As you read this, I am on vacation enjoying the beautiful music of Austin City Limits music festival with two of my best friends. It’s a festival I have wanted to go to for years. Everyone I ask about the city has nothing but good things to say.

In all of the recommendations I have gotten, it seems there is quite the food scene in Austin. I am working through a list that includes favorites like Stubbs, Frank, Chuys, and Ironworks. And to add to all that, there is soo much good food at the festival itself, and in websites like this and this.

If you were going to Austin, Texas, what would you do?

I love reading the things older people wish they knew when they were younger, or the things more experienced people in X field wish they knew when they had started. It’s so interesting to me to learn about the little items that stood out as majorly important in hindsight. Its an exercise we have the new hires complete after they have been working with my company for a while. I’ve ready What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self, and Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou. TED talks are full of themes like this. With everything out there in this genre, I am clearly not the only one who is interested.

And now The Atlantic is getting in on the game. They have launched a new video series called Advice to a Younger Me. It will feature interviews with the CEO of GILT, the CEO of DreamWorks, and more. I can’t wait to tune in!

The term bookworm is usually associated with shy, introverted types who prefer the company of novels to actual people. While books can be a great tool for avoiding others –they give you something to stare at when that weirdo on the subway is looking your way –a new study published in Science journal found that reading literary fiction can actually improve social skills. People to read authors like Chekhov and then took tests that measured social perception, empathy, and emotional intelligence scored higher than people who read non-fiction or popular fiction, and higher than those who read nothing at all. The scientists involved believe the effect is due to novels that demand the reader suss out emotional subtleties to learn and make inferences about the characters in the plot. So go ahead and take the excuse to join your friend’s – coworker’s –cousin’s book club, and chalk up the wine you drink when you meet to the noble pursuit of enhancing your social skills. And if you’re curious about where you fall on the emotional empathy spectrum, take this fun quiz by The New York Times here (I got a 31/36!).

When I go out to eat, I try to be an understanding patron. I have done my time waitressing, so I know sometimes things just go wrong and there’s nothing the waitress can do about it. The kitchen gets backed up. Another server takes the food that was supposed to go to your table. 10 tables come in at once, and things get hectic. Sometimes these things just can’t be helped. But one thing that can? Waiting endlessly for the check when you’ve finished your dinner, and just want to get the heck out of there.

Cover is a new app that lets you pay your bill using your phone with participating restaurants so that when you finish you can just get up and leave, no waiting involved. You just let your server know that’s how you’ll be paying, and the app displays your charges, allows you to enter tips and leave when you please. You can even split the check with other Cover users. Can’t wait to try it out!

Lately bread has become somewhat of a dirty word. With all of the low-carb or carb-free diets out there (Paleo, Whole 30, Atkins, South Beach), and the huge jump in gluten-free products, what used to be a diet staple is now often a shunned item falling off grocery lists around the country. Now The UK Federation of Bakers is challenging that, somewhat surprisingly, with a perfume. It’s call Eau de Toast, and it purportedly smells like breakfast, to not only remind the ladies to eat it, but to point out that bread should be included in the meal. To add a last little dig, the fragrance was debuted during London Fashion Week to a crowd that is notorious for avoiding bread to shed pounds.

It looks like their message was well received, because the fragrance is currently sold out. I mean, who doesn’t love the smell of freshly baked bread? While you’re waiting for more to be available, the Federation suggests that you create your own perfume by popping a couple slices in your toaster oven, and want to remind you that bread has protein, fiber, calcium, iron, copper, zinc, and manganese. They say it should be about 10% of your daily food intake (remember how whole grains are a necessary part of the food pyramid?). It’s at least worth thinking about having a slice here or there to help “bring bread back into fashion.”

When I am out and about in a neighborhood of NYC that I don’t know that well and I get hungry or want a drink, my first instinct is to whip out my phone and enter what I’m looking for into Yelp. Or, if I’m planning dinner or a night out, I’ll turn to the reviews for a sense of what the ambiance is like, and how the food is (if I can’t get in touch with one of my foodie friends). So today is a sad day that exposes around 16% of yelp reviews as fraudulent. I knew that certain retailers (my hair salon included) will offer incentives or service credits if you write a positive review, but I had no idea the number was so high. Yelp tries to screen out the most extreme reviews by filtering them, to conceal potentially fake raves that are just too-positive, or overtly negative reviews that might be planted by a business’s competitors, but fake reviews are sure to slip through the cracks. It’s just a reminder to take what you read online with a grain of salt.

In these days of having to pay extra to check a bag (remember when that was included?), there are so many inconveniences to carrying on. I can’t bring my favorite perfume because there is no container small enough. I have to dump out my reusable water bottle and risk using the sketchy water fountains in the airport, or spend $20 on an overpriced, environmentally un-friendly bottle to stay hydrated.  You have to bring about 20 travel size lotions to really be able to keep properly moisturized for more than a day’s trip. And, I recently had an artisanal fig and cinnamon jam confiscated by security because they probably thought it looked delicious, and apparently pastes/gels fall under that pesky 3oz restriction. But maybe not for long!

There is a new machine in the works that would end the ban on gels, aerosols and liquids in carry-ons. It would be able to identify and catalog the type of liquid, aerosol or gel to separate out what’s safe (e.g., baby food), and what’s potentially deadly (e.g., homemade bomb), by using ultrasound and radio pulses to determine the material’s chemical properties and compare them to database of items deemed harmful. I, for one, and VERY excited.