Submitted For Your Perusal

1. “Whatever Happened to Mystery?”

“The world … no longer has any tolerance for — let alone fascination with — people who aren’t willing to publicize themselves.”

2. “As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out”

“Death, of course, is unavoidable, and so Facebook must find a way to integrate it into the social experience online.”

3. “The True Calling That Wasn’t”

“Education may well lead to internships, first jobs and, soon, experience and decent money in careers that seem unstoppable. Except for one thing: The work doesn’t feel like a true calling.”

4. “Creating Sabbath Peace Amid the Noise”

“Ms. Winner herself stopped shopping on Sunday a long time ago, and recently began keeping a sort of electronic Sabbath as well — she tries to stay off e-mail and to keep her cellphone turned off. She doesn’t eat out on Sunday, either, because she doesn’t want to benefit from what she considers the exploitation of the labor of the underpaid immigrants who staff the local restaurants.”

5. “Back to Work”

“Mad Men is a period piece that reverses the template. Historical dramas like The Tudors or John Adams sift through a remote, archaic culture to highlight the most familiar and contemporary concerns of historical characters. Mad Men wallows in the comfort of a recent and well-known past by way of characters who are always a little opaque and unknowable.”

6. “The Boss Unbound”

“Recent research on status and power suggests that brashness, entitlement and ego are essential components for any competent leader.”

7. “Born to Check Mail”

“We are wired by nature … to pay attention to new stimuli, thereby helping us to respond quickly to predators or to nab a potential meal.”

8. “Only Disconnect”

“In my quest for calm, I have a surprising ally. As far as I’m concerned, American Telephone & Telegraph has done more for the art of reading and introspection than all the Kindles and Nooks ever invented. Because up in the exalted summer greenery of the mid-Hudson Valley, completing an AT&T call is like driving a Trabant from New York to Los Angeles: technically feasible but not really going to happen.”

9. “When Funny Goes Viral”

“Wouldn’t it be funny and weird to create an event about things on the Internet that are funny and weird?”

1. “Until Cryonics Do Us Part”

“Neither Peggy nor her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen.”

2. “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot”

“The most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.”

3. “Factory Efficiency Comes to the Hospital”

“The main goals of the approach, known as kaizen, are to reduce waste and to increase value for customers through continuous small improvements.”

4. “Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality”

“Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found.”

5. “Online, We Pay With Our Time Spent Searching”

“As search becomes faster and smarter, it’s as if the Internet becomes a high-speed moving sidewalk whisking everyone to free loaves of bread. Paying for the search becomes irrelevant as the time spent searching becomes trivial.”

6. “Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path”

“‘It was weird. I feel like she acts 25. She looks so old. She is too old for herself.’”

7. “They Grow Up So Quickly, Don’t They?”

“The implication is that the younger set is doing better than their solipsistic, dysfunctional elders.”

8. “Hayek: The Back Story”

“The Road to Serfdom has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.”

9. “Sex and the Single Man”

“I make love a couple of times a week, and I take the Viagra when I’m going to be making love.”

10. “J. Crew Helps Preppy Go Euro”

“The stateside European, in J. Crew’s imagining, wears all our usual American stuff — shorts, T-shirts, cargo pants, polo shirts — but has no use whatsoever for the simplicity and androgyny that used to be hallmarks of preppy.”

11. “When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?”

“In ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ the M.C. Big Bank Hank raps, ‘I’m gonna rock the mic till you can’t resist,’ using what was then a novel sense of rock, defined by the O.E.D. as ‘to handle effectively and impressively; to use or wield effectively, esp. with style or self-assurance.’”

1. “America, Illustrated”

“It is true that his work, for the most part, does not acknowledge social hardships or injustice. It does not offer a sustained meditation on heartbreak or death. Yet why should it? Idealization has been a reputable tradition in art at least since the days when the Greeks put up the Parthenon, and Rockwell’s work is no more unrealistic than that of countless art-history legends, like Mondrian, whose geometric compositions exemplify an ideal of harmony and calm, or Watteau, who invented the genre of the fête galante. Rockwell perfected a style of painting that might be called the American Ideal. Instead of taking place in lush European gardens, his playful gatherings are in a diner on Main Street.”

2. “What Big Eyes You Have, Dear, but Are Those Contacts Risky?”

“The lenses give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea. Fame-seekers there called ‘ulzzang girls’ post cute but sexy head shots of themselves online, nearly always wearing circle lenses to accentuate their eyes. (‘Ulzzang’ means ‘best face’ in Korean, but it is also shorthand for ‘pretty.’)”

3. “The Man Behind the Dreamscape”

“‘It’s really, at its core, a big action heist movie.’”

4. “A Lone Figure, Standing Upright Amid the Cyclone”

“Keaton invited neither the audience’s identification, as Lloyd did, nor its sympathy, as Chaplin did. He presented a closed-off, self-sufficient figure, his emotions, if any, hidden behind his famous stone face.”

5. “A Rapper’s Long Battle to Go It Alone”

“Sir Lucious Left Foot has been largely finished since 2008, Big Boi said, but Jive never showed much enthusiasm for it. ‘They said, “This is a piece of art, and we don’t know what to do with it,”’ he said.”

6. “They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)”

“One of Ken Rogoff’s favorite economics jokes — yes, there are economics jokes — is ‘the one about the lamppost’: A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he’s doing. ‘I lost my keys in the park,’ says the drunk. ‘Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?’ asks the puzzled cop. ‘Because,’ says the drunk, ‘that’s where the light is.’”

7. “The Great Rupture”

“Two hundred and thirty-four years into an American experiment launched in the name of the common good, it often feels, to me on the road, as if a battle is underway for the nation’s identity, a jockeying over the values that will govern whatever follows the Great Recession.”

8. “Humanity’s Database”

“When a site becomes this big, this powerful, there are ramifications — personal, cultural, economic and political.”

9. “Singing the Poet Electric”

“Whitman — an abstemious man and, for all his geniality, a loner — would not, I think, have recognized himself as the patron of the ’60s. He was no good at ‘communality,’ living all his adult life in boardinghouses or alone. Although Williams calls him ‘compulsively gregarious,’ Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.”

10. “Ben Franklin Is a Big Fat Idiot”

“I was stunned to discover how many of Franklin’s axioms failed the acid test of validity and usefulness.”

11. “The Vuvuzela as Cultural Artifact”

“At an event notable for national grudges with intricate histories, playing out before an expected record worldwide audience, this simple, slightly silly, mass-produced noisemaker/instrument became a highly unlikely symbol of cultural meaning.”

12. “Mariano Rivera, King of the Closers”

“Life evolves toward increasing specialization.”

1. “Ac-shun! Now Brace for Impact”

“Good action is harder than it looks.”

2. “Golly, Beav, We’re Historic”

“There have perhaps been funnier sitcom scenes since, and certainly much louder, more frenetic ones. But has the craftsmanship — wonderfully believable brotherly chat as a foundation; sly incongruity laid on top — ever been bested? Doubtful.”

3. “In Documentary, Wall of Sound Meets Wall of Law”

“The film employs a greatest-hits collection of 21 Spector songs, played or performed in their entirety. And it does so without having obtained Mr. Spector’s written permission. Thus the film could become the latest flashpoint in the debate over what’s generally known as fair use, and copyright law. (Fair use refers to the right, under certain circumstances, like criticism, to use copyrighted material without permission. But the exact amount one can legally use remains a murky proposition.)”

4. “Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!)”

“The plentiful pop cultural references and anything-for-a-laugh attitude of Airplane! recalled early films by Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles) and Woody Allen (Bananas). But its velocity and density were new. Every scene was packed with surreal, often faintly metafictional sight gags (including a supporting turn by the N.B.A. giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a co-pilot who denies that he’s really Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a cameo by Ethel Merman playing a psychiatric patient who thinks he’s Ethel Merman). And the film proudly served up jokes so astoundingly corny that they somehow managed to circle around the bend and become hilarious. (‘Surely you can’t be serious.’ ‘I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley!’) At the same time Airplane! wasn’t just a collection of bits. The narrative hewed closely to that of Zero Hour!, and if you can factor out all the silliness — no small feat with a movie that segues from a Casablanca-inspired romantic flashback to a Saturday Night Fever-like dance number — what remains is a compact, even classical piece of filmmaking.”

5. “I’m Not a French Maid, I Just Play One on TV”

“For Ms. Munn, making peace with this past sometimes involves therapy, and sometimes it involves dressing up as fictional male lust objects like Princess Leia or Wonder Woman (as she does in photos in her memoir), simultaneously mocking and indulging fanboy fantasies.”

6. “The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus”

“The centers look like academic versions of business incubators.”

7. “Urban Lands of Opportunity”

“Over the past couple of decades, a new way of working and a new kind of workplace have evolved.”

8. “Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin”

“‘The paper book is dead,’ says the digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte.”

9. “Death by Gadget”

“An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.”

10. “Are Cells the New Cigarettes?”

“Just as parents now tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew that cigarettes and tanning were bad for you, those kids may grow up to tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone right next to your head and chat away for hours.”

11. “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class”

“To what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?”

12. “The Mysteries of Tobias Wong”

“In 2007, the soft-spoken (and stage shy) Mr. Wong sent Mr. Chorpash, the professor and friend, to the podium at a design conference to give an entire presentation pretending to be him — never mind that Mr. Chorpash is tall and Caucasian — while Mr. Wong sat amid baffled audience members, wearing a devilish smile.”

13. “Turn Right, My Love”

“The origin of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male aviators.”

14. “The Psychology of Bliss”

“In 2003, a German computer expert named Armin Meiwes advertised online for someone to kill and then eat. Incredibly, 200 people replied, and Meiwes chose a man named Bernd Brandes. One night, in Meiwes’s farmhouse, Brandes took some sleeping pills and drank some schnapps and was still awake when Meiwes cut off his penis, fried it in olive oil and offered him some to eat. Brandes then retreated to the bathtub, bleeding profusely. Meiwes stabbed him in the neck, chopped him up and stored him in the freezer. Over the next several weeks, he defrosted and sautéed 44 pounds of Brandes, eating him by candlelight with his best cutlery.”

15. “How HDTV Scrambles Beauty Standards”

“High def likes monochrome.”

16. “Where Do Gadgets Really Come From?”

“You might own a device made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard or Apple, for instance, but had you heard of Foxconn Technology before multiple suicides by workers became a big news story? Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China, with an estimated 400,000 employees, manufacture products for all three of those familiar tech names; the company has also reportedly made devices, equipment or components for Nintendo, Amazon, Cisco and others.”

1. “Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social”

“Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.”

2. “Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom”

“Fathers are now struggling just as much — and sometimes even more — than mothers in trying to fulfill their responsibilities at home and in the office.”

3. “A Night at the Electronics Factory”

“He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.”

4. “The Half-Life of Phones”

“There is something feverish in the rush to adoption, something almost obsessive in the way our desires are driven by these objects. The question is rarely ever, do I need a new phone? It is almost always, do I want one?”

5. “Reflections in the Facebook Mirror”

“How many times in life must we engage in self-description?”

6. “Affordable Boutique Hotels in New York City”

“Rooftop bars, rainfall showers and iPhone docks were everywhere.”

7. “Do I Contradict Myself?”

“Our protagonist is a bit of a disembodied brain, highly capable of poignancy but not exactly introspection or, as is welcome in memoirs, overwhelming indiscretion.”

8. “Inside the Box”

“Bissell was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind. Bissell sees video games with open eyes. His book is about the profoundly ambivalent experience of playing them — close readings (close playings?) mostly of big-budget action and science fiction titles for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. These are the games most likely to draw a disparaging remark from a United States senator or a newspaper film critic. Extra Lives is a celebration of why they matter, but it is also a jeremiad about ‘why they do not matter more.’”

9. “Surfin’ Safari”

“During the Persian Gulf war, surfers used to say, ‘If only Saddam surfed!’ The ‘civilizing mission’ of the American military has ended up planting surf boards on beaches around the globe just as the British left cricket bats behind. According to Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, ‘Charlie don’t surf.’”

10. “How Old Can a ‘Young Writer’ Be?”

“The emphasis on futurity misses an essential truth about fiction writers: They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young.”

11. “Dysregulation Nation”

“In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere.”

12. “The Real Marshall Mathers”

“I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.”

13. “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?”

“By the end of the day, the seven human contestants were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made references to Skynet, the computer system in the Terminator movies that achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed.”

1. “The Ahab Parallax”

“One of the great underlying themes of Moby-Dick, Mr. Delbanco observed, ‘is that people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.’”

2. “Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer”

“People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent.”

3. “Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday”

“Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.”

4. “The High Cost of Loving Your Phone”

“Some people may complain incessantly about their iPhone and AT&T’s service for it, but not that many are switching. And that’s just the way the companies have intended it.”

5. “The Glee Generation”

“We’re raising a generation of Broadway babies.”

6. “Lady Gaga Doesn’t Preach, Exactly”

“I like that she not only appreciates hats but understands the boundaries a hat and veil impose on other people.”

7. “The New Face of Hip-Hop”

“Biracial Jewish-Canadian former child actors don’t have a track record of success in the American rap industry.”

8. “Blockbuster 4: The Same, but Worse”

“Their persistence back there in the shadowy realms of collective memory testifies not only to the vexing ontological riddle that is Steve Guttenberg, but also — at least as profoundly — to a notable aspect of our deep human craving for narrative.”

9. “The Vanishing Mercury Class”

“It was basically a plain Ford, of course, but a little different, a little classier. Choosing a Mercury was a statement of measured individuality.”

10. “John Waters Looks Back”

“If H. L. Mencken was the Sage of Baltimore, Waters is, at least, the parsley. Just for fun, consider what these two share: impudence, contrariness, uproarious insults to bourgeois values that made them controversial, then fashionable, then had them prematurely posing for their native-son statues. That they’d have horrified each other is just your usual Balmer lagniappe.”

11. “My Backlogged Pages”

“Tired of buying bookshelves and anxious about the economic downturn, my wife recently instituted the First Law of Literary Thermodynamics, otherwise known as the conservation of libraries. No book can come into our household without another book leaving it. I am loath to give up any books. So I’ve been dipping more and more into my unread stock, which still numbers in the hundreds.”

12. “America’s Next Top Kill”

“I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.”

13. “Lifelong Earning”

“The nagging sense of needing to acquire new skills, all the time, is palpable. That anxiety dovetails with a self-improvement ethos that fills whole sections of bookstores, cross-matched with the various ways technology prods us to tabulate parodic amounts of personal-behavior data.”

14. “Pop-Up Stars”

“Many great American characters of the second half of the 20th century, from Holly Golightly to Jerry Maguire, are ‘real phonies’ …. What the real phony wants in his heart of hearts is to be like everyone else; his playing of parts, therefore, does not entail repressing another identity. Rather, it’s the expression of his deepest desires.”

15. “The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome”

“In his famous series of 1751 engravings, ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty,’ William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater.”

1. “John Wooden, Who Built Incomparable Dynasty at U.C.L.A., Dies at 99″

“Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read: ‘Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.’”

2. “Colleges Extend the Welcome Mat to Students’ Pets”

“Stephens joins a growing number of colleges putting out a welcome mat for pets. They include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the State University of New York at Canton, which allow cats in some dorm rooms; and Eckerd College in South Florida and Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, which set aside rooms for students with dogs or cats and others who love animals so much they just want to live near them.”

3. “The Most Popular Gym Is the City Itself”

“Its mild climate, the lack of parks in its more dense areas and the propensity here to treat fitness a bit like performance art combine to make Los Angeles a municipal force in the art of improvised exercise. From the wealthy neighborhoods of Brentwood, where a traffic median is used as a track, to tiny parks in low-income neighborhoods downtown, where picnic benches are used for bench presses, the city often looks like one giant outdoor gym.”

4. “Made to Order, $5,000 Antidote to a Casual Age”

“Not to sound egotistical, but there aren’t many people who do what I do.”

5. “A Baseball Natural Just Wanted to Be Normal”

“Griffey told me last year he has never once been drunk. At all times, he wants to be in control — of his body, of his environment — and he feared what could happen if he used.”

6. “We’ll Make You a Star (if the Web Agrees)”

“Shows on the network aren’t introduced on a hunch about a strong creative concept. Instead, Bravo begins by studying its audience’s lifestyle and preferences — what is the market need? — and then creates shows and stars that reflect them.”

7. “Filmed to a Pulp”

“Kubrick called The Killer Inside Me, which came out in 1952, ‘probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.’ The book is arguably Thompson’s best and embodies many of the difficulties entailed in translating his work to the screen. It’s the story of Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town, seemingly bland and ineffectual, who turns out to be a compulsive and heartless killer. So, to begin with, there are scenes of creepy violence, including a famous passage, describing the murder of a prostitute, that begins: ‘I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once.’”

8. “Un-Innocents Abroad: The Drubbing”

“The gravest of these sins in my unscientific survey are behavioral: the women act like ugly Americans and debase every aspect of Muslim culture they come in contact with. Also: they’re women.”

9. “Our Cluttered Minds”

“This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.”

10. “What We Miss”

“Our brains are physical systems and hence have finite resources. The real problem here — what Chabris and Simons call ‘the illusion of attention’ — is that we are often unaware of these limitations; we think that we see the world as it really is, but ‘our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness.’”

11. “The Freegan Establishment”

“As far as I could tell, the two driving philosophical forces at the Buffalo mansion were freeganism and hedonism. The freegans were making a statement and having a hell of a good time doing it. It was a social experiment worthy of Henry David Thoreau, a place buzzing with industry, self-reliance and eco-consciousness; but, at times, it was also a rollicking frat house. Mornings could be dead quiet when the freegans were sleeping off their hangovers.”

1. “Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill”

“Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.”

2. “The Hard Sell on Salt”

“You might be surprised by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

3. “Handmade Hoops Put the Clang Into New York Courts”

“Other cities, including those with their own share of contributions to basketball lore like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Newark, buy modern, factory-made rims. New York is among the few places, and possibly the only one, where municipal rims used at more than 700 public parks are still made by hand.”

4. “A Sidekick Adds Luster to a Star”

“When Kerr joined the Bulls in 1993, Jordan was on his baseball-playing sabbatical, returning to the team before the 1995 playoffs, where Chicago lost in the second round. Jordan, according to Kerr, was ‘a man possessed’ during training camp the following fall, lashing teammates verbally, jamming elbows into their chests. Kerr one day took offense, talked back and was promptly punched in the face.”

5. “YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile”

“This fall, YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded ‘decision points’ that invite abandonment. Viewers will be able to select channels, but the flow of programs, whether short or long, will be continuous.”

6. “Are 5,001 Friends One Too Many?”

“Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough.”

7. “Just Don’t Call It a Corset”

“Spanx for Men has been a huge retail hit.”

8. “In Ink on a Flyleaf, Forever Yours”

“If e-books end up largely replacing traditional books, where would the extra personality that comes with an inscription go?”

9. “Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead”

“‘So’ also echoes the creeping influence of science- and data-driven culture. It would have been unimaginable a few decades ago that ordinary people would quantify daily activities like eating, sex and sleeping, or that software would calculate what songs we will like. But in the algorithmic times that have come, ‘so’ conveys an algorithmic certitude. It suggests that there is a right answer, which the evidence dictates and which must not be contradicted. Among its synonyms, after all, are ‘consequently,’ ‘thus’ and ‘therefore.’”

10. “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader”

“All the e-books I’ve read have been ugly … though the texts have been wonderful. But I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books. The difference is important.”

11. “Noises Off”

“He questions why American culture in general seems to be on the loud side, examines ‘the historic relationship between noise and violence, between the arrogance of power and contempt for the weak.’ He happily cites other sources in generous footnotes, everyone from the music critic Alex Ross to the historian Emily Thompson, who was ‘undoubtedly correct in pointing to the concept of “noise pollution” as an outgrowth of the environmentalist mind-set that emerged in the 1970s.’”

12. “Wish You Were Here”

“Living in the closing years of the American century, struggling with his own impulses and appetites, Wallace developed a vision of a society whose pursuit of pleasure was shutting itself off from true feeling and experience.”

13. “Cool”

“What we think of as modern cool (‘Cool, man!’) does not come on the scene in a serious way until the early 1940s, in jazz circles — with the credit often given to the hipper-than-hip saxophonist Lester Young. It would take another decade for the slang word to hit the American mainstream, taking off among white teeny-boppers circa 1952.”

14. “Bare Necessity”

“FiveFingers signals an ideology, a defiant embrace of a naked message to, and about, Big Footwear: the emperor has shoes, but I refuse to buy them. It borders on a product-enabled subversive critique of a multibillion-dollar industry’s innovations. But that critique has its own critics, and it’s fair to at least wonder about the dissonance involved in the slogan ‘Run Barefoot, Wear FiveFingers.’ What does it mean when even going ‘barefoot’ requires a $100 object?”

15. “M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop”

“Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. ‘I kind of want to be an outsider,’ she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. ‘I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.’”

1. “The Death of the Open Web”

“People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the ‘open’ Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.”

2. “Families’ Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed”

“More than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived.”

3. “Golf, Business and Meatloaf”

“I do not drink coffee. I’ve never had a cup of coffee or a glass of alcohol in my life. I never liked it. I never liked the caffeine thing. I really don’t need anything to wake up.”

4. “A Guide to Complaints That Get Results”

“Techniques and stratagems for prevailing in consumer disputes.”

5. “Revisiting Main St., Rethinking the Myth”

“I find most of Exile good, but not great. (That era of Stones music, fantastic. The album, not so much.) I can’t see it as a masterpiece, not only because I distrust the idea of masterpieces, but because I especially don’t want one from the Stones, who make songs and albums like birds’ nests — collaborative tangles with delicate internal balances — and have a history of great triage work, assembling bits and pieces recorded over a long period. But Exile remains the preference of the most judicious Stones fans. Why? What is its essence?”

6. “A Fresh Look Back at Right Now”

“Time travel is part of the special allure of movies, and Breathless, precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then.”

8. “Science vs. Zealots, 1,500 Years Ago”

“‘The hot topic these days is Islamic fundamentalism,’ Ms. Weisz said recently over tea at an East Village restaurant near her home. ‘But in Agora, it’s the Christians who are the fundamentalists’ whose zealotry leads them to destroy one of the libraries of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest center of learning in the ancient world.”

9. “A Gamer’s World, but a Dramatist’s Sensibility”

“Everybody these days is talking about transmedia, but Jordan is the first guy to actually do it.”

1. “Metric Mania”

“Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.”

2. “Green Juice and Twitter Prayer”

“After yoga, I see a movie or something. I have a movie theater or I go to the movies. Michael Moore recommended one to me recently on Iraq, with Matt Damon. Green Zone. It was a thousand times better than The Hurt Locker. It was amazing. Everyone in the theater was going crazy.”

3. “If Plan B Fails, Go Through the Alphabet”

“I generally figure: Well, you didn’t work hard enough, and apparently you weren’t smart enough to figure out the system. That’s probably why you didn’t advance at your last job.”

4. “World’s Largest Social Network: The Open Web”

“The open Web has a strong claim to being more ‘social’ than does Facebook.”

5. “A First Year Steeped in Finance”

“Obama hasn’t received the public credit he deserves for engineering an economic turnaround while simultaneously effecting major social initiatives. Along with health care overhaul, Mr. Alter says, the accomplishments include ‘the biggest tax cuts for the middle class since Reagan, the biggest infrastructure bill’ since the interstate highway law, ‘the biggest education bill since Lyndon Johnson’s first federal aid to education, the biggest scientific and medical research investment in 40 years, and the biggest clean energy bill ever’ (all in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).”

6. “Sending a Message That You Don’t Care”

“Electronic devices lead to more incivility because of their powerful ability to claim our attention – no matter where we are or what we’re doing. No one likes to be snubbed, of course, but the offense can take on a new edge when the winner is a machine.”

7. “Tommy Hilfiger Replants His American Flag”

Mr. Hilfiger has always come across as a little bit of a square. In interviews, his answers often sound scripted, and his personal style – navy blazers and nautical stripes – and boyish face, almost the same at age 59, make him seem as if he is playing a role.

8. “Google Tells Sites for ‘Cougars’ to Go Prowl Elsewhere”

“Cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.”

9. “Plan B: Skip College”

“College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs.”

10. “I Can’t Eat That. I’m Allergic.”

“Doctors are diagnosing allergies where none exist and people are assuming that they have allergies when they do not.”

11. “My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst”

“Had I a mighty gun / I think I’d shoot the human race.”

12. “Letters: The Data-Driven Life”

“If databases require interpretation, it might be helpful to use them to change the way we think. Lev Manovich, at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of The Language of New Media, has written that if ‘the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics and ethics of this database.’”

13. “Valuing $0″

“A product of the gift sphere may be pure, but even a sharing economy depends on somebody’s wanting what’s being offered.”

14. “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us”

“Ideas like these, taking human idiosyncrasies into account, might revive an old technocratic hope: that society could be understood so perfectly that it might be improved.”

15. “Putting a Price on Words”

“Not to get too theoretical, but this is the problem that we keep coming to with this idea, which is that we want to be selling journalism, not sex.”