Google Maps added Street View in Japan this week. Since I lived in Tokyo for three years, I’m psyched.

Except for two very brief occasions, I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in four years. But this book looks fascinating: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.

The entire prologue is online. An excerpt:

You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem. The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life–different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability–mingle so freely.

Another:

[I]t is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we’re engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity–the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.

Finally:

Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. “One-handed convenience” is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed “to handle well in the car.”

Makes me think of those obese humans hovercrafting their way around the mother ship in WALL-E.

Slate.com investigates a Texas alternative weekly rag that seems to consist almost entirely of plagiarism — including some of Slate’s articles.

At times over the last month, I’ve doubted that the Bulletin actually exists. A tiny newspaper from the Houston suburbs, filled week after week with bowdlerized Joe Conason columns and record reviews airlifted from the pages of Slate? It seemed preposterous, and the longer I spent squinting into the mustard-and-magenta glow of the Bulletin’s Web 0.0-quality Internet site, the more I began to suspect that I was the dupe of a conceptual art prank, a cheeky Borgesian commentary on the slipperiness of language and authorship. Or something.