, I got an ice cream maker for Christmas, and have been churning out literary ice cream flavors for the past several weeks. So far, PistachiOthello has been the most successful, made with the help of the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook and some slow (an hour and a half in the oven) dried-out pistachios.

Crime and PunishMint Chip has survived one iteration, but needs fine tuning before it is ready to be displayed. Peppermint extract didn’t give it quite the flavor I was looking for, and the technique I used for the chocolate chips from the Williams Sonoma Ice Cream book just didn’t work. There’s room for experimentation, and even variations on the mint-chocolate theme, though, since I already have the names set for two of them: Old TestaMint Chip being the other.

If you have any flavor names for Jasmine Tea ice cream or chocolate with peppermint oreos, leave them in the comments. The tea one was especially delicious.