Will The American Mall really be the next High School Musical? Either MTV is much smarter than us, or they have completely lost touch with America’s youth. There’s also the chance those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But when MTV announced, in December, that they were teaming up with the producers of High School Musical to create The American Mall, we were immediately skeptical: Isn’t mall culture dying? — Jossip

Social networking for book lovers just got better. Shelfari, the book lovers and reviewers social networking site based in Seattle with a global community just got a makeover. Officially launched in October 2006, Shelfari was the first social media site focused on books, their mission is to “enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.” — Galley Cat, Mediabistro

We can measure eyesight and hearing. So why not smell? Human olfactory talent is informed by our sensitivity to and awareness of smells, and also by our ability to identify and discriminate among them. Here is where our brains carry some of the responsibility for why we underestimate smell. Scientific research has found that while humans can detect thousands upon thousands of distinct scents, our brains quickly reduce that sensitivity. — Jennifer Fisher Wilson, The Smart Set

Boris falls in line with the Blairites. What a pity. Yesterday, Boris [Johnson]’s chief political adviser, Australian-born James McGrath, was forced to resign after he made an un-politically correct comment to the ‘citizen journalism’ website latest.com. …  The incident certainly shows that Boris is keen to distance himself from the accusation that he is a racist … Yet what is even clearer in the McGrath ‘race row’ is that the Tories are dedicated to upholding the speech codes that have been solidified by the New Labour PC brigade over the past 10 years – and which Boris was once so keen to criticise. Indeed, this is not so much a race row as a ‘phrase row’, a squabble over etiquette. It will do nothing to generate an enlightened, grown-up debate about race relations in London, but a great deal to entrench the New Labour government’s stifling culture of speech-policing in the name of protecting the public from anything that might be deemed offensive. — Nathalie Rothschild, Spiked