You see, women love cooking. The article is kind of hilarious in a chauvinistic sense, but it _does_ do a decent job of describing MapReduce. The only problem I see with simple overviews like this is that they leave out the fact that, often times, the reduce step is far more complicated than adding numbers together. This explanation pretty much applies for any basic framework for parallelism.

On a side note, I was surprised when MapReduce made such waves, as it's nothing _new_, per se. I still can't believe Google was granted a patent for it. I wrote "MapReduce"-esque algorithms in early high school when I made a distributed system to compute Pi. All it really does is provide a framework for creating, dispatching and joining jobs.