The Best Links this Week: Free Music Archive, a must-see movie, and the adoption market
WHERE MUSIC IS FREE
Before he became the "Love Gov," Eliot Spitzer won a settlement from record companies and large corporate radio stations involved in a pay-to-play scheme. Some of that money ended up funding the Free Music Archive, a site that provides free, legal downloads of music, including live recordings of indie darling Neko Case. Bonus: A lot of the songs have Creative Commons licenses, which means you can give your iMovie the perfect soundtrack. [Free Music Archive]
PLEASE SEE 'PLEASE GIVE'
How can you enjoy your money when others have so little? This is the question plaguing Kate (Catherine Keener) in Nicole Holofcener's honest and witty new film, Please Give. An antique furniture dealer who buys pieces from estate sales and sells them at a high markup, Kate walks around Manhattan handing out $20s to the homeless, but refuses to buy her teenage daughter a $200 pair of jeans. Would the free-spending ladies of Sex and the City 2 think twice about dropping that much for designer denim? Please Give is the film to see. (Trivia bonus: Keener was born in Hialeah, Fla., one of the lowest spending cities in the US.) [Sony Classics]
BABIES WITH PRICE TAGS
How much is a baby worth? It's a hard, awful question, but in the adoption market, very real. The Economist discovers that race and sex play a huge role in adoption costs, and finds it's $8,000 cheaper to adopt a black baby in the U.S. than a white or Hispanic baby, and $2,000 cheaper to adopt a boy than a girl. Apparently, you can put a price on anything. [The Economist]
THE SCIENCE OF SAVING
Becoming a one-car family. Negotiating the rent. We're always looking for ways to cut back, even a little. WalletPop's weekly Saving Experiments apply a little science to the process. How much is unplugging our toaster worth? Is it cheaper to make your own tacos or head to T-Bell? (Toaster: $1.08 a year; yes, it's cheaper to make your own). [WalletPop]
GOVERNMENT DATA, NOW EASIER TO USE!
The U.S. government collects mountains of data, but good luck sifting through it all. Enter This We Know, a non-profit dedicated to turning that data into searchable, public, easy-to-use databases. You'll learn where not to look for jobs (most unemployed place: Chevak, AK, 31 percent unemployment), where not to plant your vegetable garden (most toxic place: Bryn Mawr, PA, with 16,436,700 pounds of toxins per square mile), and where people settle in and stay put (more than 75 percent of Kingston, NY, residents have lived there for more than 15 years). Enter your zip code and see what comes up. [This We Know]
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