Food Apartheid. The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The LA City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people. We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn’t think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong. — Slate

Skinny women in ads – better for the bottom line. A study by business professors at Villanova University and the College of New Jersey, inspired by Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” shows that ads featuring thin models made women feel worse about themselves but better about the brands featured. — Advertising Age

An American Self-Portrait. Running the Numbers is an art project looking at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. One recent work depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration’s war on terror. — Chris Jordan

Extreme Makeover: Olympics Edition. Stifling pollution, pet genocide, and the ubiquitous loogie might be the hallmarks of the Beijing that its 17 million residents know, but it’s a long way from the cosmopolitan city the rest of the world will see during the 2008 Olympics. Instead, the control-freak Chinese government will slap some lipstick on its human-rights-violating pig and present a cleaned-up version to the rest of the world—all at the expense of Chinese tradition (i.e., selling counterfeit key chains). — Radar