Submitted For Your Perusal

1. “Happy Days”

America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.

2. “Jay-Z’s Bid for King of the Hill”

“The Jay-Z/Sinatra link isn’t so far-fetched. Both grew up on the poor fringes of New York — Sinatra in Hoboken, Jay-Z in the Marcy projects in Brooklyn — and made A-number-one through mastery of craft, business smarts and exploitation of their own hyper-masculine poise. Theirs is the story of the bad boy made very, very good, who breezes stylishly through high society with an impossibly glamorous woman on his arm, yet never loses his street-smart edge.”

3. “Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies”

“As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking.”

4. “Ballet’s Mean Streets”

“Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on. One of those, for me, is The Red Shoes.”

5. “Fight Club Fight Goes On”

“Joseph Campbell has that great idea about mythologies, that a myth functions best when it’s transparent, when people see through the story to themselves.”

6. “Short Cuts”

“The résumé that led him to M*A*S*H included duty as an Army pilot during World War II; the better part of a decade spent grinding out industrial films in his native Kansas City, Mo.; and close to another 10 years shooting episodic television shows like Combat! and Bonanza. After his breakthrough — the movie Pauline Kael hyperbolized as ‘the best American war comedy since sound came in’ — Aljean Harmetz captured the contradiction neatly in The New York Times: ‘At 46, Robert Altman is Hollywood’s newest 26-year-old genius.’ But it’s hard waiting those extra 20 years for someone to call you a wunderkind. By then, the enfant terrible was no enfant (he had six of his own), but having accumulated half a lifetime’s worth of resentment about being locked out of the movie business, he was fully capable of living up to the second half of the label when things didn’t go his way.”

7. “The Critic’s Critic”

“Johnson, at 26, arrived in London without money and with only his more than considerable wit, learning, judgment and astonishing energy. He worked at literary odd jobs and only gradually raised himself out of Grub Street. Breakthrough commenced with A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), after which Johnson was famous enough to remain solvent, and sociable enough to keep himself from his terrible fear of solitude. He knew his balance to be perilous, and he feared madness.”

8. “Heavy Lifting”

“Wrestling isn’t fake. It’s predetermined. So what?”

9. “Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?”

“The Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.”

1. “Block-a-Thon”

“In 26.2 miles, I could have walked to Yankee Stadium and back. I could have walked to Lido Beach on Long Island or Linden, N.J., to Rye, N.Y. (gateway to Connecticut!), to Hackensack or Hasbrouck Heights or through the Lincoln Tunnel and across the Meadowlands to Ho-Ho-Kus. I chose, instead, to walk a marathon without ever being more than 416 feet from my home.”

2. “Surprise! He’s Thriving on Sunshine”

“He is also a workaholic and a perfectionist. When he first started out, he memorized all his songs before writing them down, as a test of their catchiness. Retreating, for him, means about four days without making music. He composes constantly, even on his honeymoon.”

3. “Animal Wrangling in Miniature”

“This may be his first animated film, but his fingerprints are everywhere, from the dollhouse cross sections to the funny-sad family dynamics to the belief that production design is intimately linked with character.”

4. “Cinematic Soul Mates”

“She is a muse for me in the sense that a muse is someone who makes you better than you are. I think I am a better director with her, because she believes that I am better than I am, and that blind faith gives me a lot of strength.”

5. “Dickens’s Victorian London Goes Digital”

“If you’ve been looking at my movies over the years, you’ll see that I edit less and less and less. And now I don’t have to edit at all! This is the logical extension of where I’ve been going.”

6. “Eternal Role: A-List Character Actor”

“The hallmark of Mr. Damon’s screen presence is his intelligent physicality, his ability to convey plot points and character psychology through subtle, precise shifts in facial expressions and body language, whether playing the tightly coiled Jason Bourne or the schlumpy Mark Whitacre in The Informant!”

7. “Gumshoes, Dubliners and Deneuve”

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Chaplin people and Keaton people.”

8. “Success Isn’t Only for the Extroverts”

“One day, something clicked for me. I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality assessment, as part of a team-building program at work. To my surprise, I discovered that I was an introvert — and that this wasn’t a handicap or a disorder, but just an aspect of my personality with its own strengths and challenges.”

9. “Good Dog, Smart Dog”

“The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get ‘the idea of being a dog’ by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.”

10. “Ayn Rand’s Revenge”

“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.”

1. “Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out”

“It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans … write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers. It begets large-scale disinhibition, in the form of flaming and the sharing of too much information. It is hugely prone to being mis­interpreted, and when correspondents have a difference of opinion, it usually makes matters worse. It creates a lot of busywork. It is responsible for the emoticon.”

2. “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say”

“The president … is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a ‘big rambunctious dog’ over a ‘girlie dog’ and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.”

3. “How High Will Real-Time Search Fly?”

“As major events unfold, Twitter, Facebook and other similar services are increasingly becoming the nation’s virtual water coolers. They spread information quickly, sometimes before the mass media do, and their ricocheting bursts of text and links become an instant record of Americans’ collective preoccupations.”

4. “On the Way to the N.F.L. Draft, a Year of Fulfillment in England”

“Worried that Rhodes scholars would be stuffy, Rolle knew by the time he landed in London that he would fit in. Neither he nor Saad drinks alcohol, so they have avoided the popular pub scene, opting instead for four-hour debates.”

5. “For Naismith, Basketball Was Only a Start”

“To this day, he remains the only coach in the university’s storied history in the sport with a losing career record. That might have been because in many of the games when he was supposed to be coaching, he also was working as the referee.”

6. “A Fan’s Signature Moment”

“The truth is that movie love is itself a form of collecting, and to live with the movies, to write and watch and read about them day after day, year after year, is a form of intense worship. The word fan is thought to come from the word fanatic, which derives from the Latin word fanaticus, ‘of a temple.’ Hollywood was built on such adoration, with ornate movie palaces that were shrines, and stars whose ethereal beauty made them virtual gods and goddesses.”

7. “Slaughterhouse Live”

“D.I.Y. butchering also allows self-conscious carnivores — who in the past were candidates for vegetarianism — to justify their flesh-laden dinners. By learning to slaughter and butcher, they say, they can honor their pigs and eat them, too. (Some vegans, however, are not amused.)”

8. “Now Starring at the Movies: Famous Dead Women”

“Since 2000, six of the best actress awards were for biographical performances, most of dead women.”

9. “Stop Your Search Engines”

“Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers.”

10. “Few Releases”

“Limited choice is evidently part of the appeal.”

11. “The Audacity of Precious”

“Precious is a stand-in for anyone — black, white, male, female — who has ever been devalued or underestimated.”