Part of its ongoing “Safety Net” series, this morning’s New York Times features Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance, a story about the increasing demand for food stamps. In an earlier article, the NYT published one of its peerless national maps illustrating food stamp usage across the country. (“The number of food stamp recipients has climbed by about 10 million over the past two years, resulting in a program that now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and nearly 1 in 4 children.”)

This historic escalation is reflected in the web stats for the California Food Stamp Guide. A year ago, we drew attention to how the usage patterns at the FSG were a sign of the economic times. If so, then it has only gotten worse. Since then, as illustrated below, current Google Analytics for the FSG show monthly visitor sessions have increased to nearly 10,700 (a 52% increase), with over 101,000 page views (a 27% increase) and a bounce rate of only 0.25%. Annualized, this increase in the monthly usage rates of the FSG comes to more than 128,000 visitor sessions and 1,216,000 page views.

It’s a republication from last September but a worthy one, today’s Op-ed art on the back page of the New York Times’ This Week section – iPanic: Helping you deal with the loss of your life savings, one app at a time. “The fetish that’s a phone on the only network that’s an option gets even more practical, with apps for navigating your newfound destitution.”

An especially engaging article from the front page of today’s New York Times: As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up, emblematic of how pervasively and routinely search and social media are impacting jury trials.

This is a cross-post from the LSNC Advocate Feed but it is worth noting here as well: Today’s New York Times features Immigration Explorer, an interactive GIS map based on census data revealing settlement patterns for 20+ foreign-born groups between 1880 and 2000. The Immigration Explorer map is simply a companion piece to the NYT’s “Remade in America,” with today’s feature article about Diversity in the Classroom, which itself has a separate interactive statistical graph illustrating how student demographics break out by state and county and school district. For example, the Grant Joint Union High school district in Sacramento County, California.

Who cares about the Super Bowl. The real game is all about tomorrow’s “Super Tuesday” primary shootout. And the New York Times today has an especially apt and timely article given this current political zeitgeist and the high drama of tomorrow’s national political bloodbath: Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?.

And more transcendently, it’s a fascinating piece about how design affects or reflects the user’s world view.

To coin a phrase, “Barack the Vote,” people!

The New York Time today answers the pivotal question of our generation: Who’s a Nerd, Anyway? Yes, your deepest suspicions about this special, self-selecting but familiar human subspecies are confirmed, but with sociological twists: “They often favor Greco-Latinate words over Germanic ones (‘it’s my observation’ instead of ‘I think’), a preference that lends an air of scientific detachment. They’re aware they speak distinctively, and they use language as a badge of membership in their cliques” and “are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.” I will confess to having taken four years of Latin in Catholic high school (that’s just what you did then, OK?) but I have never commented on anything by saying “it’s my observation….” Truth be told, as a person who manages technology I have publicly protested at our internal tech meetings against any reference to me as a nerd. Given my Irish ancestry and the specific county origins of my family, I insist proudly I am the Dork from Cork. Deal. (Geek references are optional.)

You know GIS mapping has gone totally mainstream, out of the hands of desktop geeks into the keystrokes of the web savvy hoi polloi, when the New York Times gives front-page prominence to the story: With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking. Mapping hipsters apparently now call it the GeoWeb. We’re all part of it now. Actually, the advocacy community has long already been a part of the web-based mapping revolution, courtesy of leading innovators like California’s Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA) and even more prominent national players like DataPlace. Map on, people!

Okay. You already know I love the New York Times. Here’s today’s case for NYT technology:

Week in and week out, there is no better source for reality-based technology news than the New York Times. You know, like, tech news and information that “normals” would find of interest and relevant in practical ways to their daily lives. I consider it the most consistently worthwhile tech news source I read/view. Period. And pound for pound, there is no better tech reporter cum reviewer cum gadgetmeister cum hambone than the NYT’s unfailing trenchant yet witty David Pogue. But a few NYT examples from this week alone: All the News That’s Fit to Print Out, an article today by novelist Jonathan Dee, in which I learned about how Wikipedia works as a source of new content and its nexus with changing patterns of web journalism; iPhone Spin Goes Round and Round (sorry, you’ll need to be a TimesSelect subscriber to view it) by Joe Nocera, a great piece about how the Apple marketing machine stays on message and studiously avoids troublesome questions about the iPhone, like, “Why would you design a phone that has to be shipped back to Apple to replace the battery?”; and in addition to his worthwhile iPhone review last Wednesday, David Pogue does wonderfully entertaining tech-related videos, setting a standard few can meet, including Exhibit A from iPhone week: The iPhone Challenge: Keep it Secret. If you view only one video this week, this is the one!

God, do I ever love the New York Times. Most of my days start with Starbucks and my home-delivered copy of the NYT, and Sundays are always the best of all days because there is always something wonderful to read. Today is no exception. For my fellow geekmeisters, here’s a must-read from today’s edition: Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, a long-form article with predictable bits about the Google corporate culture but with an emphasis on the mindsets of Google search engineers and their prime directive to make search better. Don’t know what QDF is? Read on.

The New York Times tech section today features Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains, detailing the dynamics of the widely and justifiably admired darling of the open source community, and what the infusion of big bucks is doing to it. A worthy read.