Submitted For Your Perusal

1. “Once Around the Island With Gay Talese”

“In some 50 years as a writer, I do not recall ever proposing a story that would likely lead to getting my feet wet. But when an editor-acquaintance heard me say that I had never circumnavigated the city, he suggested it was about time I hop aboard the Circle Line and see what I would see.”

2. “Say Hello to Underachieving”

“The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board. Recession-strapped parents don’t always have the means or will to bankroll starter apartments or art tours of Tuscany. So many college students and recent graduates are heading to where they least expected: back home, and facing an unfamiliar prospect: downtime, maybe too much of it.”

3. “Who’s Afraid of ‘NYC Prep’?”

“To be showy or prideful is not only culturally inappropriate, but also in supremely bad taste. To be showy or prideful on reality television appears to be even worse.”

4. “The Right Stuff (by Law)”

“Where Mr. Gosling — and his legal team — draw the line is the presence of other rums in a so-called Dark ‘n’ Stormy, which was invented in Bermuda just after World War I. ‘People will try one with some other rum, and then say, what’s the big deal with this drink?’ he said. ‘That’s a real concern.’”

5. “Stereo for One: A Brief Unaccompanied History”

“Thirty years later, the age-old challenge remains: knowing who and what and when to turn off.”

6. “She’s a Director Who’s Just Another Dude”

“Within the confines of its dizzyingly high concept Ms. Shelton has created an exploration of the male ego and the passionate rigors of platonic, dude-on-dude love.”

7. “Twitter Comes to the Rescue”

“As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.”

8. “No Rest for the Wealthy”

“To Veblen, the rise of a conspicuously consuming leisure class wasn’t a sign of progress. It was a relic of barbarism, an evolutionary step from feudalism, and, hence, un-American. The equation of luxury with British tyranny and decadence, which took hold in the revolutionary era, persisted through much of the 19th century. Since primogeniture had been abolished in America early on, and there wasn’t much point in possessing huge tracts of land when vast territories were available to the adventurous, the nation had little in the way of dynastic wealth or large enterprises. The Civil War crushed the one peculiar institution that had enabled a small-scale leisure class in the slaveholding South. But by the 1880s and 1890s, the new technologies — telegraph, steam, railroad, electricity — that had forged a national market in goods and services, and the rise of Wall Street as a financial center, were allowing businesspeople to amass great wealth practically overnight.”

9. “Remixed Messages”

“Possibly the best-known response graphic was created by Matt Jones, a product designer with the British-based firm Schulze & Webb. He was ‘in a grumpy mood’ when he happened to read an article in The Guardian about the ‘Keep Calm’ trend. ‘It was full of this sort of British fatalism,’ he recalls. Being of the mind-set that ‘we have to invent our way out of trouble,’ he started sketching.”

10. “Who Can Possibly Govern California?”

“Size is important to Schwarzenegger, as befits a champion bodybuilder. The first thing he asked me was how long this article would be. ‘About 9,000 words,’ I said, exaggerating slightly, wanting to impress him. ‘It’s a big story,’ he said, nodding, pleased. Schwarzenegger then relighted his cigar, using a lighter about the size of my hand. It was the biggest lighter I had ever seen, I told him, and he grinned, seeming glad that I had noticed. He flicked up another big orange flame, for special effect.”

1. “A Sequined Glove That Mesmerized the World”

“It was impossible to look away from him — not when he was a dimpled child singer crowned with a pillowy Afro, not when he became a pop demigod uniformed in rhinestones and epaulets to command what were always referred to as his armies of fans, and not when his surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcating adulthood, sex and even race.”

2. “Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture”

“‘America is changing more quickly than the government,’ said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. ‘They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?’”

3. “‘Moveable Feast’ Is Recast by Hemingway Grandson”

“Scholars are clear that this new edition should not be regarded as definitive any more than the 1964 version. ‘This book can’t become a sacred text,’ said Ann Douglas, a professor of literature at Columbia University, adding that ‘there can be no final text because there is not one.’”

4. “Revenge by Being Louder”

“Of all the daily discourtesies we endure, none to me is more irksome than headphone leak. You know, that treble-drenched drone emanating from iPods halfway down the subway car. What puzzles me is why people do not complain more often, why we don’t rise up in numbers and insist these people turn their music down, or else. Where is Howard Beale when we need him?”

5. “Sound of Silence: The Culture Wars Take a Break”

“Today, the term culture war is a catchall for disputed matters of religion and conscience, lifestyle and social norms. The key issues are abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research. Conservatives like Ms. Palin are in many instances populist evangelicals at odds with elites, whether on campuses or within the media. But Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Cheney were themselves intellectuals engaged in a different culture war, centered on universities and colleges.”

6. “After Jackson, Fame May Never Be the Same”

“When will another pop culture figure mean so much to so many that people are moved to assemble, hug and dance?”

7. “I Love You, Man (as a Friend)”

“The kinship between gay men and straight women is familiar to the point of cliché (see: Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Kathy Griffin’s audience, etc.), but friendships between gay and straight men have barely registered on the pop culture radar, perhaps because they resist easy classification.”

8. “The Adult Store Goes Mainstream”

“Vibrators are now sold at Wal-Mart, 7-Eleven and CVS; new Internet sites for sex products feature middle-aged models and aim at mainstream couples. Several companies market sex toys to women as young as sorority sisters and as old as postmenopausal golden girls through Tupperware-style home parties.”

9. “Dillinger Captured by Dogged Filmmaker!”

“Like Mr. Burrough and Mr. Mann, Mr. Misher was an aficionado of the era. ‘The cars are cool, the guns are cool, the girls are beautiful, the guys are dressed’ in sharp suits, he said. ‘It has much more cool factor than just a quaint sepia-toned history.’”

10. “After a Pause, Maxwell’s Music Is Set to Play”

“Defying advice about career momentum, ignoring pressure from his record company and either refusing or feeling unable to treat his music like an assembly-line commodity, he broke the rhythm of his recording and touring schedule and tamped down his celebrity. ‘I needed a break,’ he said, ‘I was like half of a human being in some ways.’”

11. “Toil and Trouble”

“If de Botton were genuinely concerned that work today lacks meaning, surely here was an opportunity to ask questions. But is he worried that work today lacks meaning? Or just that some work means more to other people than he thinks it should?”

12. “Practice, Practice, Practice”

“Masters was married at the time, and Johnson was dating a judge. But so what? Their near-nightly sex was part of their work ethic.”

13. “Reading to Live”

“A product of Manhattan private schools and Princeton, Beha seems an unlikely candidate for such earnest self-­improvement. But like the working masses who were Eliot’s intended audience, he was desperately seeking a retreat from the mundane. At 27 he was the picture of aimless youth: a struggling writer, marginally employed and grievously in debt. Searching for salvation, or at least something to do, he pledged on a lonely New Year’s Eve to spend the next 12 months reading the Harvard Classics, which had long been gathering dust in his parents’ library.”

14. “The Overextended Family”

“To Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.”

1. “Into the Fray”

“Where the critics of copyright perceive the Internet age as a potential Renaissance being blocked by overconsolidated corporations, Helprin worries, plausibly, that the spirit of perpetual acceleration threatens to carry all before it, frenzying our politics, barbarizing our language and depriving us of the kind of artistic greatness that isn’t available on Twitter feeds.”

2. “Feverish Liaisons”

“She argues that it may in fact be a sign of health to enter into a relationship that is turbulent, demanding or unorthodox. She praises long-distance relationships, arduous relationships, relationships with men who are elusive, relationships the therapeutic culture adamantly opposes. She asks, ‘Could it be that the choice of a challenging love object signals strength and resourcefulness rather than insecurity and psychological damage, as we so often hear?’”

3. “Centre Court Without Rain? What’s Next, Clay?”

“There are those who feel that the roof robs Wimbledon of its ineffable spirit, the spirit that believes in triumphing over adversity and making do with unfortunate turns of events.”

4. “Ripped. (Or Torn Up?)”

“Federer is elegant and fluid and cerebral, so that his best tennis looks effortless even when he is making shots that ought to be physically impossible. Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will.”

5. “In Missouri, a Fight Over a Highway Adoption”

“Ms. Keene said members of the group, who sometimes wear swastikas, wanted to do community service.”

6. “Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned”

“Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools.”

7. “Get a Life, Holden Caulfield”

“Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as ‘weird,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘immature.’”

8. “Action!”

“She still makes relationship movies, but the relationships evolve both through the chatter at which women are supposed to excel and the contact of bodies, often male, sometimes female, running, surfing, parachuting, living and dying out in the world.”

9. “Everyone a Winner? The Lost Art of Conceding Defeat”

“At the upper reaches of society, we litigate ever more readily and accept misfortune with ever less stoicism. Being fired from a job becomes the beginning of a negotiation, while a routine school suspension instantly goes to appeal. In part, this is probably the inevitable reckoning for a culture that gives trophies to every Little Leaguer because, as the saying goes, we’re all winners. Shouldering defeat is, after all, a skill that has to be learned early, like speaking Mandarin or sleeping through the night.”

1. “Bridge to Somewhere”

“The new four-lane bridge will mean that commercial vehicles traveling between Phoenix and Las Vegas will no longer take the scenic route — the winding, narrow roadway, built in 1936, that leads across the dam. Set to be completed next year, the $114 million bridge will be supported by the longest concrete arch in the country.”

2. “Bridging the Gap”

“Our roads and bridges are crumbling, yes, but most are also mediocre, reflecting neither engineering sense nor architectural sensibility.”

3. “Corner House”

“People understand landscape as a scenic picture. For me the deeper meaning is about how your body uses landscape. So walking, cycling, gardening, all the ways you usethe land, are more fundamental than just its appearance.”

4. “Data Center Overload”

“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always ‘there,’ waiting to be heard. But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like?”

5. “Getting Up to Speed”

“If it can get started, the California high-speed train would almost certainly be the most expensive single infrastructure project in United States history. And if it is completed, the train will go from L.A. to San Francisco in just under 2 hours 40 minutes and from L.A. to Sacramento in about 2 hours 17 minutes. Judging by the experiences of Japan and France, both of which have mature high-speed rail systems, it would end the expansion of regional airline traffic as in-state travelers increasingly ride the fast trains. And it would surely slow the growth of highway traffic. Other potential benefits are also intriguing: a probable economic windfall for several cities along the route, with rejuvenated neighborhoods and center cities; several hundred thousand jobs in construction, manufacturing, operations and maintenance; and the environmental benefits that come from vehicles far more efficient and far less polluting than jets, buses and cars.”

6. “The Tweet Smell of Success”

“In separating the wheat from the chaff, Twitter has become a kingmaker of sorts, conferring online stardom to a mix of writers, gadget geeks, political commentators and entrepreneurs.”

7. “‘The Greatest’: What a Concept”

“One of the allures of competitive sport is its conclusiveness: the scoreboard says who won, who lost, go home. It’s when each of these daily pixels is considered part of a larger picture that things get far more fuzzy. And loud.”

8. “A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts. Or Not.”

“As roles go, there is no ambiguity about Brüno: he is a limp-wristed, sex-crazed queen. Universal’s promotional materials show him dressed in hot pants, leopard bikini underwear and riding nude on a unicorn.”

9. “Henry Fairlie: The Gentleman Delinquent”

“‘Even in the louche world of Fleet Street, where every vice found a champion, he distinguished himself: he drank; his finances were a crime against responsibility; his charm and darkly handsome looks availed him of endless affairs.’ It was more than something of an achievement, then, that the general tenor of his essays was able to sustain such a high moral tone.”