Tasty reads from the newsstand

OFF THE RACK

* December How to excel at worrying There are two types of people in the world: Those who divide people into two types of people, and the other kind.

There are also those of us who worry incessantly and those who just don’t know any better. Us worriers, writes Robert Leahy, Ph.D., actually “prefer to know a negative outcome for sure than face an uncertain outcome that could be positive.”

Yeah, and your point being?

“In contrast to naïve advice such as ‘just stop worrying,’ you can try to worry more effectively,” advises the good doctor in ominous slanty type.

For example, is it a problem you can act upon now, or something more abstract? The difference, he says, is between fretting about paying your rent on time and worrying about whether your house might burn down.

But his most intriguing advice is to “embrace the awkward.”

Thus, Leahy urged one man with a fear of being rejected by women (a condition that studies show afflicts 1 out of every 1.0 men) to “deliberately do something that made him uncomfortable: Start a conversation with a woman in a store or ask a woman out. He began to solve his problems by developing a new habit of being uncomfortable.”

So if you suffer from a fear of heights, consider taking up residence on a Ferris Wheel.

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

* November Megapolitan life We’ve always been susceptible to invented words, even though the thing they describe is invariably just an old phenomenon being recycled under a sexy name.

Take “megapolitan.”

“If you think the real estate boom of the past decade was bounteous, peek a little further over the horizon,” write two people with names too troublesome to risk misspelling here.

“Researchers estimate that the massive buildout will constitute a $25 trillion development market by 2030, more than twice the size of the entire U.S. economy today. According to (professor Robert) Lang, the bulk of that money will flow into 10 major metro regions he has christened ‘megapolitans.’ ” Among the chosen areas with

BUSINESS 2.0

at least a tangential interest to Canadians is the Great Lakes Horseshoe, surrounding Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh.

This “constellation of Northern industrial cities is morphing into a service-economy region and will draw a flood of immigrants.” (Note to self: Invent a word to describe “flood of immigrants,” and pitch a cover story about it to a glossy magazine.) * Nov. 14 If you loathe blogs, read this Enabling anyone to assume the mantle of writer, editor and publisher is one of the more dubious by-products of the Web’s push for democratization, “But if blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair,” writes Daniel Lyons. “Many repeat things without

FORBES

bothering to check on whether they are true, a penchant political operatives have been quick to exploit. ‘Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs,’ ” says Christian Grantham, a Democratic consultant in Washington. And while victims can resort to legal action, “filing a libel lawsuit, the way you would against a newspaper, is like using 18thcentury battlefield tactics to counter guerrilla warfare,’ ” says Toronto lawyer David Potts. “You’ll accomplish nothing and just get more ridicule.”

His recommendation? Find a third party to bash the bloggers.

EVERY DAY WITH RACHAEL RAY

* Premiere Issue Quotidian pleasures “There’s nothing ‘ everyday’ about life,” the host of TV’s 30 Minute Meals philosophizes in her inaugural Rach’s Notebook. “We need to separate the words and give them new meaning.”

Judging by non-threatening stories about supermarket shopping and memorable mistakes in the kitchen — not to mention the 16 beaming photos of Ray that populate this first issue — that meaning can be boiled down to something corny like, “real food for real people.”

Which, in the case of a feature about Whoopi Goldberg’s fridge, manifests itself thusly:

Rachael: “When it comes to snacks, I’m all about salt and fat. How about you?”

Whoopi: “That’s my M. O., as you can tell by looking at my backside.”