Submitted For Your Perusal

1. Can’t Hide in the Cloud

“The problem is that we have collectively ceded our privacy bit by bit as we have moved more social and business interactions from the physical realm to the so-called cloud, powered by tens of thousands of computers at server farms owned and managed by companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook. And it might be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to regain what we have given up.”

2. Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy

“New technologies like artificial intelligence and online education, increased domestic energy production and slowing growth in the cost of health care have prompted Mr. Cowen to reappraise the country’s prospects.”

3. For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting

“Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history.”

4. Faces of the Minimum Wage

“The recession took middle-class jobs, and the recovery has replaced them with low-income ones, a trend that has exacerbated income inequality.”

5. Messages Galore, but No Time to Think

“We can now use cellphones, texts, instant messaging, text messaging, social media, corporate intranets and cloud applications to communicate at work. Something may have been lost as we adopted these new communication tools: the ability to concentrate.”

6. No Country for Slow Broadband

“America’s broadband networks lead the world by many measures, and they are improving at a more rapid rate than networks in most developed countries.”

7. Facebook Made Me Do It

“Our growing collective compulsion to document our lives and share them online, combined with the instant gratification that comes from seeing something you are doing or experiencing get near-immediate approval from your online peers, could be giving us more reason to act out online, for better or for worse.”

8. I Know What You Think of Me

“I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will.”

9. Don’t Blame the Work Force

“Corporate executives have valuable perspectives on the economy, but they also have an interest in promoting the notion of a skills gap.”

10. The Not-So-Good Old Days

“You can’t just stroll through the past, picking the things you like and skipping the ones you don’t, as if historical eras were menus, and you could pick one from column A and one from column B. They are, rather, interconnected social, economic and political systems. Whether someone would really want to return to a particular time depends on socioeconomic class, age, sex, race and health.”

11. Where We Are Shapes Who We Are

“These studies tell us something profound, and perhaps a bit disturbing, about what makes us who we are: there isn’t a single version of “you” and “me.” Though we’re all anchored to our own distinct personalities, contextual cues sometimes drag us so far from those anchors that it’s difficult to know who we really are – or at least what we’re likely to do in a given circumstance.”

12. Behind Kanye’s Mask

“I am the nucleus.”

13. Man of Moment in the 1920s

“The image maintains its force and piquancy as a metaphor of urban anxiety: modern man uncertainly suspended over the chasm of an uncaring, impersonal metropolis, struggling to hold on to something, anything, as his feet churn the void and the minutes of his life click away.”

14. From Fish, Birds and Ants, Undead Hordes

“The animal kingdom figured heavily into his conception of the zombies. In addition to birds and fish, the filmmakers also paid careful attention to the movements of ants.”

15. Luke Janklow: Not Exactly Bookish

“He may be the last man having fun in book publishing, an industry that has gone from late nights at Elaine’s to hand-wringing about the Kindle.”

16. The Mother of All ‘Housewives’

“Ten million people were watching your show by the end of the 12th hour. That’s huge.”

17. Paul Cavaco: Finding the Look That Suits His Age

“I love sneakers, but there’s a point where you have to stop wearing certain styles because it looks like toddler-wear. The colors can be so bright. You’d think there is enough distance between your foot and your face that you can get away with it, but it doesn’t go with the older face. I’m still trying to figure out what an older person is supposed to wear.”

18. Even Michael Pollan Breaks Rules on the Road

“Even the worst pork, if you cook it for 20 hours, tastes fantastic.”

19. I’ll Have What She’s Having

“The experiments and data Bergner writes about vary widely and don’t all point in the same direction, but he sets this tour of contemporary sex research against one particular shibboleth: the notion that women are naturally less libidinous than men, ‘hard-wired’ to want babies and emotional connection but not necessarily sex itself.”

20. Feelings?

“We have only her word that Thomas is the woman she says she is: a sociopath as well as ;an accomplished attorney and law professor,’ who is just as comfortable ‘in summer dresses as I am in cowboy boots,’ is super-popular – ‘in a world filled with gloomy, mediocre nothings,’ people ‘are attracted to the sociopath’s exceptionalism like moths to a flame’ – has ‘never had an insecurity,’ feels no anxiety and possesses ‘remarkably beautiful breasts.’”

21. Visible Men

“The forces that bring us to our present lives are tangled and complex. Each of our stories contains both wrongdoing and grace, and it is not my job to unravel the skein of their guilt, to judge or absolve. I am here as a witness. I am here in the name of story and its power to transform.”

22. Invisible Men

“His client Shaker Aamer, a former resident of Britain, took a liking to George Orwell. ‘I sent him a copy of 1984, and he said he read it about three times and that it perfectly captured the psychological reality of being at Gitmo.”

23. Lionel Shriver Does It the Hard Way

“I’ve never envied people with early success; it’s easy to become a funny combination of overconfident and insecure.”

1. How Not to Be Alone

“Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.”

2. How the U.S. Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly

Today, a revolution in software technology that allows for the highly automated and instantaneous analysis of enormous volumes of digital information has transformed the N.S.A., turning it into the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike. The new technology has, for the first time, given America’s spies the ability to track the activities and movements of people almost anywhere in the world without actually watching them or listening to their conversations.

3. No Tie-Ins. No Touch Screens. No Apps.

“When you’re using a computer or an app, it’s giving you all the information you need. It’s a completely reactive experience. Parents are so scared of having their kids say, ‘I’m bored.’ It’s synonymous with, ‘I’m a bad parent,’ and so they never allow kids to feel boredom, which equals frustration, and so kids don’t get to the point where they have to dig deeper and figure out what to do.”

4. All Over but the Lease

“In other parts of the country, sharing a living space is a sign that young couples have taken a turn for the serious, with both pairs of hands firmly on the steering wheel. But in New York, where people platonically share windowless rooms with strangers in a trade for subway access, cohabitation and commitment do not necessarily go hand in hand. Living together is often driven as much by practicality as romance. And when the relationship unravels, one or both parties have to walk away from an apartment as well as a lover.”

5. Who’s Minding the Schools?

“The presumption is that the kind of ‘critical thinking’ taught in classrooms – and tested by the Common Core – improves job performance, whether it’s driving a bus or performing neurosurgery.”

6. Fixing the Digital Economy

“Dissect almost any ascendant center of power, and you’ll find a giant computer at the core.”

7. Don’t Take Your Vitamins

“Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.”

8. Loving the Midwest

“At coffee houses, my husband was annoyed by how long it took baristas to fill his order, and on the highway, he was mystified by drivers, all of whom seemed to crowd into the right lane. At trivia nights, which are common in St. Louis as informal fund-raisers, you could buy mulligans for questions you didn’t know the answer to, which offended my husband’s sense of competitive integrity. We thought that pizza made with the beloved local cheese – Provel – tasted as if it had been cooked with cellophane. And if we went out on a weeknight, we’d be the only patrons in the restaurant by 9 o’clock and would get the impression that the staff members wanted us to hurry up so they could go home. We’d ask each other, ‘Where is everyone?’”

9. No Learning Without Feeling

“Skills-based standards ignore the basic fact that language learning must occur in a meaningful context. The basis for higher-level learning – for philosophy, psychology, literature, even political science – is the emotions and impulses people feel every day. If we leave them out of the picture, reading is bled of much of its purpose.”

10. The Joke’s on All of Us

“I love jokes, even in their frequent ugliness. They illuminate the irresolvable contradictions our lives are built on. And they make us vulnerable to other people’s reactions – will you laugh, or not? Will I please you or offend you? That’s a complicated calculus when humor depends on surprise, which is close to shock, which is perilously close to outrage. It’s possible to make jokes about anything – even rape and the Holocaust – but I can’t think of a truly successful joke that is, at its base, attacking the victim. It hurts us when our jokes hurt others. But we can’t give it up; we keep trying to tell good jokes, because we love the sound of laughter, my voice joining with yours in a fearful celebration of how the frailties of others are also our own.”

11. Your Smartphone Is Watching You

“It isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state.”

12. Showing It All, Revealing Nothing

“We’ve exchanged nakedness, which is all about being genuinely exposed, for mere nudity, which is about being decorative.”

13. It’s a Small World of Real Housewives

“The closest analogy to the Bravo franchise may be McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that is known for rigid standards and uniformity, but that permits small variations overseas. There are stand-alone McCafes that serve espressos and lattes in Malaysia and El Salvador; the McDonald’s in Rome has marble counters and vaulted stone ceilings that suggest that communion wafers might be on the menu.”

14. His Target Is Assassinations

“If we embrace assassination as a central component of our foreign policy and continue with the mentality that we can kill our way to victory – or worse, kill our way to peace – then we’re whistling past the graveyard.”

15. The ‘I Dos,’ Unplugged

“The hottest topic in wedding circles this year seems to be whether to request, remind or even require that guests go cold turkey on technology during the event.”

16. Just Tap Here: Technology and Travel

“Technology and travel are becoming ever more fused, even at hotels where for centuries the basic demand has remained unchanged: a safe place to lay one’s head.”

17. Khaled Hosseini: By the Book

“Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.”

18. The Big Money

“By ‘the unwinding,’ Packer is really referring to three large transformations, which have each been the subject of an enormous amount of research and analysis. The first is the stagnation of middle-class wages and widening inequality. Depending on which analyst you read, this has to do with the changing nature of the information-age labor market, changing family structures, rising health care costs, the decline of unions or the failure of education levels to keep up with technology. The second is the crushing recession that began in 2008. Depending on which analyst you read, this was caused by global capital imbalances, bad Federal Reserve policy, greed on Wall Street, faulty risk-assessment models or the insane belief that housing prices would go on rising forever. The third transformation is the unraveling of the national fabric. Depending on which analyst you read, this is either a gigantic problem (marriage rates are collapsing; some measures of social connection are on the decline) or not a gigantic problem (crime rates are plummeting, some measures of social connection are improving).”

19. The Fortress of Solicitude

“To paraphrase the cultural critic Lewis Mumford: Every generation revolts against its mothers and makes friends with its grandmothers. Don’t be surprised if women of the next generation look askance at biodynamic vegetables and hand-knit scarves, don suits made of synthetic fibers, drink big cups of toxins and head to work in soulless skyscrapers.”

20. Faith in the Unseen

“Though neither a research scientist nor a trained philosopher, he is infuriated by the sunny confidence of neuroscience, arguing that it is not just a product of ambitious overreach but, more, a willful act of arrogance.”

21. The Genius of Getting It Wrong

“Science is a mess.”

22. Dark Places

“Captivity narratives go back to the very beginnings of American literature in the 17th century, and were the first literary form dominated by women’s experience.”

23. How Much Is Michael Bolton Worth to You?

“The artists who charge the least tend to see the most scalping.”

24. This Is Your Brain on Coffee

“Men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee.”

25. Who Made That?

“This special issue of the magazine is devoted to innovation and its assorted mysteries. Where do good ideas come from? How do they catch on? Expanding on our weekly Innovation column … we explore the genius of everything from BuzzFeed and the Brannock Device to gay marriage and low-carb diets.”

1. Sleep Studies

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

2. This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.

“He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started ‘this project,’ as he sometimes calls it. Namely: Are you insane?”

3. The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

“Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.”

4. When It May Not Pay to Be Famous

It would be dangerous for persons trained only in the law to constitute themselves the final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations.’

5. Schools Are Not Cool

“It’s absurd to talk about inculcating 21st-century skills in classrooms that resemble 19th-century sweatshops.”

6. Whither the Hatchet Job?

“Hardly any American publication wants to be negative.”

7. The Myth of Gatsby’s Suffering Middle Class

“Then, as now, Americans preferred Gatsby, seeing in the figure not just falsehood, but also the possibility that they, too, might become rich. Fitzgerald’s book itself, as opposed to the film, also offers such a possibility. Carraway, the narrator, does not hate Jay Gatsby, but comes to see him as the only hero of the story.”

8. ‘Hamlet’ Meets ‘The Hangover’

“Aeschylus, or the father of tragedy, said his dramas were ‘but slices cut off from the great banquet of Homer’s poems.’ He didn’t write one play about what happened when Agamemnon returned home from the Trojan War. He wrote three: ‘Agamemnon,’ ‘The Libation Bearers’ and ‘The Eumenides,’ known collectively as ‘The Oresteia.’ It seems ‘The Oresteia,’ one of history’s great works of art, was a franchise. Sophocles wrote more than 100 plays and won an estimated 24 dramatic competitions. He is credited with formal innovations, like adding a third actor, but he relied on recycled plotlines. In modern terminology, his ‘Electra’ was something between a spinoff and a reboot. Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, was a character in ‘The Oresteia.’ Not to be left out, Euripides, the third of the three great Athenian tragedians, wrote an Electra play too. That is not so different from Christopher Nolan’s deciding to take on Batman after Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher did.”

9. The Triumph of the Working Mother

“At all income levels, stay-at-home mothers report more sadness, anger, and episodes of diagnosed depression than their employed counterparts.”

10. Techs and the City

“Across the country, municipalities are buying ever more complicated technological ‘solutions’ for urban life. But higher tech is not always essential tech. Cities could instead be making savvier investments in cheaper technology that may work better to stoke civic involvement than the more complicated, expensive products being peddled by information-technology developers.”

11. Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

“We measure the effectiveness of drugs and other medical interventions by thin margins of success that would not be visible without sophisticated statistical techniques; why assume literature’s effectiveness should be any different?”

12. A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza

“As more and more educated Americans, especially younger ones, are looking to move downtown, seeking alternatives to suburbs and cars, they’re reframing the demand for public space. They want elbow room and creative sites, cooked up by the community or, like the plaza program, developed from a democratic mix of top-down and bottom-up governance.”

13. More Than Just a Social Butterfly

“It is a long, zigzagging tale, full of ambition, happenstance, heartbreak and summer camp.”

14. Avoiding Jokers’ Remorse

“Knowing who we can tease and what we can tease them about is a complicated business. It’s a tap dance on a crystal ball that’s cloudy with good intentions.”

15. Baby Names That Shout Out ‘I Am …’

“Baby naming has become an industry — with paid consultants, books, Web sites brimming with trend data, and academic studies exploring correlations between baby names and future success. The once-simple task of coming up with a monogram for the baby blanket has evolved into a high-stakes exercise in personal ‘branding.’ And so many prospective parents feel paralyzed, trying to find the elusive name that is exotic yet not bizarre, classic yet not pompous, on trend but not trendy.”

16. Let’s Play: Making Travel a Game

“Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and big data, gamification is now prevalent in practically every industry.”

17. Walter Mosley: By the Book

“I am one of those rare writers (at least I believe this to be true) who do not equate reading and writing in any kind of direct way. I know for a fact that the father of the Western tradition of the novel, Homer, was illiterate. Many of the storytellers and poets of the West were not schooled in letters. The founder of one of the world’s great religions, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, created a religion in an environment where no one wrote. The scriptures had to be submitted to memory only to be written down long after.”

18. Don’t Be Disgusting

“Della Casa’s message is: Don’t be disgusting. Pretty much everything that comes out of a bodily orifice meets his definition of disgusting — so much so that the mere sight of someone washing his hands would upset people, as their minds would leap to the function that had necessitated that cleansing. Spittle is not the only unpleasant thing emerging from the mouth, he warns. People who recount their dreams or brag about their children or sing off key are also offensive. Other unfortunately surviving etiquette problems he mentions include checking mail when in company, monitoring what others are eating, grooming in public and joking about disabilities.”

19. What I Read That Summer

“Still, you got to fight — so I fought. Every lunch break I sat on the deck overlooking the scrap yard and read me some Toni Morrison.”

20. Pop Life

“Nobody deserves an in-depth critical study more, and the author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? ought to be the perfect man for the job. But somewhere along the way this book developed a bad case of Buried Lede Syndrome.”

21. Such Small Portions

“Judaism is a religion, even if many Jewish humorists don’t practice it, and its Scripture sometimes expresses an outlook that is saturated with paradoxes. Insofar as these contradictions are the seeds of Jewish fun-making, there is perhaps some validity to the idea of a theologically Jewish style of humor, even if that style is not of any special interest to psychologists.”

22. Sacred Hoopster

“He cites the Grateful Dead and William James, Thelonious Monk and Abraham Maslow. He tells us that he deliberately touched his nemesis Pat Riley, then the Knicks coach, before a crucial playoff game in order to ‘count coup,’ as the Lakota do. He compares his third Lakers championship season to Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov. In the space of a page, he toggles from psychotherapy to Native American customs to Christianity to Buddhism and back to ‘two recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.’”

23. Literary Excursions

“Addicted, as we are, to comfort, utterly intolerant of boredom and feeling entitled to traipse about the globe, we have all but killed off the adventurer-memoirist.”

24. Can I Use the Same Paper for Multiple College Courses?

“The more I think this over, the more I find myself agreeing with your position.”

25. The Death and Life of Chicago

“The government failed us. The market failed us. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government — the government — doesn’t belong to us. Forget them; they forgot us. We need to solve our problems ourselves.”

26. The Hollywood Fast Life of Stalker Sarah

“Most celebrity photographers yearn to catch a star at their most defenseless, but Sarah tends to think of them as friends.”

27. Want to Save Civilization? Get in Line

“Curse lines all you like, but we would be doomed without them.”

28. The Joylessness of Sex on TV

“What’s striking about the current depiction is how much of it just isn’t sexy — how much of it is divorced from any real sense of eroticism or desire. The audience, at home in bed in need of diversion, is betrayed. What they get instead is sex that is transactional, utilitarian — the end product of a kind of twisted careerism. Is this the sex we deserve? Possibly it is — at a time of such relentless obsession on work-family “balance,” an obsession that leaves little cultural room to think about more pleasurable kinds of human engagement.”

29. Miuccia Prada’s Circle of Influence

“I am trying to work out which images of the female I want to analyze. I’m not really interested in clothes or style.”

30. Deeda Blair’s Elegance of Conviction

“It is only when you have come to know Deeda rather well that you can see that her fashion and science are not in opposition, that her glamorous side and her rigorous side fit together neatly. She doesn’t buy all new clothes every season; she intuits what clothes will look good for decades, buys sparingly and wears them accordingly. In her apartment, she pairs a delicious sofa designed for her by Billy Baldwin with Louis XVI chairs and a Jansen table. That confident restraint is echoed in her refusal to believe that new discoveries in science necessarily outclass old ones. ‘Real elegance is having convictions,’ Deeda said to me.”

31. Innovative and Frighteningly Accomplished—and Not Even 30

“The number of people in their mid-20s disrupting entire industries, taking on jobs usually reserved for people twice their age and doing it in the glare of millions of social media “followers” seems to be growing almost exponentially.”

32. Bernard-Henri Lévy on Art and Philosophy

“Philosophers can tell you about your work, and aspects of it you don’t know. They can see things much faster than artists because artists work from the subconscious, from a place beyond words. Philosophers kind of give order to art.”

1. Is Google Glass Dangerous?

“If you think the situation would improve if the computer display appeared superimposed on the world itself, think again. Perception requires both your eyes and your mind, and if your mind is engaged, you can fail to see something that would otherwise be utterly obvious.”

2. Amma’s Multifaceted Empire, Built on Hugs

“She succeeded where the government failed, and for a simple reason, Mr. Jayakumar told me: she possessed divine authority.”

3. If My Data Is an Open Book, Why Can’t I Read It?

“Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an ‘open data’ society. In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.”

4. Bequeathing the Keys to Your Digital Afterlife

“Many services and programs have sprung up to help people prepare for what happens after their last login.”

5. Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

“Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.”

6. Sunday Dialogue: Treating Mental Illness

“The brain is a wonderful organ. It heals. And it can be helped to heal.”

7. Rich Tourist, Poor Tourist

“The sense of control money provided them had also served to deaden their experience.”

8. Up, Up and Away

“The world, it seems, is running short of the second most abundant element in the universe — and that’s creating a major problem in a wide array of businesses.”

9. Misplaced Honor

“The United States Army maintains bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed United States Army soldiers; indeed, who may have killed such soldiers themselves.”

10. Gesture Writing

“Realizing that writing is a lot like drawing gives us a deeper approach. Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see.”

11. When Numbers Mislead

“Given the variety of circumstances that exist in the messy real world, we ought to think twice before doling out one-size-fits-all advice to individuals on the basis of averages.”

12. A New Stream for the Thirsty

“What Warner has built here is not a showcase for established classics but an open field for grazing, giving viewers the chance to sample lesser-known and totally forgotten films without risking $20 on a DVD.”

13. The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil

“Arendt misread Eichmann, but she did hit on something broader about how ordinary people become brutal killers. The postwar generation of young Germans took Arendt’s book as inspiration to rebel against their parents, who may not have personally killed Jews during the war but knew what was going on and did nothing.”

14. Tech Titans Choose Small or Secretive Ceremonies

“Tech titans typically go small or secretive when marrying.”

15. A Long, Wet Walk in Wales

“My idea of heaven is a long walk. Aimless hours pass, thoughts drift. I was never ambitious about how many miles I covered — until I read a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. He loved to walk, too, and thought nothing of walking to a town hundreds of miles away to try a new organ, or to look for a new job. He walked for weeks — months, even — humming to himself, I hope. I wondered why I always traveled by car, or train, or plane, always in a rush. I wanted to walk from one town to another, too. I began to yearn for slow travel.”

16. Film No Evil

“A great majority of American studios went out of their way to avoid any mention of the ominous political developments in Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until well into 1939, when the outbreak of war in Europe had come to seem inevitable.”

17. Their Own Petard

“What the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic knack for noticing and her talent for withdrawing in order to let her subjects hang themselves with their own words.”

18. Faith Healing

“The idea of the artist as heroic loner, he decides, is for him merely an anxiety that has become dangerously useful.”

19. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

“Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.”

20. Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That

“Half a century ago, the birth-control pill offered women the ability to switch off ovulation, to separate sex from reproduction. It played a part, as the ‘60s got under way, in propelling a host of profound changes, cultural as well as reproductive, societal as well as intimate — in how women saw themselves and lived their lives, starting with the notion of women being above all baby makers and mothers. The promise of Lybrido and of a similar medication called Lybridos, which Tuiten also has in trials, or of whatever chemical finally wins the race for F.D.A. approval, is that it will be possible to take a next step, to give women the power to switch on lust, to free desire from the obstacles that get in its way.”

21. Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking

“Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn’t mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it’s just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. Mozart pisses me off because he’s like a naturally gifted athlete, you listen to Mozart and you go: ‘Of course. It all came easy to him.’ Beethoven you hear the struggle in it. Look at his manuscripts, and there’s reams of scratched-out music that he hated. He stops and he starts. I love that about Beethoven, his humanity shows in his music. Mozart was almost inhuman, unhuman.”

1. Why Basketball Won’t Leave Phil Jackson Alone

“He has based his entire career on the notion of basketball as a spiritual enterprise, and as such he considers the NBA to be something like the Catholic Church: a powerful but flawed institution charged with administering that spirituality to the masses.”

2. The Health Toll of Immigration

“Becoming an American can be bad for your health.”

3. There’s a Method to My Desk’s Madness

“The average office worker spends nearly six hours a day sitting at a desk.”

4. Coffee Rites, and the Stories They Tell

“Caffeine tugs us into this kind of behavior because it is a drug – almost never an addictive drug, though, but a potentially habit-forming one.”

5. Sunday Dialogue: An Economy in Transition

“In decades gone by, it was assumed that mechanization would liberate the masses from the drudgery of work. Instead, mechanization and globalization have ‘liberated’ them from the ability to make a living.”

6. Download: Wesley Schultz

“We traveled in a minivan the first couple of years touring. So we had a lot of window time. Radiolab was our greatest escape. It uses sounds to tell stories and illustrate emotions or feelings. After you start listening to it, television seems so much duller. It’s sort of like in movies when they don’t show you what the villain looks like and your imagination runs a lot wilder and more frightening than what they could ever put on the screen.”

7. How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’

“The prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place.”

8. Get a Life? No Thanks. Just Pass the Remote.

“It feels illicit, unhealthy, even faintly criminal.”

9. All the Lonely People

“The problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own.”

10. Beware Social Nostalgia

“Doctors diagnosed 5,000 clinical cases of nostalgia in Union soldiers and determined that 74 men had died from the affliction.”

11. Le Grand Jerry Lewis

“To understand the genius of Mr. Lewis in the eyes of the French, one needs to go back to the infancy of cinema, before World War I. The French were big producers of silent films, most of them comedies. What the French love in Jerry Lewis, the actor, writer and director, is his multifaceted moi, the meta-narrative and his extreme velocity, as exemplified in French silent films. He took them back to their cinema history.”

12. Daft Punk Gets Human With a New Album

“Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile – there’s no sound, there’s no air. It’s totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it’s really hard to create emotion.”

13. Gatsby, and Other Luxury Consumers

“This is how we live: greedily, enviously, superficially, in a state of endless, self-justifying desire. This is the pursuit of happiness, mirrored in the pleasure these movies provide. But go ahead and cry.”

14. For Gay Men, a Fear That Feels Familiar

“Most of the men have checked their shirts at the door. Some have checked their pants. Conditions for injection could hardly be better. Before Lady Gaga can stutter out ‘Pa-pa-pa-poker face, pa-pa-poker face,’ Dr. Daskalakis stabs them in the arm with a needle, applies a Band-Aid and sends them on their way. All over Paddles, men are happily sucking on the lollipops he is handing out as a reward.”

15. A Case for Getting Far, Far Away

“We need this kind of remoteness more than ever. Today we brush elbows on a crowded planet. We fight traffic. We hunker in offices. We marinate in what the late David Foster Wallace called Total Noise. Maybe for you, too, this modern life overwhelms. If you’re like me, only getting far away from all that allows you to shake off the dross. Out there, the world shrinks until all that remains are ‘the rock-bottom facts of ax and wood and fire and frying pans,’ as John Graves wrote in Goodbye to a River, his classic 1960 account of a solo three-week paddle down the Brazos River in Texas. But don’t think yourself an ascetic for savoring such simple things, Graves added. ‘In a way you’re more of a sensualist than a fat man washing down sauerbraten and dumplings with heavy beer while a German band plays and a plump blonde kneads his thigh. … You’ve shucked off the gross delights, and those you have left are few, sharp, and strong.’”

16. Hilary Mantel: By the Book

“The moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. But the pleasure is double-edged, because from this point you’re going to work inhuman hours, not caring about your health or your human relationships; you’re just going to head down that road like a charging bull.”

17. Big Data Is Watching You

“The argument is forceful and passionate, but its polemical tone is wearying. Morozov seems not to trust the judgment of his audience. He is right, but relentlessly right, as if none but fools could possibly disagree with him.”

18. Man of His Words

“America has odd ways of making one feel one’s self a failure.”

19. Economic Recovery, Made in Bangladesh?

“Nearly every rich country has gone through a ‘T-shirt phase’ – an economic period in which there are a significant number of poor farmers who, rather than toil on unproductive land, accept harsh work conditions and low wages in textile and apparel factories. Britain started its T-shirt phase in the late 18th century; the United States had two – New England in the 19th century, then the South in the 20th. During the last 80 or so years, many Asian countries – first Japan, then Korea, Taiwan and China – progressed from the T-shirt phase into broader economic development. Cambodia, Vietnam, parts of India and Sri Lanka are passing through this now. But Bangladesh, where an eight-story apparel factory tragically collapsed last month, killing hundreds of workers and devastating the country, is in the midst of a particularly confusing T-shirt phase. The question is whether it will emerge into a more developed economy, like its many predecessors, or remain stuck, like Haiti.”

20. Julie Delpy Dreams of Being Joe Pesc

“I’m a pervert, but in a romantic way.”

21. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs

“It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes – including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this ‘second genome,’ as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.”