The New Yorker has an impossible-to-ignore​ headline this week: "How Bing Crosby and the Nazis helped to create Silicon Valley."

Say what? The headline conjures images of Crosby tinkering with vacuum tubes and capacitors in a Santa Clara garage owned by the Third Reich. But that's far from the case. In fact, there are some improbable leaps in the article linking the crooner with the Nazis and California's rich technological history.

Here's how The New Yorker's Paul Ford sees it:

After World War II ended, the Americans sifted through German technological innovation and found magnetic tape. The Nazis had used tape recording to broadcast propaganda, Ford writes. 

When I was a kid, Pop-Tarts were available in just a few flavors, from the classic brown sugar cinnamon to the charmingly sprinkled strawberry version. 

Over the years, the Kellogg (K) pastry treat added a few flavors, such as s'mores and hot fudge sundae. Now it's rolling out two new varieties that its parent company hopes will entice baby boomers and wealthier consumers to return. 

The new flavors are peanut butter and frosted chocolate peanut butter, and they're the first peanut butter Pop-Tarts since Kellogg discontinued the peanut butter and jelly version in 1986, according to Foodbeast.com. 

 

Staring into the face of Chuck E. Cheese's (CEC) is an exercise in perspective.

Parents see a few hours of blistering screams, bad pizza and worse music played by animatronic rodents, followed by a night of quiet, restful slumber. Supporters of illegal Internet gambling parlors see a whiskered double standard and a cartoon pit boss slinging tokens and stuffed animals.

Time magazine notes that the mouse and his arcade-and-pizza playhouses have been sucked into the gambling debate in recent years by people opposed to crackdowns on strip mall storefronts filled with simulated slot machine games that run on swipe cards, give out cash prizes and have become a boon for elderly patrons. In the words of one 70-year-old woman from Ohio interviewed by The Wall Street Journal: "It has become my world."

 

More than half a billion dollars is ready for the taking as the Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots roll over this week.

Wednesday's Powerball prize stands at an estimated $360 million, the third-largest Powerball jackpot in history. The cash option before taxes is worth $229.2 million.

Every time the jackpot has climbed this high, someone has won, according to Philly.com. No wonder people are lining up to grab tickets.

Here are six things you might not know about Powerball: 

Several grinding years of recession have scoured many of America's middle class into what one marketing and communications group is classifying as the new hardworking class.

Research from Cramer-Krasselt says this group, with annual incomes of between $30,000 and $50,000, earns too much for government assistance but doesn't want that assistance either.

The study focused on working mothers, who are having to evolve financially and socially as the economy continues through hard times. About three-quarters of the women surveyed were college graduates or had some college education, and a similar number were married. About 60% were either fully employed or had part-time work, while 32% were working as stay-at-home moms.

 

Shares of Google (GOOG) reached yet another milestone Wednesday, topping $900 as the company's annual developers conference got underway in San Francisco. At that level, Google has a whopping $300 billion market value.

The stock recently traded at $906, ahead of its average 52-week price target of $903.03.

The search engine giant has been able to shrug off concerns about weakened prices for its search ads, the surging popularity of Facebook (FB) and worries about whether it's spreading itself too thin with side projects such as Google Glass and now a subscription music service. 

Shares of Google have surged more than 28% this year, while Apple (AAPL -2.93%) has slumped more than 19% and Facebook has barely budged.   

Updated at 4:36 p.m.

A fight is simmering over food stamps, one of the nation's most used social welfare benefits and a lightning rod for both conservatives and liberals. 

The number of Americans tapping the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reached a record in December, bringing the program under fire for last year's $74.6 billion in spending. That's more than double what the program paid out before the Great Recession. 

As a result, both the Senate and House are debating measures that would shave the program. The Senate Agriculture Committee on Tuesday approved the Farm Bill, which would cut the SNAP program by about $4.1 billion, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee is considering its own version of the Farm Bill, which would trim about $2.5 billion a year. 

 

Google's (GOOG) plan to launch a subscription music service that would give users unlimited access to libraries of record labels such as those from Comcast's (CMCSA) Universal Music Group, Sony (SNE) Music Group and Warner Music Group for a monthly fee is a head scratcher.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, the market is already pretty crowded with players like Apple's (AAPL) iTunes, Pandora's (P) customized digital radio application and Spotify's popular service. Amazon.com (AMZN) plans to develop a music subscription service along with a device to stream audio through speakers or a TV, the newspaper said.

Whether the business is big enough to fit all these market participants isn't clear.