Submitted For Your Perusal

1. Party of One

“I believe that traveling alone is the last great test of who you are in a world where everyone aches to be the same.”

2. On a College Waiting List? Sending Cookies Isn’t Going to Help

“Given the high stakes and the opaque proceedings, however, some students just cannot hold back.”

3. Brooklyn, the Remix: A Hip-Hop Tour

“For many, the word ‘Brooklyn’ now evokes artisanal cheese rather than rap artists. The disconnect between brownstone Brooklyn’s past and present is jarring in the places where rappers grew up and boasted about surviving shootouts, but where cupcakes now reign. If you look hard enough, the rougher past might still be visible under the more recently applied gloss.”

4. Hidden Threats to Young Athletes

“The No. 1 killer of young athletes is sudden cardiac arrest, typically brought on by a pre-existing, detectable condition that could have been treated. Another substantial yet hidden lethal threat is heat stroke, a condition considered completely preventable.”

5. The Long Shadow of Bad Credit in a Job Search

“Someone loses their job so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.”

6. The Posture Guru of Silicon Valley

“She believes that people suffer from pain and dysfunction because they have forgotten how to use their bodies. It’s not the act of sitting for long periods that causes us pain, she says, it’s the way we position ourselves.”

7. Sunday Dialogue: How Goods Are Produced

“Our willingness to buy garments sewn under dangerous conditions, chocolate made from cocoa picked by captive children, or cellphones and laptops containing ‘conflict minerals’ from Congo create the demand that underwrites these tragedies.”

8. The Hidden World Under Our Feet

“Forget the term ‘dumb as dirt.’ The complex soil ecosystem is highly evolved and sophisticated. It processes organic waste into soil. It filters and cleans much of the water we drink and the air we breathe by retaining dust and pathogens. It plays a large role in how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. Soil, with all of its organic matter, is second to the oceans as the largest carbon repository on the planet. Annual plowing, erosion and other mismanagement releases carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, and exacerbates climate change.”

9. Romantic Triangle: Star, Director, City

“It is a deeply romantic film with no real romance at its center, a love letter to a city that is depicted, at times, as anything but lovable.”

10. A Messy Look at the Family Mystery

“The voyeurs among us can be forgiven for finding the subject interesting — who doesn’t love juicy family secrets, especially if they aren’t our own? — but reviewers so far have embraced Ms. Polley’s vision.”

11. Early Salvos From ‘Bloody Sam’

“His frontier community is not an early bloom of civilization but rather a center of cruelty and hypocrisy; the Apaches the travelers will encounter on route are not Ford’s noble warriors but savages, pure and simple; the characters are driven not by the pioneer spirit but by vengefulness, bitterness and base profit.”

12. The Boy Toy’s Story

“Another reason he looks different: the chin implant is gone. Mr. Thorson had it removed in an attempt to reverse one of the creepier episodes in the history of plastic surgery. Early in their relationship, Liberace plucked an oil painting of himself from a room in his Las Vegas mansion and asked a visiting doctor to reshape Mr. Thorson’s face to look like Liberace’s as a young man. Liberace wanted a boy toy and a son. With sex and fatherhood disturbingly twined, Mr. Thorson wound up with a new chin, a nose job and enhanced cheekbones.”

13. A Line Between Sweet and Skimpy

“On the one hand, I’ve internalized all the messages that I should not criticize my daughters’ bodies, compliment them merely for their looks, or in any way stifle their emerging sexuality. On the other hand, I don’t want them to leave the house dressed as pole dancers.”

14. Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?

“The key to the appeal of ‘Scandal’ may be, simply, that it’s more fun than anything else on television.”

15. The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

“Even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.”

16. Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?

“We live in a country, and an age, with extraordinary empathy for endangered species. We also live at a time when alarming numbers of protected animals are being shot in the head, cudgeled to death or worse.”

17. Casa Es Mi Cas

“Airbnb, for its part, might bill itself as a cheaper, roomier, warmer way to overnight — less deracinated than a hotel, but without the creaky-floorboard unease of a bed and breakfast — but the great unadvertised draw is the chance to spend time amid somebody else’s trappings.”

1. Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?

“The answer isn’t pretty.”

2. Latest Product From Tech Firms: An Immigration Bill

“The fact that technology lobbyists were given an unusual degree of access to the negotiators on the bill is entirely justified, he said.”

3. The Last Refuge From Scandal? Professorships

“The traditional path to an academic job is long and laborious: the solitude and penury of graduate study, the scramble for one of the few open positions in each field, the blood sport of competitive publishing. But while colleges have always courted accomplished public figures, a leap to the front of the class has now become a natural move for those who have suffered spectacular career flameouts.”

4. The Apprentices of a Digital Age

“They are not debating Chaucer; they are debating product features.”

5. Corporations Find a Friend in the Supreme Court

“The Roberts court is the most pro-business court since the mid-1930s.”

6. More Tech Magic, if You Can Afford It

“The experience of wearing Glass raised questions for me about the future of new technology and who gains access to it first – part of a much larger debate concerning the undercurrents of power and privilege that course through the Web.”

7. A Child’s Wild Kingdom

“Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with nonhumans.”

8. The Idled Young Americans

“The United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.”

9. What Health Insurance Doesn’t Do

“If the benefit of health insurance is mostly or exclusively financial, then shouldn’t health insurance policies work more like normal insurance? Fire, flood and car insurance exist to protect people against actual disasters, after all, not to pay for ordinary repairs. If the best evidence suggests that health insurance is most helpful in protecting people’s pocketbooks from similar disasters, and that more comprehensive coverage often just pays for doctor visits that don’t improve people’s actual health, then shouldn’t we be promoting catastrophic health coverage, rather than expanding Medicaid?”

10. Brain, Interrupted

“Tweet about this at your own risk.”

11. Beyond the Code of the Streets

“Even in victory, the distance between expectation and results is dizzying for both. The old code remains a part of you, and with it comes a particular strain of impostor syndrome. You have learned another language, but your accent betrays you. And there are times when you wonder if the real you is not here among the professionals, but out there in the streets.”

12. Blu-rays to Avoid Ultraviolet Rays

“One of the great pleasures of Hard Times is the way it romanticizes, just barely, the idea of living on a shoestring, of being secure enough in your own skin to know you don’t need much to live the way you want. Chaney drifts into the movie wearing a beat-up newsboy cap and toting a scruffy duffel bag and drifts out pretty much the same way, much to the awe of his temporary compatriots.”

13. Working Alone, Together

“This was supposed to be the age of the mobile (a k a nonexistent) office, with ‘solopreneurs’ telecommuting from home or the beach in elastic-waist pants. But many who work independently are discovering alienation lurking behind the home-office fantasy, and an increasing number are joining a new generation of co-working organizations.”

14. Urban Gardening: An Appleseed With Attitude

“In a city where an elite few fuss over $13 plates of escarole wedges, too many others eat at 98-cent stores and drive-throughs or go hungry altogether. Mr. Finley estimates that the City of Los Angeles owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20 Central Parks, with enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants. His radical fix is to take back that land and plant it, even if it’s the skinny strip between concrete and curb.”

15. Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I.

“Parents describe finding out things they had rather not have known. One quick glance at Instagram, and they may not want that lovely girl they welcomed at their weekend house several times last summer to return. You wouldn’t believe what that boy, the one who is a lifeguard at the town pool, said about a 12-year-old in her bikini. And who is rolling a spliff on the 14-year-old neighbor’s Tumblr?”

16. The Right Stance Can Be Reassuring

“Striking a commanding pose, whether you are in a sparkling gown or frayed jeans, can change how you perceive yourself, which ultimately influences how you are perceived by others.”

17. Go the Same Way, or Go the Wrong Way

“For the pop sociologists of the period after World War II, ‘crowd’ was a scare word, an impersonal entity that would extinguish your personality, spew contempt at your uniqueness, disable the operation of your individual instincts and judgment. Now the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has become an accepted platitude. ‘Peer pressure,’ far from being a pernicious influence, is something we seek out as we race from one review site to another. You might call this the Yelpification of culture. The goal and appeal of Yelp, and of countless similar companies, is to make everyone, regardless of income or social status, feel like a teenager trying to get into an exclusive private school that evening.”

18. Science Chronicle

“For this project, McLellan photographed 50 disassembled classics of mechanical and electronic design, with the components first arrayed in formal order and then in midair free fall.”

19. Face Value

“If your aim is to own the finest specimens in a category pursued by other wealthy collectors, insufficient scarcity will never be your problem.”

20. Basic Training

“While miniature war-gaming has never been able to claim a place in the mainstream, it has influenced almost everything we think of as gaming today.”

21. Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machin

“The Mountain View investors are the partners of Y Combinator, an organization that can be likened to a sleep-away camp for start-up companies. Y.C. holds two three-month sessions every year. During that time, campers, or founders, have regular meetings with each of Y.C.’s counselors, or partners, at which they receive technical advice, emotional support and, most critical, lessons on the art of the sale. There is no campus, only a nondescript office building in Mountain View – on Pioneer Way, around the corner from Easy Street.”

22. My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants

“I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.”

1. When One Man’s Game Is Also a Marauding Pest

“The pigs – ill-tempered eating machines weighing 200 pounds or more – roam city streets, collide with cars, root up cemeteries and provide plot lines for reality TV shows like Hog Hunters.”

2. A Bit of Writing, and Various States of Loll

“Being a writer, work is pretty much never-ending. You have to keep the hours of a Kwik-E-Mart. You always have to be available to your own work. Ideas don’t arrive with a 9-to-5 regularity, and I sometimes let them collect and on a weekend will answer them.”

3. How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers

“In all, Gild’s algorithm crunches thousands of bits of information in calculating around 300 larger variables about an individual: the sites where a person hangs out; the types of language, positive or negative, that he or she uses to describe technology of various kinds; self-reported skills on LinkedIn; the projects a person has worked on, and for how long; and, yes, where he or she went to school, in what major, and how that school was ranked that year by U.S. News & World Report.”

4. When Your Data Wanders to Places You’ve Never Been

“When consumers fill out warranty cards, enter sweepstakes, answer online surveys, agree to online privacy policies or sign up to receive e-mails from brands, they often don’t realize that certain details — linked to them by name or by customer ID code — may be passed along to other companies.”

5. Today’s Dream House May Not Be Tomorrow’s

“An ever-changing economy requires constant geographical repositioning.”

6. Diagnosing the Wrong Deficit

“I don’t doubt that many people do, in fact, have A.D.H.D.; I regularly diagnose and treat it in adults. But what if a substantial proportion of cases are really sleep disorders in disguise?”

7. No Rich Child Left Behind

In the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.”

8. Wikipedia’s Sexism

“It appeared that, gradually, over time, the volunteer editors who create the site had begun moving women, one by one, from the ‘American Novelists’ category to the ‘American Women Novelists’ subcategory.”

9. Whither Moral Courage?

“This new idea — that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people — is spreading fast.”

10. The Dark Side of Energy Independence

“America’s oil and gas bonanza will drive down global energy prices, undercutting the foundations of petrostates everywhere.”

11. The Art of the Hunt

“Collecting, at its highest levels, is more like hunting than shopping.”

12. In the Season of Marriage, a Question. Why Bother?

“Marriage has become a status symbol – a highly regarded marker of a successful personal life.”

13. The Adulterous Sins of Our Father Figures

“So what do you do when you discover you belong to a class of men you hate?”

14. He’s a Mess, and That Makes It Funny

“Mr. Maron’s comedy is made up of riffs rooted in the humor of his intense, searching character. His insights about politics and culture were never terribly original. He’s a good storyteller, but there are better ones. He has a resonant, scratchy voice and a playful theatricality, but what distinguishes him from other bluntly honest comics is the gravity of the questions he asks and the doggedness with which he pursues them.”

15. From Red Zone to Red Carpet

“The importance of self-branding has probably never been more powerful in sports, part of the legacy of Mark McCormack, the lawyer who founded the sports management powerhouse now known as IMG, and who — recognizing early the commercial capability of sports stars – encouraged his clients to think of themselves less as athletes than as potential endcaps at Walmart.”

16. Twitter Shows Its Rude Side

“If Twitter is an excellent shopping mall full of boutiques offering specialized news and wit and opinion, it is also a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain kind of white male rage.”

17. The Year of the Cat

“2013 is shaping up to be the Year of the Cat.”

18. Many Selves

“The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world.”

19. Out of the Oven…

“A life involving no home cooking, Pollan convincingly argues, is a life diminished. It’s not just that you probably eat food that’s of worse quality (in Pollan’s world, cooks seldom burn things or give their guests food poisoning). It’s also because the noncook suffers a loss of engagement ‘with the material world.’”

20. Contested State

“In 1860 Florida ranked last in the Union in its spending on education. It held the same position in 2010 as measured by the proportion of income devoted to schooling.”

21. Who Says New York Is Not Affordable?

“Highly paid, college-educated people are increasingly clustering in the college-graduate-dense, high-amenity cities where they get good deals on the stuff they like, while low-skilled people are increasingly flowing out to cheaper places with a worse quality of life.”

22. The Mind of a Con Man

“What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. ‘There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,’ he said. ‘Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.’”

23. The Problem With How We Treat Bipolar Disorder

“Despite having these feelings in my mid-30s, when my kids were 8, 5 and 3, I was thriving professionally: I had recently completed my Ph.D. in geography, had just finished co-teaching a semester at M.I.T. as a lecturer and was revising my dissertation on spec for a respected university press. Yet several nights a week, I drove to the reservoir near my home, sat under a tree and, as joggers and their dogs ran past, thought about ending it all. There was a gun shop on the way to my poetry group; I knew exactly where to go when the time came.”

24. Why Your Grandpa Is Cooler Than You

“So many modern sources of cultural credibility – the underground, with its exclusivity in the hard to find; the retro, with its crate-excavated nostalgia for some prelapsarian age of hip – have, in one way or another, been undermined or negated. To someone living out his 20s online, being 90 and, to an extent, immune to cultural trends might look like a last bastion of unmediated cool.”