1. “One’s A Crowd”

“More people live alone than at any other time in history.”

2. “Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight”

“The influx affects more than just the bottom line – campus culture, too, is changing.”

3. “To Combat Modern Ills, Korea Looks to the Past”

“Centuries ago, carefully selected boys from across Korea lived secluded lives on this campus surrounded by pine trees, a creek and a pond. They read Confucian classics and recited poems about nature. They began and ended their days by visiting a shrine where Confucian sages were venerated. They bowed twice, head touching the floor, before answering their teacher’s questions on the day’s reading. In their heyday, more than 700 such academies dotted Korea, training applicants for the civil service and serving as guardians for the Confucianism that provided the ruling ideology of the Yi dynasty (1392-1897).”

4. “You’ve Won a Badge (and Now We Know All About You)”

“For companies, the premise of gamification is that it engages people in the kind of reward-seeking behaviors that lead to increased brand loyalty, not to mention increased profits. By tracking the online activities of people who sign up for such programs, companies can also amass more detailed metrics about each user – the better to identify the most active customers.”

5. “When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots”

“What does it mean to treat human behavior as if everyone has a price?”

6. “The Death of the Cyberflâneur”

“Hardly anyone ‘surfs’ the Web anymore.”

7. “Should Personal Data Be Personal?”

“Personal data is valuable.”

8. “Facebook Is Using You”

“The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger – and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.”

9. “Is GPS All in Our Heads?”

“The more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.”

10. “Still Creating Otherworldly Adventures”

“Since the silent era the industry standard has been 24 frames a second. Peter Jackson is shooting The Hobbit at 48; James Cameron may well make Avatar 2 at 60. Mr. Trumbull is talking 120.”

11. “A Foot in the Door in Silicon Valley”

“In a land where the uniform – jeans, hoodies and flip-flops – is purposefully nonchalant, and where no one would be caught dead in a tie, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd. It’s like a secret handshake for those who have arrived, and for those who want to.”

12. “Open Marriage’s New 15 Minutes”

“Online culture brings new opportunities to engage with other partners outside the traditional bounds of monogamy, whether they are hookups on Craigslist or flirtatious ‘direct messages’ on Twitter.”

13. “Power Point”

“The tailored topcoat is reappearing on men interested in stylish dressing.”

14. “Back on the Case”

“For those still unfamiliar with Raylan Givens, he’s a United States marshal known for his ever-present cowboy hat and his quick draw. He also has good manners, is deferential toward women and demonstrates a certain reticence about speaking any more than is necessary. ‘I haven’t thought of anything worth saying,’ he tells one character, who replies: ‘You just did it again. You make one-line declarations. You sort of mope around, so to speak, while your mind is flicking lines at you.’”

15. “Three Books Explore the Reality Behind the World of ‘Downton Abbey’”

“Until ‘Downton Abbey,’ I never realized how many of my deepest desires involved ironing. True, it would also be nice to have a great deal of furtive sex with my social inferiors, preferably in crinolines. But at this point, I’d settle for a crisp newspaper.”

16. “One Man’s History”

“He argues that it is an intellectual’s duty to ‘speak truth to power’ no matter what, and there is no doubt of his willingness to endure withering castigation for his own views. In return, he skewers many people – Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Michael Mandelbaum, Judith Miller, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, myself included – for being ignorant at best and willing dupes of power at worst, never conceding that his opponents could be honestly wrong or that his own views might deserve more introspection.”

17. “Going to the Mats”

“The yogis of old, Broad notes, ‘were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms – even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality.’ They read palms, interpreted dreams and sold charms; they promoted yoga as the way to sexual ecstasy (‘yoga,’ Broad tells us, means ‘union,’ and not just the spiritual kind).”

18. “Smoldering Subversive”

“At the current cultural moment, when women diet and exercise to achieve a boyish form, and don girdles – hiply re­baptized as Spanx – to heighten this effect, it’s jarring to see Taylor, with her nipped-in waist, straining bosom and generous hips, flirt and rage without apparent anxiety that she may be ‘bulging’ in both fleshly and emotive terms. Camille Paglia has called Taylor ‘prefeminist,’ believing that she expresses ‘woman’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm.’”

19. “Joe Eszterhas Sure Cleaned Up”

“At one of the early meetings, Adam Fogelson, Universal Pictures’ chairman, said to him, ‘Why do you want to do this story?’ Mel said, ‘Because I think I should.’ I liked that answer very much.”

20. “It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom … Right?”

“For nearly a decade, it turns out, the most accurate forecasts have come from the fringe. So it’s upsetting to learn that many of those same Cassandras now believe, for different reasons, that we are on the brink of another catastrophe that may be far worse.”

21. “The Kids Are More Than All Right”

“Today’s teenagers are growing increasingly conservative.”

22. “The NBA Is Missing Its Shots in China”

“When the N.B.A. revealed its ambitious plans for China, it was pursuing the logical next step to expand its already successful business there. But the logic of the Chinese state was very different.”

23. “Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the Comedy.”

“The paradox of the podcast explosion among comics is that it’s at once a minirenaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves – a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy.”

“Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away.”

2. “Private Snoops Find GPS Trail Legal to Follow”

“Sales of GPS trackers to private individuals may have already surpassed more than 100,000 per year, some experts believe. The marketing is just getting started.”

3. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand”

“It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby, ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ That warning seems to hang over these offices.”

4. “The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation”

“In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company.”

5. “The BlackBerry, Trying to Avoid the Hall of Fallen Giants”

“The road of progress is littered with the corpses of fallen titans.”

6. “Ritalin Gone Wrong”

“In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.”

7. “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?”

“If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a ‘morality pill’ — a drug that makes us more likely to help?”

8. “The Perils of ‘Bite Size’ Science”

“In recent years, a trend has emerged in the behavioral sciences toward shorter and more rapidly published journal articles. These articles are often only a third the length of a standard paper, often describe only a single study and tend to include smaller data sets. Shorter formats are promoted by many journals, and limits on article length are stringent — in many cases as low as 2,000 words. This shift is partly a result of the pressure that academics now feel to generate measurable output. According to the cold calculus of ‘publish or perish,’ in which success is often gauged by counting citations, three short articles can be preferable to a single longer one.”

9. “Cracking the Code in ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’”

“It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.”

10. “Why Men Always Tell You to See Movies”

“In one study conducted at Stanford two versions of the same video of a woman were presented to subjects: one had the low frequencies of the woman’s voice increased and the high frequencies reduced, the other vice versa. Consistently subjects perceived the deep voice to be smarter, more authoritative and more trustworthy.”

11. “Dissected Long Before Her Debut”

“Ms. Del Rey generates so much anger precisely because she does so little.”

12. “Final Reckonings, a Tuneful Fedora and Forgiveness”

“It’s probably not a good idea to do an autopsy on a living thing.”

13. “It’s Not Me, It’s You”

“Even though research shows that it is natural, and perhaps inevitable, for people to prune the weeds from their social groups as they move through adulthood, those who actually attempt to defriend in real life find that it often plays out like a divorce in miniature — a tangle of awkward exchanges, made-up excuses, hurt feelings and lingering ill will.”

14. “Hollywood Fixer Opens His Little Black Book”

“It is a lurid, no-detail-too-excruciating account of a sexual Zelig who (if you believe him) trawled an X-rated underworld for over three decades without getting caught.”

15. “The Dangers of Sharing”

“What if most people are willing to surrender their privacy in exchange for coupons, free music and videos, or simple book recommendations? This seems to be Facebook’s preferred strategy, an instance in which the mere right to privacy — even if enshrined in a constitution — is not going to be enough. Someone also needs to make a powerful argument about the dangers of sacrificing that right.”

16. “The Influence of the Inquisition”

“Looking at the Inquisition, one sees the West crossing a threshold from one kind of world into another. Persecution acquired a modern platform — the advantages afforded by a growing web of standardized law, communications, administrative oversight and controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals. And in its higher dimensions it was animated not by greed or hope of gain or love of power, though these were never absent, but by the fervent conviction that all must subscribe to some ultimate truth.”

17. “Our Favorite Weapon”

“Reaching beneath his jacket, he quickly unholstered, unloaded and handed me his Glock 9 millimeter — this was in Kentucky, land of permissive ­concealed-carry laws. ‘I always carry this, and I always will.’”

18. “‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine”

“In 1962, when A Wrinkle in Time, after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity.”

19. “Is There Anything Marc Newson Hasn’t Designed?”

“Newson’s career as arguably the most influential industrial designer of his generation and the leading exponent of the so-called design-art movement may stand as much on the quasi-­moral power of design to affirm the social virtues of wit, proportion, elegance and simplicity, as on his obsession with futuristic forms and modernist aesthetics. Not that he has any overt agenda as a design evangelist. His motivation, apart from the business of it all, is the spirit of personal discovery, not civic edification. Each project is a fresh encounter with the material world.”

20. “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg”

“We’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.”

“The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: ‘old literacy’ refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; ‘new literacy’ stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.”

2. “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

3. “True to His Abstraction”

“Ellsworth has been fearless in his commitment to the limitless possibilities of abstraction.”

4. “The Energy of New York Still Seduces Jackson”

“Jackson does meditate, but a sign on his desk reads: ‘There are no Zen masters. There is only Zen.’”

5. “A Clash of Media Worlds (and Generations)”

“Technology types don’t see this as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. They see it as a battle between old and new.”

6. “A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included)”

“Here are four principles of tax reform that most of those economists would endorse.”

7. “Her Key to Efficiency: Arrive Late, Leave Early”

“As an academic, I’m lucky: I can come and go as I please as long as I keep publishing my work. I wish that there were a way to extend this flexibility to more men and women.”

8. “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”

“I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.”

9. “Why World War I Resonates”

“Imagine an officer in the United States Army – in his 50s, say – on the Argonne front in 1918. As a young soldier he could conceivably have fought, 30 years earlier, in the last of the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 1880s. Yet now he stands surveying a different world. The tactics were 19th century – advance on the enemy. But the enemy had weapons of mass destruction – the battlefield was dominated by tanks, machine guns, howitzers, aircraft and poisonous gas. Some 117,000 American servicemen died in the 19 months of United States participation in World War I – more than twice as many as in Vietnam, nearly 20 times as many as in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

10. “Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes”

“Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.”

11. “How Americans Have Reshaped Language”

“Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people ‘dogs,’ ‘rogues’ and even ‘queens’ (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled ‘poopes’ (‘dolts’).”

12. “Guidebooks to Babylon”

“There is no more vivid means of evoking the shadowy back streets, raucous taverns and perfumed boudoirs of a vanished city than to pore over a prostitute directory’s brittle, yellowed pages.”

13. “Renaissance Man”

“For two and a half years, Mr. Gleick, a sophomore majoring in bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted an hour a day to learning something new. His rule: It can’t be related to schoolwork, or merely reading a novel.”

14. “David Helfand’s New Quest”

“Quest has no departments, no tenure and no classes larger than 20. It uses the block system, in which students take one course at a time for a month. Students get a grade, plus a faculty assessment of whether they are ‘contributing to, and benefiting from, the intellectual life of the classroom.’ And students spend their last two years focused on a single question of their choosing.”

15. “A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond”

“Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life.”

16. “How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life”

“We’ve reached a point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose.”

17. “What You (Really) Need to Know”

“Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different?”

18. “One Percent Education”

“Just as the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans gobble up a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic resources and rejigger our institutions to funnel them benefits and power, so too do our educational 1 percent suck up a disproportionate share of academic opportunities, and threaten to reconfigure academic culture so that it both mimics and serves their values.”

19. “A Mess on the Ladder of Success”

“The U.S. has always been a remarkably itinerant country, but new data from the Census Bureau indicate that mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history.”

20. “The Hand-Held Highlighter”

“By the 1970s, highlighting was already overtaking underlining as the dominant way to refer back to something important, or just kind of important.”

21. “George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits”

“Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses.”

“Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence.”

2. “Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations”

“Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1% is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99% to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75% of the money, compared with 64% of the income in other households.”

3. “Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World”

“The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.”

4. “Spend, Spend, Spend. It’s the American Way.”

“We tend to think it’s OK for people to go into debt to buy gadgets or take vacations.”

5. “When You’re the Worker Who Can’t Say No”

“In situations like this, people often automatically say ‘yes’ out of fear.”

6. “It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or Is It?”

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. By comparison, mood disorders – depression and bipolar illness, primarily – affect 9.5 percent. That makes anxiety the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin, and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. Last spring, the drug research firm IMS Health released its annual report on pharmaceutical use in the United States. The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam – better known by its brand name, Xanax – was the top psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010.”

7. “Fruit Flies and Love”

“During fruit fly courtship, the male, lured by a full larder, extends one mandolin-like wing and serenades the female, then engages in a style of oral sexual foreplay many humans enjoy. Then he mounts her and copulates for 20 minutes or so. Here’s the sly part. The last male she has sex with will sire most of her many offspring, and she chooses the father only after lots of romps in the orchard or lab, based on his flair for courtship.”

8. “Mourning in a Digital Age”

“Old customs no longer apply, yet new ones have yet to materialize.”

9. “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings”

“She analyzed box-office hits and critically acclaimed movies on the American Film Institute’s favorites lists. She broke down their emotional components, isolated the elements of mood elevation and tested her findings against those of market researchers. She concluded: Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.”

10. “Renovate Renovate Baby. Need Help?”

“When we pull up to Lowe’s, he takes a VIP parking spot, which is to say he drives his SUV right up to the door and hops out. Mostly we’re hunting for decorative moldings to give the staircase a quick hit of faux dignity. After scavenging through the store, he finally finds a handful of light wood ones – the better to curve with the staircase – and scoops them up.”

11. “William Gibson’s Future Is Now”

“In Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel.”

12. “What It Means to Be Middle Aged”

“It began in 1918 when, Cohen reports, ‘a doctor at San Quentin prison … transplanted the testicles of an executed man into a senile 60-year-old inmate.’”

13. “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America”

“Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s ‘oversoul’ to the ‘overman.’ Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger,’ Emerson wrote, ‘In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.’ More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. ‘Life only avails,’ Emerson once wrote, ‘not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.’”

14. “My Berlin Airlift”

“‘Americans like e-books because they’re easier to buy.’ A performance artist said, ‘They’re also easier not to read.’”

15. “What Does Wall Street Do for You?”

“Wall Street’s core function is to perform a sort of financial alchemy, an incredibly complicated method of giving a lot of people what they want.”

16. “The Chinese-Takeout Container Is Uniquely American”

“The structure has come to represent the idea of Eastern cuisine in Western society even though this packaging is not used for food containment in Chinese culture.”

17. “‘Why Write Novels at All?’”

“The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer ‘How should novels be?’ but ‘Why write novels at all?’”

“Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship. And for both authors and readers, these changes may be unexpectedly salutary.”

3. “The Critics Rave … for Microsoft?”

“It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from Microsoft.”

4. “Sifting the Professional From the Personal”

“My Facebook friends are all my real friends.”

5. “Building the Team That Built Watson”

“Scientists, by their nature, can be solitary creatures conditioned to work and publish independently to build their reputations. While collaboration drives just about all scientific research, the idea of ‘publishing or perishing’ under one’s own name is alive and well.”

6. “Paved, but Still Alive”

“As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, ‘The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.’ Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers. What to do?”

7. “From the Cage to the Screen, With Fists Flying”

“The first thing you need to do is just immediately get back to work.”

8. “Wary of Energy Drinks in an Adrenaline Sport”

“We’re saying, ‘Do whatever you want, but you can drink water and be just as cool.’”

9. “Be It Resolved”

“People with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.”

10. “The Myth of Japan’s Failure”

“The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”

11. “Theater for Twits”

“The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has tweet seats from which patrons can carry on what organizers call ‘digital conversations’ during concerts. In Florida, the Palm Beach Opera set up a tweet section for a performance of Madama Butterfly. Last month, The Public Theater in New York said via Twitter: ‘We think we may be the first of the large theaters to do some Tweet Seats, don’t know about smaller theaters.’”

12. “Get a Midlife”

“The most recent research on middle age has looked at gains as well as deficits.”

13. “Return to a Darker Age”

“Artificial illumination has arguably been the greatest symbol of modern progress.”

14. “Alone Again, Naturally”

“Most men seem unable to live alone for longer than, say, at the outside … three months. Most single women I know really love their lives.”

15. “My Back Pages: Digital Diary Traces Memories”

“We are beginning to see ourselves not just from the inside, as an actor doing something on a daily basis, but from the outside — understanding what we look like to the world around us and developing a kind of hybrid identity.”

16. “Striking on the Modern Matchbook”

“By the 1940s, it was estimated that more than one million Americans had become phillumenists, or matchbook collectors. During World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had matchbooks bearing the words ‘I shall return’ dropped behind enemy lines in the Philippines.”

17. “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”

“Black has come to believe that ‘the vast majority of people’ should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.”

18. “How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?”

“There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it.”

“In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.”

2. “F.D.A. Is Finding Attention Drugs in Short Supply”

“Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.”

3. “In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay”

“I know they value me.”

4. “Apropos Appropriation”

“To look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.”

5. “Fugue for History and Memory”

“The Tree of Life is like a piece of music. Its sections are more like movements than the conventional ‘acts’ of a screenplay. It discloses its meanings through the layering and recasting of themes rather than the linear presentation of action. And it depends on the contrapuntal arrangement of contrasting ideas: time and eternity; past and present; masculine and feminine; innocence and experience.”

6. “In Pennsylvania, a Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget”

“Sister Barbara listened closely and then said, ‘What I hear you saying, Susan, is that you feel forsaken.’”

7. “Defining Words, Without the Arbiters”

“Automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations.”

8. “Your Recycled Resolutions Are a Boon for Business”

“Our collective failure to keep our resolutions represents an annuity of sorts for health clubs, weight-loss centers and other enterprises that make up what you might call the self-improvement industry. It’s an industry that thrives on our failure to change: recidivism is good for the bottom line.”

9. “The Year of the Multitaskers’ Revenge”

“As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.”

10. “Bob Parsons Doesn’t Do Subtle”

“I made $5 million that year, and I went ahead and had my ear pierced. And anytime something good happened, I would get a bigger diamond. The problem now, brother, is I’m running out of ear.”

11. “The Fat Trap”

“For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.”

12. “Let’s Start Paying College Athletes”

“This glaring, and increasingly untenable, discrepancy between what football and basketball players get and what everyone else in their food chain reaps has led to two things. First, it has bred a deep cynicism among the athletes themselves. Players aren’t stupid. They look around and see jerseys with their names on them being sold in the bookstores. They see 100,000 people in the stands on a Saturday afternoon. During the season, they can end up putting in 50-hour weeks at their sports, and they learn early on not to take any course that might require real effort or interfere with the primary reason they are on campus: to play football or basketball. The N.C.A.A. can piously define them as students first, but the players know better. They know they are making money for the athletic department. The N.C.A.A.’s often-stated contention that it is protecting the players from ‘excessive commercialism’ is ludicrous; the only thing it’s protecting is everyone else’s revenue stream.”

13. “A View From the Margins”

“Sam Anderson, the magazine’s critic at large and resident marginalia obsessive, selects highlights from a year in reading – and scribbling.”

“A programmer’s need to explore, freely and openly, is powerful. That is what I and others like me understood the first time we opened The C Programming Language and were magnetically drawn into the world Dennis Ritchie created. We were closer to the machines, yes, but also interconnected. We had the sense of being asked to join a heady conversation in which what could be said was limited by only talent, energy and imagination.”

2. “The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible”

“A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man? Dante created his great image of divine intent, justice and grace as the architecture of time and being. Milton explored the ancient, and Calvinist, teaching that the first sin was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, and providential because it prepared the way for the world’s ultimate reconciliation to God. So his Satan is glorious, and the hell prepared for his minions is strikingly tolerable. What to say about Melville?”

3. “Before Recruiting in Ivy League, Applying Some Math”

“While the Academic Index, referred to as the A.I., is a routine part of life in an Ivy League athletic department, outside those offices, it is frequently treated like the most furtive of secret fraternity handshakes. The specifics on how the Academic Index is calculated or how it is evaluated from university to university are not made public. The formula for calculating individual A.I. numbers is not available on the league Web site or in any other official public forum – even if there are dozens of such calculators listed online (nearly all of them inaccurate).”

4. “Bourbon’s All-American Roar”

“Bourbon is one product America still makes better than anyone else.”

5. “Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition”

“Real leaders, wrote the novelist David Foster Wallace, are people who ‘help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.’”

6. “Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War”

“Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.”

7. “Is It Bigger Than a Breadbox?”

“No man wants to wear a watch smaller than a woman has on.”

8. “Challenging Hip-Hop’s Masculine Ideal”

“How long will it be until some blonde – or any white woman – rises to fame through hip-hop?”

9. “Rye Is Back, With Flavors of Americana”

“At the time of his death, in 1799, George Washington’s estate was the largest producer of whiskey in the country, turning out 11,000 gallons a year.”

10. “Why We Lie”

“Trivers calls deceit a ‘deep feature’ of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.”

11. “Paul Nelson: Bad Boy Rock Critic”

“The mythic American hero is a man, almost always womanless, who has somehow been trapped in that curious nether­world between comic innocence and tragic experience; unable or unwilling to make a choice, he can at best (or worst) embrace either adjective, neither noun. He has known happiness once, lost it, and now nothing will help.”

12. “The Enlightenment’s True Radicals”

“Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and ‘one substance’ materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body.”

13. “Their Noonday Demons, and Ours”

“These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction, ‘mind-wandering’ or ‘top-down processing deficit’) to the medical (A.D.H.D., hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps ‘acedia’ is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal – but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia – or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.”

14. “Nate Dogg, b. 1969″

“These days, singers drizzling R & B syrup over incongruous lyrics are a familiar, even hackneyed comedic premise. But Nate Dogg never seemed to be joking.”

“The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.”

2. “As Wars End, Young Veterans Return to Scant Jobs”

“In Afghanistan, Cpl. Clayton Rhoden earned about $2,500 a month jumping into helicopters to chase down improvised explosive devices or check out suspected bomb factories. Now he lives with his parents, sells his blood plasma for $80 a week.”

3. “Rules to Stop Pupil and Teacher From Getting Too Social Online”

“Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.”

4. “Reframing the Debate Over Using Phones Behind the Wheel”

“Distracted driving is like smoking.”

5. “The Price to Play Its Way”

“The United States churns out roughly 45,000 lawyers a year, but survey after survey finds enormous unmet need for legal services, particularly in low- and middle-income communities.”

6. “Making Science Leap From the Page”

“The pages have some pizazz: they are replete with punchy, interactive electronic features — from dynamic illustrations to short quizzes meant to involve students rather than letting them plod, glassy-eyed, from one section to the next. Audio and video clips are woven into the text.”

7. “Are We Not Man Enough?”

“Do we really want to feed a business culture that increasingly elevates cocksure confidence and pushiness above all else, especially if it filters into everyday life?”

8. “The Dismal Education”

“Learning about the shortcomings as well as the successes of free markets is at the heart of any good economics education, and students — especially those who are not destined to major in the field — deserve to hear both sides of the story.”

9. “Once a Star, Always a Star”

“The crucial but impossible-to-quantify factor of stardust was not included in the equation.”

10. “Friending the New York Scene”

“He favors Tom Ford suits and Dior jeans, though he lamented to this reporter that the pair he was wearing was too snug. And in 2005, Mr. Parker said he was booked in North Carolina on suspicion of cocaine possession when he was president of Facebook (no cocaine was found on him and he was never charged). But Mr. Parker is also a self-educated polymath who decided as a teenager to liberate himself from what he called ‘the shackles of conventionality’ and found himself at the forefront of two of technology’s most important trends: the digital distribution of entertainment, and social media.”

11. “Remember Me From Yesterday?”

“Social networking has robbed us of our nostalgia.”

12. “Old-Fashioned Glories in a Netflix Age”

“It is also an argument for cinema, for cinema as a constituent part of modern life, which means it’s also a way of telling the truth.”

13. “Riding Off Into Civilization’s Sunset”

“This eschatological mood seems the natural outgrowth of the ‘we’re all connected’ school of movies like Crash and Babel several years ago that anticipated the hyperconnectivity of the new social media. But it is one short step from ‘we’re all connected’ to Tom Lehrer’s grimly jolly fantasy of nuclear annihilation.”

14. “Peace While Traveling? Not Impossible.”

1. Accept the reality that most of what causes stress in travel is out of your control. In fact, you have much less control of things in general than you might like to believe.
2. Feeling rushed is one of the leading causes of stress. Go to airports and bus and train stations extra early. While others may be rushing frantically, you can be strolling leisurely.
3. Check in with yourself. Notice what you are feeling in a particular moment. If it’s annoyance, frustration or fatigue, don’t get all caught up in it. Don’t cling to the sensations.
4. Travel lightly. When I arrive at my destination for the holidays I announce to everyone, ‘I hope you like this sweater I’m wearing because you’re going to see it a lot.’ And mail rather than carry gifts. Even one shopping bag is a nuisance.
5. Those around you are doing their best. Offer a smile that says, ‘Yes, I know it’s difficult, but we’ll all get there.’ Perhaps a little later than scheduled, but you’ll get there. Let someone go ahead of you; it’s part of the holiday spirit.

15. “Hedy Lamarr’s World War II Adventure”

“The uniqueness of this story lie deeper themes that Rhodes touches upon: the gender biases against beautiful and intelligent women, the delicate interpersonal politics of scientific collaboration and, perhaps most important of all, the never-ending, implacable conflict between art and Mammon in American culture.”

16. From “The One-Page Magazine”

“Researchers at Harvard and Duke have found that creative thinkers are more likely to take unethical shortcuts for gain, possibly because their talents make them better at rationalizing bad behavior.”

17. “Michael Stipe Is Not Grumpy”

“I still get death threats about it from Beatles fans.”

18. “Four Minutes With The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

“‘The human brain wants to put things together; it wants to create a narrative.’ Their job is to facilitate that desire.”

19. “Grocery Shopping on Speed”

“What if, he wondered, one chair was placed on top of another? What if a basket was placed on top of each seat? What if it had wheels? The modern shopping cart was born.”

1. “An Earth Where the Droids Feel at Home”

“My first intention wasn’t to produce a series on Star Wars, but to photograph locations that are the makeup of our modernity: parking lots, peripheral zones, wastelands, forgotten places, of both beauty and ugliness, common and mad.”

2. “Two Romneys: Wealthy Man, Thrifty Habits”

“He is as cheap as it comes. And I think that carries over into everything he does.”

3. “Put It on My Marquee: I Just Watched Creepshow 2”

“In 1987, the Washington City Paper, a weekly newspaper, published the video rental records of Judge Robert H. Bork, who at the time was a nominee to the Supreme Court. One of the paper’s reporters had obtained the records from Potomac Video, a local rental store. Judge Bork’s choice of movies — he rented a number of classic feature films starring Cary Grant — may have seemed innocuous. But the disclosure of Judge Bork’s cultural consumption so alarmed Congress that it quickly passed a law giving individuals the power to consent to have their records shared.”

4. “Consultant Nation”

“Consulting, with its rapid succession of different assignments, is the prototypical industry for a job market in which instability and change appear to be the norm.”

5. “A Message on Every Arm”

“Seemingly democratic and certainly affordable (if not free), the tote might be the ideal carryall for these post-luxury recessionary times. The tote’s status is stealth. It telegraphs not money but access, ethics, culture.”

6. “For Anchorwomen, Family Is Part of the Job”

“A Fox news journalist promoting federal social programs?”

7. “Obsession, Reignited”

“When people come to me and say, ‘Why can’t you compromise?’ I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? The fact that we’re having this conversation means that we’ve compromised.’”

8. “The 10 Best Books of 2011″

“We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy.”

9. “The African-American Experience”

“The story is just so endlessly rich, and powerful, and poignant, and inspiring.”

10. “William F. Buckley Jr.: Right Man, Right Time”

“Not only was he the high priest of the modern American conservative movement and the founding editor in chief of its leading intellectual publication, National Review; he was also a gifted polemicist, best-selling novelist, sesquipedalian speaker, television star, political candidate, yachtsman, harpsichordist, wit and bon vivant.”

11. “Anarchist Anthropology”

“Graeber argues that once-prevalent relationships based on an incalculable sense of duty deteriorated as buying and selling became the basis of society and as money, previously a marker of favors owed, became valuable in its own right.”

12. “Everyone Speaks Text Message”

“For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking.”

13. “Riffs: The Year in Movies”

“Drive is the year’s best Batman adaptation.”

“Telecommunications, which in theory should bind us together, has often divided us in practice.”

2. “Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers”

“If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.”

3. “Know What You’re Protesting”

“Ironically, the topic of the lecture that the protesters chose to boycott was economic inequality.”

4. “Software That Listens for Lies”

“A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.”

5. “Don’t Just Sit There, Work Out at Your Desk”

“Every little bit helps.”

6. “Talking Face to Face Is So … Yesterday”

“Face time — or what used to be known as spending time with friends and family — is exhausting. Maybe that’s why we’re all so quick to abandon it. From grandfathers to tweenies, we’re all taking advantage of the ways in which we can avoid actually talking, much less seeing, one another — but still stay connected.”

7. “Riot Gear’s Evolution”

“Following the ‘Battle in Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, a more restrictive, preemptive and aggressive form of protest policing emerged at the 2003 protests in Miami over the Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

8. “The Junking of the Postal Service”

“Do Americans need Saturday mail delivery … or daily mail delivery … or a state-run postal service at all? Should mail be a guaranteed government service — like primary education — because it is essential to our well-being? Or has this once hallowed institution, like pay phones, outlived its utility?”

9. “Getting Far, Far Away From It All”

“The idea of going for more than an hour or two without checking some sort of device for a text or e-mail, never mind face-to-face interaction, is unfathomable to many people in the professional world Mr. Trippetti inhabits. But there are overworked, overcommitted professionals in big cities like New York who periodically do just that.”

10. “One More Thing Goes to the Web: Subway Ogling”

“To unsuspecting subjects, an admiring photographer is as likely to be checking e-mail as snapping a shutter.”

11. “The Cardboard Beginnings of the Credit Card”

“At first, the very notion spooked people.”

12. “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’”

“Oh, the deception! The rank insincerity! It’s just like the Devil in Mutton Chops to promise an orgiastic communion fit for the gods, only to deliver a gospel of ‘self-conceit so intensely intellectual,’ as Melville complained, ‘that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.’”

13. “Me and My Man Shed”

“There is a model clipper ship made entirely out of Budweiser cans — Palace’s favorite brew. There are black-and-white photographs of Muhammad Ali, John Wayne, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ernest Hemingway and a yellowing newspaper cutout of Joe Namath throwing a touchdown pass.”

14. “Viggo Talks and Talks”

“He never had Champagne dreams and caviar wishes, and much of what passes for ‘a celebrity lifestyle’ is, he thinks, rather banal and grim. ‘I don’t have lots of friends in the business, and the ones I do have are probably more like me, in that they’re not the kind of people to go places just so they can be seen. I see people doing that stuff and to me, it seems pathetic and ridiculous and kind of . . . well, humiliating. Life’s too short.’”

“It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot.”

2. “Out of Work, and Trying to Stay Positive”

“Every morning, Ms. Henry checks her e-mail alerts from the Web site CareerBuilder.com. Then it is on to Monster.com and Indeed.com. Since being laid off in June 2009, Ms. Henry said, she has sent out an average of 50 to 100 résumés a month – more than 2,000 in all. Last year, she had two interviews.”

3. “The Agony of Gift-Giving in a City That Has Seen It All”

“It is not merely that so many New Yorkers have a lot, but rather that so many have heard about way too much. Really, they have heard about everything, it seems, so that presenting the novel, the outré, the unforeseen, quickly becomes a challenge that feels insurmountable.”

4. “Naked Truth: New Sitcoms Are Reruns”

“It’s definitely the End of Comedy. As with Francis Fukuyama’s much-discussed essay ‘The End of History,’ that doesn’t mean there will be no more small-screen humor. It means that television comedy has ceased evolving.”

5. “Famous Minds, Keeping Secrets”

“J. Edgar and A Dangerous Method are movies about secrecy, about the psychological mechanism of repression, about the gap between the face that is presented to the world and the morass of desires, fears and contradictions that lurk behind that face. Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Cronenberg, in different ways, try to probe the obscure zones of their characters’ inner selves, to indicate truths about those people that cannot quite be seen or expressed in words.”

6. “Let’s See What’s Inside That Pretty Head”

“With the exception of Woody Allen movies and, God help us, The Prince of Tides, the psychological aberrations of men rarely attract the attention of serious filmmakers.”

7. “The Unbelievers”

“88 percent of African-Americans believe in God with absolute certainty.”

8. “Willpower: It’s in Your Head”

“When people believe that willpower is fixed and limited, their willpower is easily depleted. But when people believe that willpower is self-renewing – that when you work hard, you’re energized to work more; that when you’ve resisted one temptation, you can better resist the next one – then people successfully exert more willpower.”

9. “How It Went”

“A lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.”

10. “The Mind’s Ear”

“At the very moment the poor old book-object dissolves before our eyes, pecked to pieces by the angry birds of Kindle, iPad and the rest, we are renewing our primary contract with the author by offering him our ears.”

11. “Enthusiasms”

“The man writes a lot.”

12. “Two Brains Running”

“It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching.”

13. “A Good Run”

“Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”

14. “So Much Depends”

“To many, including me, he was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Unlike Eliot and Pound, two of his rivals in importance, he refused to be an expatriate. When Pound wrote him from overseas, urging Williams to leave America, Williams incorporated the advice into a brutally terse and powerful poem in praise of staying home. He spent virtually all his life in Rutherford, N.J., close to the American voices that enthralled him.”

15. “The Not-So-Invisible Empire”

“In the early 1920s, the K.K.K. became a national phenomenon, more popular north of the Mason-Dixon line than south of it. At its peak in 1924 there were probably 35,000 Klansmen in Detroit, about 55,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Ohio, 240,000 in Indiana and 260,000 in Pennsylvania: a veritable army of proud Anglo-Saxons kluxing in their local klaverns. Ten bucks a head for membership, another six and a half for those fine flowing robes.”

16. “What Muncie Read”

“Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles.”

17. “The Evolution of Fleece, From Scratchy to Snuggie”

“It completely changed the way the world dresses for cold weather.”

18. “Can the Bulldog Be Saved?”

“Most can’t have sex without help – they’re too short and stocky. Most can’t give birth on their own – their heads are too big. A breed that has trouble doing those two things is, by definition, in trouble.”

19. “Should We All Go Gluten-Free?”

“Even a healthy intestine does not completely break gluten down. For those with celiac disease, the undigested gluten essentially causes the body’s immune system to lash out at itself, leading to malabsorption, bloating and diarrhea – the classic gastrointestinal symptoms – but also, at times, joint pain, skin rashes and other problems.”

“For people of a certain technological proclivity, this has become the new multitasking: to live simultaneously in the physical world and in their smartphones, without missing out on either.”

2. “What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering”

“Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like ‘A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.’ So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job.”

3. “Kris Jenkins’s View of Life in the N.F.L. Trenches”

“NFL fans, people outside, they have no clue what goes on.”

4. “Drake Pushes Rap Toward the Gothic”

“No rapper has been as woman focused as Drake since LL Cool J, but seduction is barely a motif for him. He’s past that, on to disloyalty, miscommunication, manipulation. He lives in a world where complete trust isn’t possible and believes the only woman right for him is a scarred one.”

5. “Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?”

“Why aren’t there any good movies anymore?”

6. “Going Abroad, Staying Authentic” + “Answers to ‘Where on Earth to Eat?’”

“Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.”

7. “Headphones With Swagger (and Lots of Bass)”

“In terms of sound performance, they are among the worst you can buy.”

8. “For Job Hunters, Digital Merit Badges”

“The badges will not replace résumés or transcripts, but they may be a convenient supplement, putting the spotlight on skills that do not necessarily show up in traditional documents — highly specialized computer knowledge, say, or skills learned in the military, in online courses or in after-school programs at museums or libraries.”

9. “Distracted? It’s Time to Hit the Reset Button”

“He suggests visualizing a reset device in your brain and saying: ‘I need to press the reset button and get back on track.’ This takes the spotlight off the distraction and puts it on the redirection. ‘You are rewiring your brain,’ he says.”

10. “Are You a V.I.P.? Check Your Klout Score”

“In September, during a Fashion’s Night Out event in the upscale Miami neighborhood of Bal Harbour, guests decked out in Marc Jacobs and Herve Leger could not help but notice a separate velvet-roped V.I.P. area. There, a privileged few shared one denominator: each guest had accumulated a Klout score above 40.”

11. “Goodbye, Golden Years”

“Retirement seems out of the question for increasing numbers of Americans who are saddled with debt and whose savings evaporated during the recent bust. Today’s workers should expect to labor longer, and companies should expect to employ more older workers.”

12. “Download: Christo”

“Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Web sites — those words are not in my vocabulary. I never learned to drive. I do not know how to use a computer. I do not even like to talk on the telephone.”

13. “Secret Dread at Penn State”

“True masculinity, like true sportsmanship, contains other virtues, too: forthrightness, honesty, fair play, courage in difficult situations, readiness to acknowledge error, concern for the weak as well as admiration for the strong. In their handling of Mr. Sandusky, the leaders of Penn State’s legendary football program failed to display a single one of these qualities.”

14. “Poet-Bashing Police”

“I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved.”

15. “Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters”

“Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.”

16. “So You Think You Can Be a Morning Person?”

“For those who fantasize about greeting the dawn, there is hope. Sleep experts say that with a little discipline (well, actually, a lot of discipline), most people can reset their circadian clocks.”

17. “Teaching Good Sex”

“If kids are starting to use their bodies sexually, they should know about their potentialities.”

“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.”

2. “Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury”

“The downturn in the real estate market has presented an unusual housing opportunity for thousands of college students. Facing a shortage of dorm space, they are moving into hundreds of luxurious homes in overbuilt planned communities.”

3. “The Director of Sideways Sees His Life Go Forward”

“Mr. Payne comes across as meticulous. Proper. Patrician, even. His face and fingers are long and tapered; his frame is tall and, thanks to regular yoga, taut. ‘Shall’ pops up in his speech, as do unexpected, unusual words and allusions. With a new acquaintance he’s not loose or loquacious but rather dutifully courteous: Would you like a car tour of Omaha? A restaurant recommendation for dinner? Have you read the Delta in-flight magazine? You should, because there’s an Omaha article with useful information.”

4. “Music, Not Movies, But Still Exploring Places of Darkness”

“I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.”

5. “Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging”

“They developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual shareholder meeting.”

6. “Whatever Happened to Discipline and Hard Work?”

“The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often precisely not to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians.”

7. “Love, Lies and What They Learned”

“How and why do people fall in love?”

8. “Dirty Harry Meets Dirtier Edgar”

“Don’t I seem like the tender type? All this .44 Magnum stuff, it’s just an act.”

9. “In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks”

“Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own.”

10. “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?”

“What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of Selfishness.”

11. “The Subconscious Shelf”

“To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.”

12. “Werner Herzog Lives Dangerously”

“It’s exhilarating for a man to be shot at unsuccessfully.”

13. “My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists”

Daily Schedule
9:30: Reading.
10:00: Mathematics.
10:30: Science.
11:00: Yoga (with parents).
Tea break (with parents).
11:30: Drawing, painting.
12:30: Lunch.
1:30: Writing (Monday and Tuesday: Play of the week; Wednesday: Correspondence; Thursday and Friday: Writing and illustrating stories.)
2:30: History and geography.
3:00: Yoga.
6:30: Spanish.

14. “Confessions of a Tweeter”

“Instead of tweeting to reflect on my life, tweeting had become my life.”

“If you’re serious about breeding winners, you never smoke or drink near your crickets.”

2. “Tracking Caribou, Shooting Hoops, Winning Trophies”

“They have dominated much larger schools from across the state with sweet shooting, nimble ball-handling and a selfless, team-first approach that residents here say stems from the same shared resolve and cooperation it has taken for their people to survive for thousands of years in such a remote and often ruthless place.”

3. “Andy Rooney, a Cranky Voice of CBS, Dies at 92″

“I don’t like any music I can’t hum.”

4. “Writers’ New Form: Tweet-Up Comedy”

“As the service has gone from novel to necessary, performers and writers up and down the comedy food chain have taken to it. Though for most it’s simply another promotional tool letting followers know about a coming show or book release, many are making Twitter into a virtual workshop, whether they’re stand-ups testing bits and experimenting with improv or behind-the-scenes writers edging into the limelight.”

5. “Idle N.B.A. Leaves Void in Cities Like Portland”

“The lockout has started to pinch local businesses that depend on the teams, as well as city and state governments that rely on the tax revenue generated by players, teams and fans.”

6. “Tweets on Grad School”

“You know you’re in #gradschool when you are typing a paper and Word does not recognize many of the key words you are using (e.g. discoursal)”

7. “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)”

“Studies have found that roughly 40% of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60% when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included.”

8. “The China Conundrum”

“Once in the classroom, students with limited English labor to keep up with discussions. And though they’re excelling, struggling and failing at the same rate as their American counterparts, some professors say they have had to alter how they teach.”

9. “Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This”

“It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.”

10. “The Once and Future Way to Run”

“We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world.”

1. “Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work”

“Science fiction novels of a half-century ago dramatized conflicts between humans and robots, asking if people were controlling their technologies, or if the machines were actually in charge. A few decades later, with the digital revolution in juggernaut mode, the verdict is in. The robots have won. Although the automatons were supposedly going to free people by taking on life’s menial, repetitive tasks, frequently, technological innovation actually offloads such jobs onto human beings.”

2. “Easy to Use, or Steal, but Inching Out of Reach”

“The poignancy surrounding the current spate of iPhone thefts is that Apple products have always read as cooler than their rivals’ because their design suggests a gleaming world of innovation and opportunity, of capitalism behaving well — a world that seems ever diminishing, ever less accessible to the struggling and young.”

3. “Storing the Stuff of Dreams”

“Behind the mute facade of a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower lies an ingenious system of steel vaults traveling on rails. Within those armored containers, which have been in continuous use since the Jazz Age, are stored some of New York City’s most precious objects and, presumably, a good number of its darkest secrets.”

4. “The Genius of Jobs”

“The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will.”

5. “You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, F.B.I.”

“In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up.”

6. “Twitterology: A New Science?”

“Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze.”

7. “Like the Best Zombies, VHS Just Won’t Die”

“I enjoy the aesthetics of VHS. I like putting it in the VCR and rewinding and pausing and fast-forwarding. It’s an experience nobody gets to do anymore because they consider VHS dead.”

8. “Favorites of the Season, Cherished All Year”

“I’ve sometimes said that I’d never direct anything in which a character says, ‘Merry Christmas,’ unless she says it during an orgasm.”

9. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin”

“Avant-garde art movements generally take root in major cities. It helps to have a dense population of young artists competing for greatness. Perhaps that’s why it feels so surprising to stumble on Wright’s jolting modernism in the quiet countryside. Here, amid the emerald green fields, is Cubism (evoked in the jutting planes of his houses). Here is Surrealism (note his habit of turning a homely edge into a thing of curve and whimsy). Here are buildings whose forms must have once seemed as alien in this terrain as flying saucers.”

10. “Roaring at the Screen With Pauline Kael”

“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies.”

11. “Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself”

“In a drab fourth-floor classroom at Miami Dade, the two women, each in her late 40s, joined the 33 other students assembled — mostly women, mostly middle-aged and mostly creatively frustrated. At the front of the class, Barry wore an Emily Dickinson T-shirt, a red bandanna knotted atop her head. She was preparing to sing.”

12. “The Orchestral Maneuvers of John Maus”

“Apart from a keyboard and some recording gear stacked in a corner of the study, Maus’s spare cabin looks like the lair of a lonely grad student desperately trying to finish a dissertation on the concept of inoperative community. Which, in fact, it is.”

13. “Steve Jobs: Vampire. Bill Gates: Zombie.”

“These two approaches to being undead mirror two very different approaches to being alive. You’re either a vampire or a zombie, and it’s easy to tell which one.”

“As the modern world has perfected its ontic measures, our ability to measure ourselves ontologically seems to have diminished.”

2. “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute”

“Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.”

3. “A Grizzled Troubadour Dusts Off His Bowler”

“They say I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing.”

4. “Rescued by Design”

“The objects here tend to look rugged and sometimes embarrassingly simple, as in ‘Why hadn’t anyone come up with that idea before?’ Their beauty lies elsewhere: in providing economical, smart solutions to address the problems of millions of the world’s poorest people.”

5. “Raised on the Web, but Liking a Little Ink”

“Lately, it seems, the zine is enjoying something of a comeback among the Web-savvy, partly in reaction to the ubiquity of the Internet. Their creators say zines offer a respite from the endless onslaught of tweets, blog posts, I.M.’s, e-mail and other products of digital media.”

6. “The Paradox of the New Elite”

“One dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream. At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.”

7. “Will Dropouts Save America?”

“American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.”

8. “Happy Birthday iPod!”

“Lots of people use music for emotional regulation. It’s similar to the way people use drugs such as caffeine and alcohol: they play a certain kind of music to help get them going in the morning, another kind to unwind after work. Brain surgeons perform their most concentration-intensive procedures while music plays in the background.”

9. “A Man, a Bike and 4,100 Miles”

“This was an American journey by a New Yorker who became more American as he went along. By virtue of absorbing almost 4,000 miles of thrilling landscape, inch by inch, I learned more about topography and how it figures in the identities of thousands of localities and millions of Americans than I had ever understood.”

10. “A Little Imperfection For That Smile?”

“In Japan, a new fashion has women paying to have their straight teeth purposefully disarranged.”

11. “Staying Up Late at Museums”

“Ms. Howard, 45, had paid $55 to sleep on a gallery floor alongside 80 others who had brought their own pillows, blankets and toothbrushes for what the Rubin had advertised as a ‘Dream-Over.’ The Rubin even had ‘dream interpreters’ — psychologists and psychiatrists led by Edward Nersessian, a professor from Weill Cornell Medical College — to wake them in the morning and take notes on their dreams. Or, at least, what they could remember of them.”

12. “Extreme Museum: The Rigors of Contemplation”

“And among other unexpected consequences of restless exhibition attendance, how can I omit what I once thought of as Museum Mind? By Museum Mind, I did not mean some exalted state of consciousness in which Beauty and Truth coalesce. Museum Mind is what I had when I couldn’t really pay attention to da Vinci at the Louvre or Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. It is what inspired me to rush past dinosaur remains at the American Museum of Natural History or feel my eyes glaze over while gazing at Civil War battlefields. Museum Mind, once it hit, was difficult to dislodge.”

13. “The Design of Symbols”

“We see them in airports, hospitals and government buildings, in waiting rooms and bathrooms, on exits and entrances: schematic silhouettes of men, women and children. The graphic icons are characterized by a no-frills, geometric style that is immediately recognizable and decipherable wherever they’re found. But while the symbols are ubiquitous, few people know where they had their origins.”

14. “How to Read Moby-Dick”

“Melville challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task — ‘Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’s crater for an ink stand!’ — Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter’s worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention. Reporting the exact day and time of his writing in a parenthetical aside, he ‘pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition,’ the moment Philbrick identifies as his favorite in the novel. Melville may not have called this playfulness metafiction, but he defied strictures that shaped the work of his contemporaries, including that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick, calling it a “token of my admiration for his genius.”

15. “Dwight Macdonald’s War on Mediocrity”

“He liked the smell of napalm in the morning, and wore it like after-shave.”

16. “The Thrill of Defeat for Sports Fans”

“Sports are absurd.”

17. “Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence”

“We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives.”

18. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami”

“For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — ‘but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.’”

19. “Bad Times on Wall Street, Boom Times for Kevin Spacey”

“Spacey has always seemed uncannily in tune with the fluctuations of modern money culture. His crisp diction and creased, handsome-but-not-too-handsome face; his way of splitting the difference between smart and smug, sarcastic and sincere; and his unmistakably businesslike demeanor have made him an exemplary figure for a period that doesn’t quite know what to make of its relationship to greed.”

1. “Checking Out”

“On this page are images of a few items that I have pulled from the trash cans of various libraries. I have chosen these items not only because I am already a little nostalgic for them, but also because I know that their passing marks an important shift in the role and functions of the library.”

2. “Online Banking Keeps Customers on Hook for Fees”

“The technology locks you in and they’re keenly aware of it.”

3. “New Tool for Mountain Climbers: A Stopwatch”

“From the big walls of Yosemite to the peaks of the Alps, climbers are setting speed records as techniques develop and gear becomes lighter or is left behind in favor of a minimalist approach that leaves little margin for error. Many quick athletes say they are doing what climbers have always done — striving to reach the summit a bit faster or with purer style. But as stopwatches become as important as carabiners, others say focusing on speed runs counter to the ethos of climbing.”

4. “Chris Martin of Coldplay Asks: What Would Bruce Do?”

“‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he blurted, wearing a slightly stained ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ T-shirt and loudly colored sneakers, though he had no sunglasses, hat or any other means of celebrity disguise. But Mr. Martin was actually five minutes early.”

5. “Allen, Coen and May: 3 Wits, One Show”

“When a man is driving in a car and looks out the window and notices a woman with a great body, as he strains to check her face out, how does she know to keep turning so the back of her head is always toward him?”

6. “Mad About Her: Pauline Kael, Loved and Loathed”

“If she still casts a shadow it’s less because of her ideas, pugilistic writing style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews), and more because she was writing at a time when movies, their critics and, by extension, the mainstream media had a greater hold on American culture than they do now.”

7. “Of Parties, Prose and Football”

“Literature is one of the few things Mississippi can be proud of.”

8. “In His Shoes”

“If the first wave was an overexuberant expression of wealth, the next is of ostentatious restraint.”

9. “Is Race Reflected by Your Outfit?”

“The question was whether people wearing janitor attire would more likely be viewed as black. The answer: Yes.”

10. “A Tall Tale, but True: Men in Heels”

“‘I never leave the house with less than eight inches on my feet,’ he said cheerfully.”

11. “Going With Your Gut First, Then Your Heart”

“If you’re not adventurous about food, you’re probably not adventurous about other things.”

12. “A Genius of the Storefront, Too”

“Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”

13. “The Default Choice, So Hard to Resist”

“The role of defaults in steering decisions is by no means confined to the online world. For behavioral economists, psychologists and marketers, defaults are part of a rich field of study that explores ‘decision architecture’ — how a choice is presented or framed.”

14. “How Insults Spur Success”

“There’s nothing like a little ‘I’ll show ’em’ to incite ambition.”

15. “Is the Brain Good at What It Does?”

“Like many authors who embrace new ideas rather than build on what has come before, Davidson sets out to destroy the old beliefs, as if burning down a forest in order to plant new crops.”

16. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?”

“I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?”

17. “I Was an Under-Age Semiotician”

“During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting ‘under erasure’ the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, ‘I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.’ It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity.”

18. “Why Facebook Is After Your Kids”

“Facebook thinks it needs access to kids’ lives in order to continue to dominate its industry. The younger the child, the greater the opportunity to build brand loyalty that might transcend the next social-media trend. And crucially, signing up kids early can accustom them to ‘sharing’ with the big audiences that are at their small fingertips.”

19. “The Curious Case of Ryan Gosling”

“With the possible exception of James Franco, no actor of Gosling’s generation is better at self-awarely puncturing his own mythos in a way that somehow enhances that mythos — at existing inside the pop-entertainment sphere and remaining fully conscious of its paradoxes.”

20. “The 10 Percenter”

“I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?”

“One day in the late 1990s, Mr. Jobs and I were walking near his home in Palo Alto. Internet stocks were getting bubbly at the time, and Mr. Jobs spoke of the proliferation of start-ups, with so many young entrepreneurs focused on an ‘exit strategy,’ selling their companies for a quick and hefty profit. ‘It’s such a small ambition and sad really,’ Mr. Jobs said. ‘They should want to build something, something that lasts.’

2. “Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen” & “The Secrets of Government Killing”

“The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war.”

3. “Inflating the Software Report Card”

“School officials, confronted with a morass of complicated and sometimes conflicting research, often buy products based on personal impressions, marketing hype or faith in technology for its own sake.”

4. “Clamping Down on Rapid Trades in Stock Market”

“There is something unholy about them.”

5. “Al Davis, the Controversial and Combative Raiders Owner, Dies at 82” & “Davis Lived Up to the Label of Maverick Till His Death” & “A Genius in Silver and Black”

“Just win, baby!”

6. “Even in a Locker Room Apart, an Undeniable Leap of Progress”

“The most exceptional thing about Brianna Amat, who has become known as the Kicking Queen, is not her twin accomplishments as homecoming queen and place-kicker. It is that she feels accepted as a full member of the high school football team in Pinckney, Mich.”

7. “Inside Knowledge for All You Outsiders”

“There has always been a special appeal in narratives, whether in books, movies or television series, that claim to show us something about how the world works. The police procedural, the backstage drama and the heist picture, as well as the day-by-day campaign chronicle, are durable forms that cater to this appetite for exclusive knowledge, inviting the reader or viewer to learn something about how the professionals do it and to feel, vicariously, like one of them. It is not that you learn how to rob a bank or crack a case or swing a vote, but you gain access to a half-secret language and a body of artisanal lore that allows you to imagine that in the right circumstances you might be able to.”

8. “Hand-Drawn Homage to Classic Films”

“The movie poster is dead. Long live the movie poster.”

9. “Within Beats a Heart of Pure Melodrama”

“Here are a few examples of what might be called creative romantic problem solving from the annals of extreme storytelling.”

10. “Grilled Chicken, That Temperamental Star”

“Few outside the business know their names. But given the more than $4 billion in television air time bought by restaurant chains and food conglomerates each year, these directors arguably have some of the widest exposure of any commercial artists in the country. In a typical week, tens of millions of viewers see their work.”

11. “A Master’s Skill, or Just Luck?”

“Does earning top-level returns over, say, 20 or 25 years show that a manager is among the most skilled people in the field?”

12. “The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good”

“Yes, innovations like the iPad and Twitter have altered daily life. And, yes, companies have figured out how to produce just as many goods and services with fewer workers. But the country has not developed any major new industries that employ large and growing numbers of workers.”

13. “Redefining the Meaning of No. 1”

“Choosing metrics to measure our society is not a value-free process.”

14. “The Left Declares Its Independence”

“Occupy Wall Street emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline.”

15. “Every Movement Needs a Logo”

“What is a protest movement without a logo?”

16. “Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day”

“There is good news about this bad news, if you are a lover of the breed, because less visibility, especially in inspiring roles as public servants, is likely to mean less demand for the dogs. That means less reason to produce too many puppies, which is the best thing that can happen to any purebred dogs.”

17. “Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race”

“Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones.”

18. “My Muse Was an Apple Computer”

“Steve Jobs’s perfectionism made perfect sense to people like me: Of course, he sweated every detail; of course he drove others mad. He was a J. D. Salinger who, weirdly, knew computing.”

19. “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”

“The melancholy over Steve Jobs’s passing is not just about the loss of the inventor of so many products we enjoy. It is also about the loss of someone who personified so many of the leadership traits we know are missing from our national politics.”

20. “Up From Ugliness”

“When we think about what Jobs meant to turn-of-the-millennium America, this is the place to start: not just with the technical wizardry behind Macs and iPhones and iPads, but with the Apple founder’s eye for grace and style, and his recognition of the deep connection between beauty and civilization.”

21. “Is Violence History?”

“The central thesis of Better Angels is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.”

22. “Inside Bruce Jay Friedman’s Pulp Arcadia”

“Some writers seek immortality and end up scarred and bitter. Friedman sought regular paychecks and occasional furtive embraces and ended up with a table at Elaine’s.”

23. “Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote?”

“The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the ‘page.’”

“Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts? And if so, what convergence of historical, social and economic forces has been responsible for the emergence of this new type? Why does Super Person appear among us now?”

2. “When the Nurse Wants to Be Called ‘Doctor’”

“Dr. Roland Goertz, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, says that physicians are worried that losing control over ‘doctor,’ a word that has defined their profession for centuries, will be followed by the loss of control over the profession itself.”

3. “Coupon Sites Are a Great Deal, but Not Always to Merchants”

“Some entrepreneurs are questioning the entire premise of the industry.”

4. “Long-Secret Fallout Shelter Was a Cold War Camelot”

“Shelves are stocked with giant tins of waterless hand cleaner (today’s Purell), cans lined with lead that contained drinking water (no longer advisable), deodorant to clean clothes, petroleum jelly, castor oil and ample Army K-rations. Gas masks sat at the ready. An escape hatch lies at one end, just in case the Russians were coming.”

5. “Your Worst Nightmare? Not Anymore”

“Filmed in black-and-white, The Human Centipede 2 opens with the closing minutes of the first film, until the camera pulls back to reveal that we are watching the original movie on someone’s DVD player. Its owner, we learn, is a deranged parking-garage attendant named Martin (Mr. Harvey), a squat, uncommunicative man with googly eyes and a disturbing tendency to lick his fingers. Molested by his father, bullied by his mother and disregarded by the world, Martin sets about creating his own human centipede with victims he kidnaps.”

6. “A Trip to China Can Make a Guy Hate His iPhone”

“If we’re talking about him as an artist, I’d say that he completely lost track of his ideals.”

7. “Future Shock”

“Here is a survey of some other films set in very different near-futures.”

8. “A Detective Who Gazes Into the Abyss”

“Luther is the last truly weird detective standing.”

9. “Reading the Writing on the Envelope”

“In 1861, it was easy to decommission the Pony Express, a technologically obsolete, privately owned delivery service. A century and a half later, we have a delivery service whose raison d’être is rapidly vanishing before our eyes.”

10. “When Data Guys Triumph”

“At its heart, of course, Moneyball isn’t about baseball. It’s not even about statistics. Rather, it’s about challenging conventional wisdom with data.”

11. “The Freedom To Choose Your Pronoun”

“Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.”

12. “How Yoga Won the West”

“His prescription for life was simple, and perfectly American: ‘work and worship.’”

13. “How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?”

“The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines.”

14. “The Indomitable Will of Gustav Mahler”

“For all its professional, emotional and physical crises, Mahler’s life was exemplary for an artist who, no matter how loud the outside world might pound on the walls of his concentration, vigilantly maintained an unobstructed direct line to his creative self, keeping it uncorrupted and unblocked to the end.”

15. “The Almost-Lost Poem That Changed the World”

“It is a rich literary paradox: authors are embedded in history, yet they slip away; they time-travel.”

16. “The Origins of Religion, Beginning With the Big Bang”

“When Bellah says that his book could have been much longer — he leaves out Christianity, Islam, indeed every religious development of the last 2,000 years — there is no reason to doubt him. Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’”

17. “The Motivational-Speaker Smackdown”

“The prize: just a trophy and a title. No money.”

18. “What is the Food and Drink Issue?”

“Cooking changes lives in ways that eating never approaches. Cooking makes you care about nourishment, family meals, nutrition, pleasure, relaxation, skills, control, health, the environment, culture and the earth.”

19. “Mother Modern”

“The two most interesting things about Los Angeles are the domestic architecture and the ephemeral population.”

“Snooping, instead of being an antisocial activity, is actually prosocial. Our spaces are telling others what we’re like even when we’re not. These days, we need such boosts to communication, because as the demise of the bookshelf shows, our true selves are increasingly retreating from public display and disappearing inside our devices. We are becoming more invisible.”

2. “Stalking the Biggest Star in Hollywood: Its Sign”

“In a city where so many landmarks and historical remnants have been torn down and replaced, that sign is one of the few remaining tangible symbols of a center of glamour and celebrity that, in truth, is not quite as glamorous as it once was.”

3. “Mexico Turns to Social Media for Information and Survival”

“In Mexico, Twitter, Facebook and other tools are instead deployed for local survival.”

4. “Placing Islamic Art on a New Pedestal”

“Planning before work protects you from regret.”

5. “And Now a Word From the Director”

“Mr. Polanski belongs to a long line of liars, adulterers, sadists and slaves, wife beaters, rapists, miscellaneous miscreants and even murderers who helped make Hollywood great. Charlie Chaplin liked young girls so much that three of his four wives were teenagers when they wed. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer may have had more stars than there are in heaven, as it proudly crowed, but in the 1930s it also had an opium den on the lot and Christmastime orgies. Walt Disney … played Hollywood host to Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. In 1952 Elia Kazan gave up old colleagues to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then went off to direct a handful of movies about betrayal, including one about selling out your nearest and dearest: On the Waterfront. It’s a classic.”

6. “When Your Therapist Is Only a Click Away”

“There will be a group of true believers who will think that being in a room with a client is special and you can’t replicate that by remote involvement. But a lot of people, especially younger clinicians, will feel there is no basis for thinking this.”

7. “Alphabet Soup”

“First developed about 20 years ago to streamline conversation on chat platforms like Usenet and IRC and popularized on AOL instant messenger and Gmail chat, terms like LOL (laugh out loud), OMG (oh my God) and BTW (by the way) now seem to be popping up in real life (IRL).”

8. “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?”

“The fact is that most people can afford real food.”

9. “Download: Dan Fogelman”

“I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. They terrify me.”

10. “Now You See It, Soon You Won’t”

“In a simpler world, trending would be harmless, the equivalent of baseball fans checking batting averages on a daily basis. But in a media culture that cares nothing about the past or the future, it’s one more way of narrowing our attention spans — this time, to the 140-character limit of a Twitter communication. (I can’t bring myself to say ‘tweet.’)”

11. “Why Rent When You Can Nest?”

“In some ways our parents see ‘success’ and ‘independence’ as synonyms, though no such conflation exists for many immigrants.”

12. “The Post-Black Condition”

“What this malleability means, according to nearly all the 105 prominent African-Americans interviewed for this book, is a liberating pursuit of individuality.”

13. “The Roger Ebert Show”

“Ebert and I had a similar Catholic ­working-class upbringing, with the Lone Ranger and Lawrence Welk, and we share the same passions: old-school newspapering, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, tuna melts, Robert Mitch­um, the Latin Mass, film noir, used-book stores, hoarding.”

14. “The Less Than Heroic Christopher Columbus”

“He was a harbinger of genocide. He was a Christianizing messiah. He was a pitiless slave master. He was a lionhearted seaman, a rapacious plunderer, a masterly navigator, a Janus-faced schemer, a liberator of oppressed tribes, a delusional megalomaniac. In Columbus, Laurence Bergreen, the author of several biographies, allows scope for all these judgments. But Christopher Columbus was in the first place a terribly interesting man — brilliant, audacious, volatile, paranoid, narcissistic, ruthless and (in the end) deeply unhappy.”

15. “How Will We Fuel the Future?”

“For most of human history, the labor of men and animals was the sole source of energy, and that placed significant limits on how much energy we could use. Starting in the late 18th and early 19th century, humans harnessed the power of steam and coal to run machines, and the result was an explosion of material abundance. In 1957 Adm. Hyman Rickover, the great engineer who is known as the father of the nuclear Navy, calculated that a century earlier, in the early years of the industrial age, 94 percent of the world’s energy was provided by the labor of men and animals. Water and fossil fuels made up the remaining 6 percent. By the 1950s, those numbers had reversed, and coal, oil and natural gas supplied 93 percent of the world’s energy. Rickover pointed out that without this energy revolution, most of the material advances of the modern age would be impossible. A car, he said, uses the energy equivalent of the labor of 2,000 men — a jet plane that of 700,000 men.”

16. “When a Dictionary Could Outrage”

“Now all is legitimated under the rubric of pop culture.”

17. “Billy Beane of ‘Moneyball’ Has Given Up on His Own Hollywood Ending”

“The book arrived in 2003, a few years after Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, another book that valorizes unorthodox thinkers and offers the titillating prospect of new and radical ways to understand the inner workings of the world.”

18. “A Long Day at ‘The Office’ With Mindy Kaling”

“I could tell you who the line producer on ‘Saturday Night Live’ was when I was 12 years old.”

“For years, computers have been creeping ever nearer to our neurons. Thousands of people have become cyborgs, of a sort, for medical reasons: cochlear implants augment hearing and deep-brain stimulators treat Parkinson’s. But within the next decade, we are likely to see a new kind of implant, designed for healthy people who want to merge with machines.”

2. “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World”

“People with autism, whose unusual behaviors are believed to stem from variations in early brain development, typically disappear from public view after they leave school. As few as one in 10 hold even part-time jobs. Some live in state-supported group homes; even those who attend college often end up unemployed and isolated, living with parents.”

3. “A Heartthrob Finds His Tough-Guy Side”

“That’s what Ryan does. He walks around, and he brings magic. He makes everything better.”

4. “Call It Your Online Driver’s License”

“The whole thing is fraught with the potential for doing things wrong.”

5. “Male Models at the Line of Beauty”

“Fashion should turn to one of its own for guidance. It should ask itself: What would Oscar do?”

6. “Another Reason to Avoid His Friends”

“A man whose wife or girlfriend has greater contact with some of his good friends than he does is about 92 percent more likely to have erectile dysfunction than a man who is closer to all his friends than his partner is.”

7. “Autumn: Party Time Across the World”

“Throughout history, the first day of autumn has been considered a good time to take stock of the year’s successes and failures.”

8. “What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?”

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure. And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

9. “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell”

“There’s something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art.”

“As people harness their bodies to use more electronic devices in more places, they may unknowingly be putting themselves at a greater risk of injury.”

2. “Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games”

“Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry whose main contribution is to create amusing and sometimes antisocial entertainment.”

3. “Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS”

“A person who knows all of another’s travel can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

4. “No More Desk Potatoes?”

“The familiar and expensive format — host, monologue, band, couch, guests — so durable for more than 50 years, is threatened by oversaturation and technological revolution at the same time.”

5. “The Cult of Physicality”

“‘No’ is a complete sentence. I don’t need to give a reason.”

6. “Authentic? Get Real”

“Authenticity seems to be the value of the moment, rolling off the tongues of politicians, celebrities, Web gurus, college admissions advisers, reality television stars.”

7. “Where Fashion Gazes at Itself”

“Formerly a pileup of profanity-laced teenage ramblings and partly expressed emotions, at least to an outsider’s eye, Tumblr has become an image-driven platform of importance to fashion photographers — like Terry Richardson (who uses it mostly as a diary) — brands and bloggers, who have made it an integral part of their online lives.”

8. “A Relic of the ’70s Still Inspires”

“I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”

9. “On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial”

“What is happening on campuses today is without rival, in terms of commercializing everyday college life.”

10. “In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column”

“Will ‘robot journalists’ replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?”

11. “Download: Christian Louboutin”

“I don’t follow anything online. I am rather slow on that side.”

12. “The Trouble With Homework”

“How effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?”

13. “The Biographer’s New Best Friend”

“Newspapers are often described as the ‘first draft of history,’ and thanks to these new tools, biographers can tap them in ways that an earlier generation of scholars could only have dreamed of.”

14. “Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words”

“His range is extraordinary, both in breadth and in altitude. He is as self-­confident on the politics of Lebanon as on the ontology of the Harry Potter books. He can pivot from the court of Henry VIII to the Baader-Meinhof gang, then stoop to the question of whether fellatio is the quintessentially American sex act. He reviews the Ten Commandments, offering some thoughtful revisions. He wages war against euphemism — most vividly by having himself subjected to water­boarding, so that he can report with authority that it is not an ‘enhanced interrogation’ technique but unquestionably ‘torture.’”

15. “Whisker Rebellion”

“The shaggy hipster thing is wearing really thin. It’s the age of the man once again. Dudes are turning to quality.”

16. “Profile in Style: Scott Sternberg”

“That’s such a magazine question.”

17. “Mr. Rodgers’s Neighborhood”

“If destiny is biology, then I was born to be a musician.”

1. “I’m on Facebook. It’s Over.”

“The time suck wasn’t the biggest reason I avoided joining for so long. The biggest reason was that I didn’t know which me would join.”

2. “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores”

“Schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

3. “Hope, Fear and Insomnia: Journey of a Jobless Man”

“Some nights, he couldn’t sleep. Other times, he woke at 4 a.m., reached for his cellphone and played video games for an hour or two, until he grew so tired that the phone fell from his hand and he was dozing once again. It was hard to say exactly what caused the insomnia — anxiety about unpaid bills, fear of never finding another job, an internal time clock accustomed to working the night shift — but it was a problem he shared with many of his former co-workers.”

4. “Straw Dogs, Stirring Up Trouble Again”

“There are few more unnerving scenes in movies than the rape of Amy by her ex-boyfriend … and what makes it so memorably terrifying is the awful ambivalence it engenders in both the victim and the viewer — of either sex. Appallingly, Amy, who resists strongly at first, begins to feel some stirrings of pleasure as her old lover does his worst.”

5. “Choosing Cinematheque Over Cineplex”

“One way to trace the history of the movies is to look at the evolution of alternative cinemas — to consider, in other words, how an inventive approach to showing films can foster a new way of understanding them.”

6. “Jewels of Olmsted’s Unspoiled Midwest”

“Much attention is given to Olmsted’s creations on the Eastern Seaboard, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City, and the Emerald Necklace in Boston. But he is also responsible for public spaces elsewhere, most notably in the Midwest.”

7. “A Brand Keeps Its Cool (and Endures)”

“Can it be that sometimes anti-innovation, as it were, is the most innovative route of all?”

8. “Before Wal-Mart, There Was A.& P.”

“We want ‘everyday low prices,’ but we feel great affinity for small, local businesses and, as recent controversies about Wal-Mart opening stores in big cities attest, we are often hostile to the large enterprises that make such prices possible.”

9. “New York Was Calm as Irene Stormed Through”

“Time definitely slowed down.”

10. “Download: Matthew Ferguson”

“His principles are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago. The book reads like anything you’d find in the Harvard Business Review. Ford not only created an industry, he developed modern manufacturing. Through his constant push for efficiency he was able to charge less for his automobiles and pay his employees more. It was important to him for his employees to be able to afford the product.”

11. “The Limping Middle Class”

“Starting in the late 1970s, the middle class began to weaken. Although productivity continued to grow and the economy continued to expand, wages began flattening in the 1970s because new technologies — container ships, satellite communications, eventually computers and the Internet — started to undermine any American job that could be automated or done more cheaply abroad. The same technologies bestowed ever larger rewards on people who could use them to innovate and solve problems. Some were product entrepreneurs; a growing number were financial entrepreneurs. The pay of graduates of prestigious colleges and M.B.A. programs — the ‘talent’ who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street — soared.”

12. “One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities”

“The world’s richest places tend to be dense, with well-educated residents and a free-market-orientation.”

13. “Do Happier People Work Harder?”

“Work should ennoble, not kill, the human spirit.”

14. “Errol Morris Looks for the Truth in Photography”

“Believing Is Seeing, though perceptive about photography, is fundamentally concerned with something very different: epistemology. Morris is chiefly interested in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the truth — in both senses — lies.”

15. “Here’s Looking at You, Katydid”

“Male honeybee genitals explode after sex; wasps turn cockroaches into zombie incubators; male scorpionflies produce wads of saliva to feed their mates — a nuptial gift that distracts her front end while her hind end mates (the larger the gift, the longer the pairing).”

16. “From Scroll to Screen”

“The codex also came with a fringe benefit: It created a very different reading experience. With a codex, for the first time, you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them and bookmark them. You could skim if you were bored, and jump back to reread your favorite parts. It was the paper equivalent of random-access memory, and it must have been almost supernaturally empowering. With a scroll you could only trudge through texts the long way, linearly.”

17. “The Sugary Secret of Self-Control”

“Willpower consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose, has a limited capacity and operates by rules that scientists can reverse-engineer — and, crucially, that can find work-arounds for its own shortcomings.”

18. “The Fresh Prince of Cool Air”

“Derelict husbands seem to be the leading cause of AC failure.”

19. “Hugh Laurie Sings the Blues”

“I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.”

“The book should be in near-mint condition when I start reading it, but I am not obsessive about keeping it that way. On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans.”

2. “Gilded Traces of the Lives Qaddafis Led”

“At one farm, horses wandered by marble statues of lions, tigers and bears, and on a sun-baked day, reindeer grazed by the deck of an empty pool. At the home of one son, Saadi, there were signs of a life mundane in its seeming frustration. A man who drifted through stints as an athlete, soldier and Hollywood producer, Saadi kept the English-language self-help book Success Intelligence in his master bedroom.”

3. “The Changing Face of the Burning Man Festival”

“In 1986, a handful of passers-by gathered to watch a landscape gardener named Larry Harvey burn an 8-foot stick figure on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The event became a summer ritual. In 1990 it outgrew the beach; the following year it moved to the desert. After a freewheeling and anarchic period in the mid-’90s, Burning Man changed direction: It started selling tickets, giving rise to a small company to manage it all. Mr. Harvey, 63, is now the executive director of that company, Black Rock City L.L.C.”

4. “Reaping the Rewards 0f Risk-Taking”

“What other nations typically lack, Mr. Kao adds, is a social environment that encourages diversity, experimentation, risk-taking, and combining skills from many fields into products that he calls ‘recombinant mash-ups,’ like the iPhone, which redefined the smartphone category. ‘The culture of other countries doesn’t support the kind of innovation that Steve Jobs exemplifies, as America does,’ Mr. Kao says.”

5. “Animated or Real, Both Are Believable”

“We have the illusion we are looking at chimpanzees. They are remarkably convincing.”

6. “After Class, Skimpy Equality”

“Why has the pendulum swung back to a feeling that sexualization of women is fun and funny rather than insulting and uncomfortable? Why are so many women O.K. with that?”

7. “Oh, to Be Warm in Summer’s Heat”

“Why are airports, shops, offices and homes in the United States and elsewhere chilled to sweater-weather temperatures in summer when the temperature outside rises?”

8. “Ugly? You May Have a Case”

“Why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?”

9. “College Doesn’t Create Success”

“Before long, spending four years in a lecture hall with a hangover will be revealed as an antiquated debt-fueled luxury good.”

10. “Summer Cinema Worth Debating”

“This summer, by my count, three movies have been especially divisive, provoking strong and interesting schisms among critics and also among people who actually buy tickets — or so I surmise, having spent the past few months trawling Internet comment threads, sipping cocktails in civilian company and eavesdropping on the subway while pretending to play Angry Birds on my phone.”

11. “Their Soft and Not-So-Rowdy Ways”

“This shift in headgear is a stand-in for the continuing war for country’s masculine center, and for the intra-genre class politics that have been complicating country music for years but rarely more intensely than now, as the genre almost inexorably slides into soft rock.”

12. “A Virus Movie Determined to Get Real”

“In a weird way, the less you trump it up, the more unsettling it becomes.”

13. “The French Dylan. Also Beatty, Stern, Johnny Rotten…”

“He is best remembered in the United States, if at all, for Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, recorded in 1969 with his girlfriend, the British actress Jane Birkin. But in France he is a towering culture hero whose American equivalent is impossible to conjure: a chain-smoking, alcohol-fueled singer-songwriter with the musical importance of Bob Dylan, the literary reach of Leonard Cohen, a chain of romantic conquests to rival Warren Beatty’s and the smutty, provocative persona of Howard Stern.”

14. “Scrapbooking Big-Screen Memories”

“A movie theater can be a magical place, a portal; in the cold, quiet blackness anything is possible. That becomes clear as you pore through the Cinema Treasures site, cinematreasures.org, a riveting compendium of theaters, open or closed, from around the world that can be searched by name, city or ZIP code.”

15. “Casting Reality TV? It’s Now Difficult To Find Real People”

“The job of discovering charismatic but sincere subjects who can make for compelling television has grown much more complicated.”

“The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that ‘from the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.’”

2. “College Football’s Ugly Season, Facing Scandals of Every Stripe”

“It becomes a complicated issue, because so many of the decisions being made are about money. Yet the theme of the whole concept is not about money. It’s sort of a two-sided issue where you’re talking out of two sides of your mouth. You’re trying to make it about money, but you’re trying to make it not about money.”

3. “A Hollywood Anachronism, Serving Stars but Never Gossip”

“Hollywood people are remarkably susceptible to fantasy. The same people that make fantasy want it and need it.”

4. “Just Give Me the Right to Be Forgotten”

“As I looked into the matter, I discovered that I, as an American, did not actually have an automatic right to demand that a company erase personal information about me.”

5. “High-Tech Product, Low-Tech Pitch”

“Information technology products, like e-mail archivers and Web site security software, are increasingly being promoted on the radio.”

6. “Relationship Status: In a ‘Stayover’”

“It seems that emerging adults age 18 to 29 often spend three or four nights a week at the home of their partners on a long-term basis rather than move in together.”

7. “An Empty Regard”

“In the Second World War, everybody fought. Soldiers were not remote figures to most of us; they were us. Now, instead of sharing the burden, we sentimentalize it. It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them. This is also a form of service, I suppose: lip service.”

8. “Think You’re Smarter Than Animals? Maybe Not”

“A few recent research papers describe animal competence at social and cognitive tasks that humans often struggle with.”

9. “A Gift From the Musical Gods”

“It is a pure, mystifying gift. It cannot be taught, though silly how-to blog posts proliferate (‘Eight Keys to Instant Charisma’). Someone who has it will exude it, whether performing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ or Scarlatti, Mimi or Marguerite. Charisma is not earned with age; an artist is charismatic at 16 or 60. Rigorous training enhances and focuses it, but it cannot create it.”

10. “Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform”

“Teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, but mountains of data, going back decades, demonstrates that most of the variation in student performance is explained by nonschool factors: not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like.”

11. “‘Nasty School’ and Other Poems”

The Yesees said yes to anything
That anyone suggested.
The Noees said no to everything
Unless it was proven and tested.
So the Yesees all died of much too much
And the Noees all died of fright,
But somehow I think the Thinkforyourselfees
All came out all right.

12. “Are All of Our Leaders Mad?”

“‘Psychological moderation’ is not the prescription for greatness.”

13. “The Dollar-Store Economy”

“Perhaps this is all merely our grandparents’ Woolworth’s five-and-dime updated by inflation to a dollar and adapted, like any good weed, to distressed areas of the landscape. But a new and eroding reality in American life underwrites this growing market.”

14. “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?”

“No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.”

15. “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace”

“Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.”

16. “Drill, Bébé, Drill”

“I can look in someone’s mouth and know their life.”

17. “Sister Act”

“The very first inkling I ever had of this project came from watching a United Way commercial. And in the commercial there was a young African-American girl, probably 9 or 10 years old. She was running through a stereotypical litter-strewn urban ghetto. And there was a voice-over saying something like, ‘Every day, Kianna has to run past drug dealers on her way to school. We salute girls like Kianna. Run, Kianna, run.’ And my first thought was, Excuse me! Can we clean up Kianna’s neighborhood?”

“Photographs by Charlotte Dumas of privately owned dogs who were mobilized, with their owners, to search for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They are now retired.”

2. “With No More Cowboys Taking Vows, Monastery Quits the Cattle Business”

“They’re not cattlemen. They’re more interested in the intellectual stuff.”

3. “Working at Making the Most of Your Vacation”

“These days, because of technology, it’s very hard to disengage completely from the office during a vacation.”

4. “Two Titans Share the Seat of Power”

“Watch the Throne [is] perhaps the most ambitious and effortful late-career album hip-hop has ever seen.”

5. “Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow”

“By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.”

6. “How Crimes Have Changed”

“‘Who are you guys?’ Diamond asks, confounded by the idea of crime without personality, stripped of style and panache. The time of the independent operator is over, absorbed by a world of employees.”

7. “The Incredible, Inevitable Shrinking Album Cover”

“The digital revolution has already reduced record sales, and its impact is now being felt in packaging. Album covers appear to be growing simpler and less detailed than those in the past. The evolution reflects the way in which more and more fans will be staring at covers on their smartphones, iPads and other mobile devices, on which record jackets are now roughly the size of a postage stamp.”

8. “Maybe It’s Time for Plan C”

“In recent years, a wave of white-collar professionals has seized on a moribund job market, a swelling enthusiasm for all things artisanal and the growing sense that work should have meaning to cut ties with the corporate grind and chase second careers as chocolatiers, bed-and-breakfast proprietors and organic farmers.”

9. “Our Plugged-in Summer”

“During weekends this summer, I would pursue the opposite of an unplugged vacation: I would check screens whenever I could. Not in the service of work, but in the service of play. I would crowd-source new ideas for car games and YouTube my picnic recipes. I would test the prevailing wisdom that the Internet spoils all the fun.”

10. “The Elusive Big Idea”

“We are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.”

11. “Download: Anthony Bourdain”

“When you’re on the road 240 days a year, listening to something that makes you feel like you’re in a film makes it better.”

12. “The Mutual Fund Merry-Go-Round”

“Individual investors should take control of their financial destinies, educate themselves, avoid sales pitches and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, like those offered by Vanguard, which operates on a not-for-profit basis. (Even Morningstar concludes, in a remarkably frank study, that low costs do a better job of predicting superior performance than do the firm’s own five-star ratings.)”

13. “A Hacker Tells All”

“While he excelled at infiltrating computer systems from a keyboard and had a sharp memory for numbers, Ghost in the Wires really showcases another of Mitnick’s skills: social engineering, or what he describes as ‘the casual or calculated manipulation of people to influence them to do things they would not ordinarily do.’ By doing his research and impersonating authority figures over the phone or by e-mail, Mitnick found he could persuade just about anybody — programmers, technicians, even the nice lady at the Social Security Administration — to give him the things he wanted, like passwords, computer chips and personal information about F.B.I. informants on his tail.”

14. “Love, the Many-Splendored Emotion”

“A rat will grow up fat and sassy if well-­licked by its mother, nervous and underdeveloped if licked poorly or not at all.”

15. “Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe”

“Deutsch is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head.”

“The theorem itself can be stated simply. Beginning with a provisional hypothesis about the world (there are, of course, no other kinds), we assign to it an initial probability called the prior probability or simply the prior. After actively collecting or happening upon some potentially relevant evidence, we use Bayes’s theorem to recalculate the probability of the hypothesis in light of the new evidence. This revised probability is called the posterior probability or simply the posterior. Specifically Bayes’s theorem states (trumpets sound here) that the posterior probability of a hypothesis is equal to the product of (a) the prior probability of the hypothesis and (b) the conditional probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, divided by (c) the probability of the new evidence.”

2. “A Brazilian’s Comic Mania: Social Media”

“I’m a creature and creation of the Internet, and I’m very proud of that. The Internet made it possible for me to construct my career the way I wanted to.”

3. “So You Think You Can Judge Dance”

“What do professionals think of ‘So You Think You Can Dance’?”

4. “Robert Ryan’s Quiet Furies”

“A little prettier and he might have been one of the golden boys of the golden age. But there could be something a touch menacing about his face (something open and sweet too), which bunched as tight as a fist, and his towering height (he stood 6 foot 4) at times loomed like a threat. The rage boiled up in him so quickly. It made him seem dangerous.”

5. “Daring to Stumble on the Road to Discovery”

“Invention and discovery emanate from the ability to try seemingly wild possibilities; to feel comfortable being wrong before being right; to live in the world as a careful observer, open to different experiences; to play with ideas without prematurely judging oneself or others; to persist through difficulties; and to have a willingness to be misunderstood, sometimes for long periods, despite the conventional wisdom.”

6. “The Thrill of Boredom”

“Boredom deserves respect for the beneficial experience that it is.”

7. “When Data Disappears”

“We generate over 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year. By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything?”

8. “Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade”

“We can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist.”

9. “An Ex Blogs. Is it O.K. to Watch?”

“I was ashamed of my own prurient curiosity, but I was hooked. My ex wanted readers. He got one.”

10. “Teaching Kids How to Break Up Nicely”

“Should you delete pictures of your ex after splitting up? Is it O.K. to unfriend your last girlfriend if you can’t stop looking at her profile? And is it ever ethically defensible to change your relationship status to single without first notifying the person whose heart you’re crushing?”

11. “The Mad Scientist of Smut”

“His preservationist impulses, his hoarding of books and newspapers; that microscopic, slow-motion style, filling an instant with cascades of thought and remembrance; even his way of writing about sex … is still more about foreplay than climax — what are they but ways of arresting time, of preserving the moment and staving off the end?”

12. “The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter”

“The reason it works is that somebody is in charge.”

13. “My So-Called Adulthood”

“Many people’s first reaction is to cry ‘too soon!’ — a hopeless protest against the brute fact that we are now, 20 years later, as far in time from Nirvana as the grunge bands were from their retro inspirations like Black Sabbath. The fact that this feels like an eye blink only testifies to how the brain’s internal clock gums up with age, so that whole years now generate fewer novel memories than once might have been sparked by a single sweaty night in a mosh pit. Remember: Most kids who entered college this year weren’t even born when grunge broke. If it’s too soon, you’re too old.”

“So much of our social and professional lives are determined by the systems we use to keep track of them.”

2. “In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers”

“Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released.”

3. “Can Microsoft Make You ‘Bing’?”

“He explains that in the valley, with its job-hopping and start-up culture, there is a ‘renters’ mentality’: if things aren’t working out, just move on. At Microsoft, he says, there is a ‘homeowners’ mentality’: a dedication to making things work.”

4. “The Video Store, Reinvented by Necessity”

“The movement toward community-building goes beyond marketing. It is also tapping into a cultural impulse to connect with something, or someone, in a digital age.”

5. “What’s in a Face at 50?”

“The face actually can reveal more than we might want to admit.”

6. “The Dutch Way: Bicycles and Fresh Bread”

“But that points up another mental difference: the willingness of Europeans to follow top-down social planning. America’s famed individualism breeds an often healthy distrust of the elite. I’m as quick as any other red-blooded American to bristle at European technocrats telling me how to live. (Try buying a light bulb or a magazine after 6 p.m. in Amsterdam, where the political elite have decreed that workers’ well-being requires that shops be open only during standard office hours, precisely when most people can’t shop.) But while many Americans see their cars as an extension of their individual freedom, to some of us owning a car is a burden, and in a city a double burden. I find the recrafting of the city in order to lessen — or eliminate — the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom. So I say (in this case, at least): Go, social-planning technocrats! If only America’s cities could be so free.”

7. “When Shilling on the Web, Think Small”

“What difference does it make if you don’t craft a message with its medium in mind? A world of difference.”

8. “Babies to Heroes: A Field Guide to Big-Screen Men”

“The movies may be male dominated, but images of men are surprisingly narrow.”

9. “Apes From the Future, Holding a Mirror to Today”

“The beauty of Boulle’s amusing idea, and of the best science-fiction ideas in general, is that it encourages us to take a longer view than we’re accustomed to; maybe longer than we’re entirely comfortable with.”

10. “Like Seaside Heights, but With a Duomo”

“Tanning, nails, everything is different here.”

11. “The Jargon of the Novel, Computed”

“Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?”

12. “Sex, Lies and Data Mining”

“Their breakdown is simple. Men like pornography. Women like romance novels.”

13. “Know Thyself: Easier Said Than Done”

“When people today are asked whether they regularly dream in color, most say they do. But it was not always so. Back in the 1950s most said they dreamed in black and white. Presumably it can hardly be true that our grandparents had different brains that systematically left out the color we put in today. So this must be a matter of interpretation. Yet why such freedom about assigning color? Well, try this for an answer. Suppose that, not knowing quite what dreams are like, we tend to assume they must be like photographs or movies — pictures in the head. Then, when asked whether we dream in color we reach for the most readily available pictorial analogy. Understandably, 60 years ago this might have been black-and-white movies, while for most of us today it is the color version. But, here’s the thing: Neither analogy is necessarily the ‘right’ one. Dreams don’t have to be pictures of any kind at all. They could be simply thoughts — and thoughts, even thoughts about color, are neither colored nor non-colored in themselves.”

14. “A Mild-Mannered Maniac”

“He has taught at Harvard, adapted the last volume of Proust into a feature film, transformed several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales into a dark, surrealist comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni and made the life of the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt into a fractured biopic starring John Malkovich.”

15. “The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes”

“A few years ago, the film-geek Web site Chud.com posted a hoax review of a lost masterpiece from Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah: a stripped-down and brutal take on Batman that abandoned every aspect of the mythos except the vigilantism and the car. Only the fact that this movie never existed keeps it from being my favorite superhero film of all time.”

“In New York literary circles, anyone who doesn’t have a Twitter account qualifies as a radical Luddite. But some have made gestures toward enforced self-denial. The novelist Jonathan Lethem has said he owns two computers, one of which he had Internet-disabled to use for his fiction writing. Dave Eggers, Nora Ephron and others have extolled the computer program Freedom, which cuts off your computer’s Internet access for up to eight hours. Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections in a dark room wearing earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold, and confessed to blocking his Ethernet port with Super Glue while working on Freedom (not named, apparently, for the software program).”

2. “Scientific Advances on Contraceptive for Men”

“Male contraceptives are attracting growing interest from scientists, who believe they hold promise for being safe, effective and, also important, reversible.”

3. “After Floods, Debate Over Missouri River Rolls On”

“What precisely is this river for?”

4. “Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables”

“Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That ‘other force’ should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.”

5. “Addictive Personality? You Might be a Leader”

“What we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex or drugs.”

6. “Slowing Down to Savor the Data”

“The effort to sort, select and summarize data for others is not new. It’s an ancient, pragmatic response to feeling beleaguered by information, says Ann Blair, a history professor at Harvard and the author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. In earlier ages, however, the sense of being inundated with information was felt mainly by scholars. After the printing press was invented, Professor Blair says, they felt even more overwhelmed by the sheer number of books available. Now the public is facing a digital data tsunami. ‘What strikes me as unique about our age isn’t so much that, as individuals, we feel overloaded and panicked about all the information we should know,’ she says, ‘but the fact that everyone, whatever your walk of life, everyone now experiences overload.’”

7. “The Auteur vs. the Committee”

“The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge.”

8. “The Personal Energy Crisis”

“Demand has finally begun to exceed our capacity. We’re facing an energy crisis, and this one is personal.”

9. “Look Past the Beauty, if You Can”

“She’s one of those people who casually peppers a conversation with sentences like ‘I was in Brazil, learning how to free-dive from some spear fisherman.’”

10. “The Joke Is on the Ph.D.”

“‘Piled High and Deeper — Life (or the Lack Thereof),’ more commonly known as ‘Ph.D. Comics,’ is dedicated to the plight of doctoral candidates: their sleep-deprived stupor, fleeting social lives and the tragic realization that advisers don’t really care.”

11. “The Essential T.A.”

“To have to scramble for money while trying to do research is burdensome.”

12. “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s”

“Will the Ph.D. become the new master’s?”

13. “R.O.I.”

“As a strictly financial calculation, does the investment pay off?”

14. “The Left-Leaning Tower”

“The most effective way to keep out a whole class of people who are unwelcome isn’t to bar entry, but to make sure that very few in that class will want to enter.”

15. “Sigmund Freud’s Cocaine Years”

“Halsted was a consummately brilliant and flashy surgeon who had captained the Yale football team and then gone on to medical training in New York, where he soon established a reputation not only for his operative skills and speed but for the outgoing personality that distinguished him as a bon vivant and hail-fellow-well-met. In 1884, while working mainly at Bellevue Hospital, he and a small group of rising young doctors began to self-experiment with cocaine, in order to develop techniques that would permit surgery on the extremities and other areas whose nerve supply could be blocked by direct injection of the drug. Unaware of its dangerously addictive qualities, each of the young men gradually fell under its diabolical spell.”

16. “An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece”

“It could be argued that this is essentially an academic habit, and that Fried is faithfully observing the expected conventions — so faithfully that he has become an unconscious apostate. If academia elevates scholarly and impersonal inquiry above the kind of nutty, fictional, navel-gazing monologues of Nicholson Baker, then Fried is at once its high camp apotheosis and its disintegration into mere manner.”

17. “Ladies, We Have a Problem”

“While the mission of SlutWalks is crucial, the package is confusing and leaves young feminists open to the very kinds of attacks they are battling.”

18. “Cornel West Flunks the President”

“You’ve got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer.”

19. “Around the World in One Day”

“If the knock against the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular, is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed.”

20. “Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?”

“I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. ‘Twenty years from now,’ he replied.”

“Writers write them for reasons that usually have a little to do with money and not as much to do with masochism as you might think. There is real satisfaction in a story deeply told, a case richly argued, a puzzle meticulously untangled. (Note the tense. When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.)”

2. “An Alarming New Stimulant, Legal in Many States”

“Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself ‘to pieces’ over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.”

3. “Foreclosure? Many Pets Are Losing Their Homes”

“The animals are the ones losing their families and their homes.”

4. “Leading Man, Miles Beyond the Boy Band”

“Heads had turned when he’d entered, but he picked a table in an empty section, nestled discreetly behind a serving station. Outside, Mr. Timberlake had walked with the briskness of someone long accustomed to sudden, shrieking swarms of fans. But as he worked on his coffee, he grew more relaxed and more animated, one leg tucked beneath the other like an overgrown kid.”

5. “The Songs of Now Sound a Lot Like Then”

“The fading of newness and nowness from pop music is mystifying. But in the last couple of years a concept has emerged that at least identifies the syndrome, even if it doesn’t completely explain it. Coined by the co-founders of cyberpunk fiction William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, ‘atemporality’ is a term for the disconcerting absence of contemporaneity from so much current pop culture. This curious quality can be detected not just in pop music but in everything from fashion to graphic design to vintage chic.”

6. “Download: Oliver Sacks”

“I don’t know what Facebook and Twitter are since I don’t use a computer.”

7. “Drought: A Creeping Disaster”

“City planners worry that unless drastic action is taken, Perth could become the world’s first ‘ghost city’ — a modern metropolis abandoned for lack of water. Similar fates may await America’s booming desert cities: Las Vegas, Phoenix or Los Angeles.”

8. “Books and Other Fetish Objects”

“It’s a mistake to deprecate digital images just because they are suddenly everywhere, reproduced so effortlessly.”

9. “Our Broken Escalator”

“American pre-eminence in mass education has eroded since the 1970s, and now a number of countries have leapfrogged us in high school graduation rates, in student performance, in college attendance. If you look for the classic American faith in the value of broad education to spread opportunity, you can still find it — in Asia.”

10. “The Critique of Pure Horror”

“Why do so many of us enjoy being disgusted and terrified?”

11. “Growing Up, Then Going Home”

“Out of college, money spent, see no future, pay no rent, all the money’s gone, nowhere to go.”

12. “Seeing Promise and Peril in Digital Records”

“At a government-sponsored gathering last month, Dr. David Brick, a pediatric cardiologist in New York, demonstrated how it took eight mouse clicks on a digital record to find the patient information presented comfortably on the single sheet of a paper chart.”

13. “Working Separately, Together”

“Some companies offer telecommuting and sabbaticals to satisfy the wanderlust of the worker bee. But what about the poor lonely freelancer? Enter the concept of ‘co-working,’ in which small and independent operators toil together in one shared office space.”

14. “Is Anyone There?”

“Eager for a second opinion, I sent out interview requests to four Buddhist monks (two directly, and two through their publishers) and to two Buddhist monasteries. Six hours later, one monk wrote back apologetically to say he would not have time to talk by phone because he was leading a 10-day meditation course in Brazil, where the Internet connection is ‘patchy,’ which would prohibit his responding again by e-mail.”

15. “He Sexts, She Sexts More, Report Says”

“Women are more likely to send nude photographs or sexually explicit text messages than men.”

16. “How the Robber Barons Railroaded America”

“Our method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing — all bad things.”

17. “Inventing the Interstate”

One must remember what it used to mean to drive in the United States. Before the Interstate knitted together the country, before it became a metaphor for the nation’s collective mobility for intellectuals homegrown and imported … America’s roads were … an ‘anarchic jumble.; Improvements meant grading dirt tracks, way-finding was a fiction, and a State Department report, circa 1916, judged road conditions here ‘far worse than any other major nation except Russia and China.’”

18. “Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding”

“July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts.”

19. “‘Well, Here It Comes! The Biggest Song in the U.S.A.!’”

“The ultimate niche paradise ends up being nothing but an empty room and a mirror.”