The 10 Best Asian Condiments Because no one should be left empty-handed at a party Kirin FreeKirin FreeThe Japanese brewery behind sushi-bar favorites Kirin Ichiban and Kirin Light uses a yeast-free process to ensure Kirin Free has zero alcohol (most beers labeled non-alcoholic in the U.S. contain trace amounts, up to 0.5% ABV). Kirin Free was an instant hit in Japan, and the brewery is eager to see how U.S. consumers will respond, testing the beer in New York, California, Nevada and Arizona. Zero alcohol means the beer has less belt-busting power than a handful of TicTacs: just 37 calories. Paulaner Thomas BrauPaulaner Thomas BrauGerman brewer Paulaner creates a non-alcoholic wheat beer with notes of banana and clove that’s actually quite decent, but it’s not sold in the U.S. Instead, we get Paulaner’s Thomas Brau, an N/A (less than 0.5%) beer with a grain-and-hay, pilsner-like aroma, unobtrusive flavor, and a crisp, light finish. The 8 Manliest Meals in Novels, Ever

The 10 Freshest, Funkiest Natural Wines Under $40 A Brewing Company Used 30 Lobsters to Make This Beer Starbucks Is About to Open Their Most Extravagant Location Ever Natural Wine Is About to Take Over the U.S. How to Crack an Egg Without Looking Like an Idiot How to Make the Perfect Glazed Turkey Sandwich Why San Francisco Chefs Are Obsessed with This Phothe best wine with turkey The Best Wing Spot In Every Statebest texas red wines The Genius of 'Billions' Is in the Foodbest sweet california wine Watch a Bunch of Bartenders Guess Who's UnderageBadel Pelinkovac Orange 1L Badel Komovica Diluted Grape Brandy 1L Badel Pelinkovac Gorki 1L Girls in the Vineyard White Blend Vietti Barolo Castiglione 2012

Light beer doesn't have to be light on taste — or at least that's what the TV commercials tell us. Sometimes, though, it's actually true, as is the case with these 10 low-cal brews (including two that are gluten-free) that will quench your thirst while watching your waistline.Keith Bedford / Reuters Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong The MIT economist Peter Temin argues that economic inequality results in two distinct classes. And only one of them has any power. A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s left? That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white) lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s whims.

The War on Stupid People American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth. As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.” The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart.

People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement. meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one. At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found.

You’d be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you’d be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages. Purple Turtle Photography / Getty The Complex Lives of Babies A new documentary explores how early experiences drive development. The idea that new babies are empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world around them doesn’t sound unreasonable. With their unfocused eyes and wrinkly skin, tiny humans sometimes look more like amoebas than complex beings. Yet scientists have built a body of evidence, particularly over the last three decades, that suggests this is patently untrue. “When kids are born, they’re already little scientists exploring the world,” said the filmmaker Estela Renner via a video conference from Brazil before a recent screening of her new documentary The Beginning of Life (streaming on Netflix) at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

That’s something Renner, a Brazilian mother of three, discovered as she spoke with early-childhood experts and parents in nine countries around the world about the impact a child’s environment in the first few years of life has on not only her physical development, but her cognitive, social, and emotional development, too. “I didn’t know that kids were not blank slates,” she said. “It changed the way I look at babies.” If more people recognized that fact, the way communities and policymakers think about and invest in the early years of life might be different. How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer. As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest.