Submitted For Your Perusal

1. “Turncoats Who Become Heroes”

“The unease these movies express, and the problem they try, in their various pop-philosophical ways, to address, is an old one that has taken on some chilling new dimensions in our environmentally anxious, technologically accelerating world. What does it mean to be human?”

2. “Better Loving Through Chemistry”

“These dating sites offer you a list of romantic candidates whose selection is based on proprietary analyses of personality characteristics or biological markers.”

3. “The New Math on Campus”

“Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.”

4. “Apolitics and the War Film”

“When it comes to current military engagements on the Asian landmass, Karl von Clausewitz’s assertion that war is ‘the continuation of politics by other means’ is one memo — and perhaps one of the few clichés — that American filmmakers have largely chosen to ignore.”

5. “Cue the Director’s Adrenaline”

“I like watching Out of the Past repeatedly.”

6. “A Reluctant Return to the Spotlight”

“Sade emerged in the music-video era (her debut album, Diamond Life, appeared a year after Madonna’s did), when many pop stars believe they need maximum media exposure to sustain a career. Instead Sade has hung back, letting the songs alone define her. It’s a decision that may, in the end, make her more cherished.”

7. “He’s So Vain”

“After Collins, there were Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron and Julie Christie. He had sex with Cher when she was 16. He used to call Sandra Bernhard in the middle of the night, asking her to talk dirty to Uncle Warren. He dated Diane Keaton and Mary Tyler Moore at the same time, while they were living in opposite towers of the San Remo on Central Park West. He apparently dated not only Simon, but also the actress Joyce Hyser, Michelle Phillips, Twiggy, Liv Ullmann, Joni Mitchell, Jackie O. (briefly), Isabelle Adjani, Elle Macpherson and Stephanie Seymour. He even courted Lillian Hellman and Kitty Car­lisle Hart in their golden years; nothing happened, probably, but he wouldn’t have minded if it had.”

8. “Tales Out of School”

“Of the top 20 universities in the world, according to one 2008 reckoning, just three were outside the United States.”

9. “The Book of Self-Love”

“How had the radical changes in American economic and social arrangements since the 19th century affected the individual?”

1. “Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism”

“Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of ‘taste.’ And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of ‘trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.’”

2. “High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur”

“They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid the framework for grass-roots activism in the ’60s, as well as those of gay rights and even Communist groups. They held ‘affirmative action’ bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock ‘Love Thy Prisoner’ campaign to find American homes for Guantánamo inmates.”

3. “Type-A-Plus Students Chafe at Grade Deflation”

“The grading change at Princeton was prompted by the creep of A’s, which accelerated in the 1990s, and the wildly divergent approaches to grading across disciplines. Historically, students in the natural sciences were graded far more rigorously, for example, than their classmates in the humanities, a gap that has narrowed but that still exists.”

4. “Masculinity in a Spray Can”

“Boys themselves, at a younger age, have also become increasingly self-conscious about their appearance and identity. They are trying to tame their twitching, maturing bodies, select from a growing smorgasbord of identities — goth, slacker, jock, emo — and position themselves with their texting, titillating, brand-savvy female peers, who are hitting puberty ever earlier.”

5. “When Phones Are Just Too Smart”

“The next generation of gadget users might prove different, but for now it is clear that people prefer fewer choices, and that they gravitate consistently toward the same small number of things that they like. Owners of iPhones are no different from cable TV subscribers with hundreds of channels to choose from who end up watching the same half-dozen.”

6. “Talking About a Revolution (for a Digital Age)”

“As the studio-indie model disintegrates, a new nonstudio model appears to be emerging from the rubble. In recent years, for instance, novice filmmakers and longtime independent insiders have begun experimenting, and finding some success, with new approaches to releasing movies, including self-distribution. The D.I.Y. world isn’t new, but what is novel is how filmmakers and other industry insiders are sharing their nuts-and-bolts experiences and blue-sky ideas both in person and online, creating a virtual infrastructure.”

7. “One Noodle at a Time in Tokyo”

“Combine New Yorkers’ love of pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers, throw in some Southern barbecue mania, and you’ve still only begun to approximate Tokyo’s obsession with ramen.”

8. “The Way We Learn”

“Along the way, Menand notes that most graduate students don’t earn Ph.D.’s, and that most Ph.D.’s don’t get tenure-track jobs: ‘There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs’ — graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations — who can teach introductory courses for a pittance.”

1. “Room Service”

“The exercise feels a little like a last gasp.”

2. “Movie and Book Explore Link Between Board and Bedroom”

Chess as a metaphor for sex may seem far-fetched, but it has been used before, as in a tension-laden scene between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair. What may seem even more far-fetched is the idea that there is a way to apply ideas about sex to improve chess skills, and vice versa. But Natalia Pogonina, who is No. 17 among women, and her husband are writing a book about just that. The book is titled Chess Kamasutra.

3. “Bob Noorda Is Dead at 82; Designer Took Modernism Underground”

“He and Mr. Vignelli set about standardizing the type family to make sure that the signs were cleaner and clearer; they settled on Helvetica, originally a Swiss design known for its sans serif economy and sterility, against a white background. Mr. Noorda worked on every detail, from typeface selection to color coding. He ‘had a very systematic mind,’ Mr. Vignelli said, adding that ‘his work was extremely civilized.’”

4. “Making Sense of the New Political Anger”

“Two different protests are under way. One, most visible on the left, is rooted in traditional populism that favors increased government. The other, on the right, springs from a purist strain in American politics that distrusts government altogether.”

5. “The Book Club With Just One Member”

“The collective literary experience certainly has its benefits. Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. Social reading may even persuade you that you liked something you thought you didn’t. There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. ‘The pursuit of reading,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘is carried on by private people.’”

6. “Disaster Coverage Without Having to Roll Up the Sleeves”

“An odd thing happens in a disaster, and that is how it bares the underlying language of clothes. It underscores the information that clothes traditionally transmit about where people stand in society, who they are and what tasks they perform.”

7. “This Article Is Not Yet Rated”

“Social scientists doggedly pursue evidence of correlations between on- and off-screen behavior, while some commentators insist that no such connections could possibly exist. The rest of us know perfectly well that we don’t play with anvils and dynamite just because we see Wile E. Coyote do it, though perhaps those Looney Tunes are cautionary tales. But we also can acknowledge that our actions, our fantasies and the pictures we consume are not all that far apart. And it is for precisely this reason — in recognition of the unique and dazzling impact of an art form that is also a mass medium compounded of big pictures and good-looking people — that movies have always attracted the attention of censors.”

8. “36 Hours in Mexico City”

“The time to visit this megacity — about 20 million people live in the metropolitan area — has rarely been better.”

9. “One Thing After Another”

“Gawande, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer at The New Yorker, makes the case that checklists can help us manage the extreme complexity of the modern world.”

10. “Capitalist Chameleon”

“In viewing capitalism as an extension of a culture unique to a particular time and place, Appleby is understandably contemptuous of those who posit, in the spirit of Adam Smith, that capitalism was a natural outgrowth of human nature. She is equally scornful of those who believe that its emergence was in any way inevitable or inexorable.”

11. “Our Boredom, Ourselves”

“A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.”

12. “Speech Therapy”

“Cultivating and stylizing accents in order to stand out as part of a subculture — to represent, in other words — may be as American as the melting pot.”

13. “James Patterson Inc.”

“There is no computer in Patterson’s office; he writes in longhand on a legal pad and gives the pages to his assistant to type up. Hanging above the round wooden table where he works is a photograph of President Clinton taken during the Monica Lewinsky scandal walking down the steps of Marine One with a copy of Patterson’s When the Wind Blows tucked under his arm. (Patterson’s popularity in Washington is apparently bipartisan: the wall of one of his downstairs bathrooms is plastered with fan mail from both George Bushes.) Neatly arranged on an adjacent L-shaped desk were 23 stacks of paper of varying heights, Patterson’s works in progress.”