1. “My Car, My Sanctuary”

“That the American road system is a crowning achievement of Western civilization is too little appreciated.”

2. “From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz”

“The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor.”

3. “Idealistic Lawmen Taking Crime Very Personally”

“What in 1955 was a progressive plea for civic reform (laced, again, by some searing violence), had become by 1973, in the context of the Miranda decision and Nixon’s law-and-order politics, a wild-eyed fantasy about an incorruptible leader who finds it necessary to subvert the law in order to save it. Unconcerned with legal niceties like search warrants and evidence, Pusser, here portrayed as a former professional wrestler, conducts his campaign of civic reform by busting up the local clip joints (and quite a few patrons) with a giant stick carved from an oak tree.”

4. “Stop. Snap. Move. Repeat for, Oh, 10 or 20 Years.”

“For the first four years of the project, he worked completely alone, driven by what may have been a muse or ‘daemons,’ he’s unsure which; not even his closest friends and colleagues knew what he was up to.”

5. “Packing All the Heat a Movie Could Want”

“All these guns are real.”

6. “Where Garrison Keillor Gets ‘Carried Away’”

“If you hike 10 miles at night on the High Plains of North Dakota, it could change your life. And for the good.”

7. “Like the Video? I Wrote the Book”

“Not long ago I wrote an essay in which I facetiously foresaw Don DeLillo’s having to sell White Noise mugs and T-shirts on his Web site to make ends meet. I had forgotten that in the 21st century any absurd dystopian fantasy or black satire you can dream up invariably turns out to be already true. I was advised that I would need to increase my presence on social media.”

8. “Let’s Go Reading in the Car”

“Here’s my theory about the evolution of the book. First, God speaks the Commandments, then he writes them on a tablet (white fire on black fire, the sages say), and only later, and slowly, are they transcribed. So first comes the audiobook, then comes the e-book, and only as a last resort the barbarism of parchment and paper. With audiobooks we go back to the source.”

9. “The Voice”

“The best readers don’t put so much acting into the recording that it interferes with the connection between the author and the listener.”

10. “Manageable Discontents”

“Here are some reasons, I think, that Franzen’s essays do not match his fiction. While his prose is always cogent, he is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit. His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and character development. By contrast, the I-character in his essays is not as strongly developed, nor as vivid. He is better able to convey moral irony by dramatizing a fictional conflict than by baldly stating his views.”

11. “Books With 140 Characters”

“Here’s how it works: Every month we pick a literary genre (in March, for instance, we chose science fiction and read Neuromancer, by William Gibson, the following month) and solicit nominations. After a few days my editor and I cull through these suggestions for a shortlist of six books, which we then put up for a vote. Readers campaign for their favorites (Great Expectations is ahead?” @GatsbyGoil writes. “Didn’t we all read that in middle or high school?”), and by the end of the month we declare a winner. Books are procured – more often than not, downloaded – and the discussion begins. Conversations are organized around chapters, so no single reader reveals that Pip and Estella never actually tie the – Oops! I’ve said too much already.”

12. “Richard Ford Is a Man Who Actually Listen”

“Living, it’s called living. You might call it wasting time, but I just call it living. Going bird hunting, reading books, watching the Red Sox, doing things with my wife that we wouldn’t have time to do if I was writing a book. There’s a whole lot to do once you can get out from under the yoke of working.”

13. “Making Choices in the Age of Information Overload”

“If we researched every single purchase, we wouldn’t have time to make any purchases. I have better things to do with my time.”

14. “How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again”

“Moviegoing is, at its core, a social experience. The moment those lights dim and the film reel rolls, you’re no longer an individual sitting in an auditorium; you’re part of a mass of people who are connected through a shared event and the desire to be entertained and transported. In that moment, when you turn from a solitary viewer into an audience, you form a trusting and reciprocal relationship not only with the movie but also with those around you. Every person in the theater contributes to the experience. Usually, this means reverent silence. But I’d argue that there is no theater audience that contributes more to the experience of seeing a movie than one at a midnight show.”

1. “Two Smooth Operators on the Line”

“Here’s a vivid illustration of sexuality as performance.”

2. “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College”

“I’ll be paying this forever.”

3. “Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking”

“You don’t ever want to get into a situation where your worth is being judged by the amount of your productivity.”

4. “Tiny Hand Over Hand”

“Climbing is pretty much the only thing that holds Ashima’s interest for long. Television, movies and computers are not a big part of her day, partly because the Waldorf school she attends has a philosophy that includes a general distaste for technology. She collects handmade Japanese stickers, which she keeps in a scrapbook, and her favorite subjects are gym and woodworking, where she learned to make a cutting board and a salad spoon and fork.”

5. “Sexuality and Other Female (Film) Troubles”

“I wanted to make a Merchant-Ivory movie with vibrators.”

6. “Chronicling the Pounds, Their Risks and Causes”

“Our DNA has programmed us to want more, and our economic and cultural systems have delivered more.”

7. “The Amygdala Made Me Do It”

“The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that – to put the matter plainly – we have no idea what we’re doing.”

8. “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths”

“To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.”

9. “The Human Disaster of Unemployment”

“A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8%) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47%. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States.”

10. “The Digital Lost-Dog Poster”

“According to the American Humane Association, last year more than seven million dogs and cats went missing; only about 17 percent of lost dogs and 2 percent of lost cats ever find their way back from shelters to their original owners. More than 10 million pets are euthanized every year because their owners can’t be found. HomeAgain’s Web site has a ticker counting pet recoveries tracked to chip technology; as of late April, it clocked 1,016,843 such reunions.”

11. “Back to Basics, Real Basics”

“When his own creative juices are clotting up, he reaches over to his desk and picks up, of all things, an Acheulean hand ax.”

12. “Dieting for Dollars (or Maybe a Movie Ticket)”

“They decided to build a computer program to make shedding pounds as geekily fun as playing Xbox, but with an added incentive: the opportunity to win cash.”

13. “Meet Your Neighbors, if Only Online”

“There’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.”

14. “When You Text Till You Drop”

“70 percent of those who report heavily using mobile devices experience ‘phantom vibration syndrome,’ which is what happens when your pocket buzzes and there’s no phone in your pocket.”

15. “Boggle the Mind”

“Science writers, like teachers, have an obligation to get the facts right. When enough details are wrong, readers may lose confidence in the big picture.”

16. “The Original Colonists”

“Humans and certain insects are the planet’s ‘eusocial’ species – the only species that form communities that contain multiple generations and where, as part of a division of labor, community members sometimes perform altruistic acts for the benefit of others.”

17. “The Writer in the Family”

“One morning at breakfast, when she was in the first or second grade, E. L. Doctorow’s daughter, Caroline, asked her father to write a note explaining her absence from school, due to a cold, the previous day. Doctorow began, ‘My daughter, Caroline….’ He stopped. ‘Of course she’s my daughter,’ he said to himself. ‘Who else would be writing a note for her?’ He began again. ‘Please excuse Caroline Doctorow….’ He stopped again. ‘Why do I have to beg and plead for her?’ he said. ‘She had a virus. She didn’t commit a crime!’ On he went, note after failed note, until a pile of crumpled pages lay at his feet. Finally, his wife, Helen, said, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ penned a perfect note and sent Caroline off to school. Doctorow concluded: ‘Writing is very difficult, especially in the short form.’”

18. “Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle”

“He was raised vegetarian and became a vegan in college, at one point eating nothing but brown rice for 10 days. Not long after he moved to New York, he adopted a ‘paleo’ diet, eating mostly meat and berries. Now he is obsessed with authentic Chinese food.”

19. “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?”

“In another famous case, a 9-year-old boy named Jeffrey Bailey pushed a toddler into the deep end of a motel swimming pool in Florida. As the boy struggled and sank to the bottom, Bailey pulled up a chair to watch. Questioned by the police afterward, Bailey explained that he was curious to see someone drown. When he was taken into custody, he seemed untroubled by the prospect of jail but was pleased to be the center of attention.”

1. “He’s Not Done With Exploring the Universe”

“It’s not much of a spoiler to say that things don’t go well. In Greek mythology Prometheus, after all, was chained to a rock and had his liver eternally pecked out for the crime of stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans.”

2. “A Desert Town on the Way Up … to Space”

“Adherents believe that the next phase of space exploration will be led by nimble, ambitious entrepreneurs – a new generation of people like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who helped create the electronics industry in a garage – and that this is their moment to come together and make it happen.”

3. “Amid Brazil’s Rush to Develop, Workers Resist”

“No one burns anything if they’re satisfied.”

4. “From Misfit With Blog to Author With Deal”

“Her father was a taxidermist prone to keeping bobcats and wild turkeys as pets. Her neighbors regularly invited the family over to swim in a pool created by water from an open-air cistern that was used to clean pigs.”

5. “Whistling His Own Tune”

“Most players in sports believe they actually know something about officiating. And they don’t.”

6. “At California State, Protesters Start a Fast”

“California was once the model system, and now that seems to be breaking down at every level.”

7. “Rising Early, With a New Sentence in Mind”

“Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I’m inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don’t bug me, so it’s so easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re working harder than you really are. So I do everything possible to make myself remember this is a job I’m going to, and I have to produce every day. The tie and the jacket are part of that.”

8. “Jobs Few, Grads Flock to Unpaid Internships”

“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships. But now I’ve even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools.”

9. “The Jobless Young Find Their Voice”

“Where are the advocacy groups for jobless youth?”

10. “The Outsourced Life”

“The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us. And, the more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, sure, why not?”

11. “Future TED Talks”

“Returning TED talker Sherry Turkle, an author and academic, says that giving lectures about how lonely the Internet is making people has made her and her audiences even lonelier.”

12. “Science and Truth: We’re All in It Together”

“By now, readers understand that the definitive ‘copy’ of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers. (If a book isn’t read until it’s written in – as I was always told – then maybe an article is not published until it’s been commented upon.) Writers know this already. The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit – suitable for framing, not much else.”

13. “Black Women and Fat”

“Many black women are fat because we want to be.”

14. “In the Middle of a Food Fight”

“If they had a chance, they would eat us.”

15. “The Screen Can’t Hear When You Yell ‘Bravo’”

“Most of the audience doesn’t quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders. For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.”

16. “Comic Guerrilla Tries Sticking With the Script”

“He operates from courage, and I operate from fear. But we’re both fanatical engineers of comedy. There are people in comedy that like to take a funny idea and wing it, and then you have the people that like to take out rulers and protractors and try to figure out everything.” He added that Mr. Baron Cohen’s comedy amounted to a kind of ‘cultural surgery.’”

17. “Scriptless in Seattle: A Filmmaker’s Map”

“‘I’m taking you to some of my favorite places in Seattle.’ Her guided tour on that March morning included a cafe, a bookstore and Scarecrow Video, where she returned a sack of DVDs by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen that she had been using for research.”

18. “Cherishing Sun-Baked Cinema”

Sam Elliott was so damn good-looking in that sleazy, ’70s bathing-trunks-and-mustache way (predating ‘Baywatch’ and ‘Magnum, P.I.’) that he could pretty much charm the bra and panties off of anybody. But there was also something wildly sexy about Los Angeles, the city. Somehow I knew it held the key to my future, and Lifeguard was the sales pitch: sunsets and muscle cars and beach houses and lazy sex on unmade beds.”

19. “Sit Down, Cool Off and Fire Up a DVD”

“It was once fashionable to dismiss her work in Barbarella as evidence of her pre-radicalized frivolousness. Maybe people were too busy looking at what else was on display to notice her prodigious comic gifts were as well. In Barbarella she’s a sexy Buck Rogers, the all-American hero as lewd buttercup.”

20. “Adding a Little Flicker to Those Lights”

“They’re for making statements, not love.”

21. “Workouts, Times 2 (or 3)”

“Most are professionals with full-time jobs, yet they manage to spend some two hours a day – and upward of $500 a month – exercising.”

22. “Hello, Stranger”

“I think we are moving toward that shift where people prefer to engage with each other over the Internet.”

23. “In Iris Love’s Wide Circle of Friends”

“I trust people who like animals and who drink because it shows they have a soul.”

24. “Unleashing the Power”

“At his 1926 doctoral exam, the mathematician David Hilbert is said to have asked but one question: ‘Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?’ He had never seen such beautiful evening clothes.”

25. “The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy”

“This could be the most hated book of the year.”

26. “How McDonald’s Came Back Bigger Than Ever”

“In 2011, the average free-standing McDonald’s restaurant in the United States generated nearly $2.6 million in sales, an increase of roughly 13 percent since 2008. Last year, sales nearly doubled the industry’s projected growth rate by growing 4.8 percent over the previous year.”

27. “Honey, I Got a Year’s Worth of Tuna Fish”

“For ‘couponers,’ as they call themselves, free product is the holy grail. Freebies are obtained by combining various promotions in ways that can seem laborious and arcane to the civilian shopper: waiting for items to go on sale and then using coupons to buy them; ‘stacking’ manufacturers’ coupons with store coupons; shopping during “double coupon” days; or receiving, post-purchase, a ‘catalina’ – a coupon from a company called Catalina Marketing that can be redeemed on a future transaction.”

28. “Color Me My Way”

“That story begins in Minnesota, where Neiman grew up tough and poor. Enough happens to him in the 1940s alone to fill a book: he spends a night in jail for brawling and ships off to basic training the next day. When G.I.’s land on Omaha Beach, the Army gives them condoms to protect their rifle muzzles; Neiman uses his to safeguard his cigars. He eventually goes AWOL in Belgium, paints murals for the Red Cross, bootlegs Cognac and loses a girlfriend to Marlene Dietrich.”

29. “Small Wonder”

“She only ate nuts.”

30. “In-Between Days”

“The first notable, strange thing about living in two places is that whenever you are ‘here,’ you carry within you a ‘there.’”

1. “Directors Heading Down New Paths”

“In one brilliantly staged sequence Stevens places Milland and Wright in the foreground, as they slip into an air-clearing conversation that may end their marriage; in the deep background are the couple’s two rambunctious boys, struggling with a stepladder that threatens to collapse on a table stacked with Christmas dinnerware. The metaphor is clean and precise, the tension is almost unbearable, and the scene is staged with an apparent ease and naturalness that represents the classical Hollywood tradition at its most elegant and expressive.”

2. “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes”

“Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy.”

3. “At This Atlanta Barbershop, the Conversation Goes on 24/7”

“Black barbershops are evolving to keep up with modern lifestyles and an economy that forces many clients to work unusual hours.”

4. “The Man Is a Coach. Period.”

“Confidants describe him in terms usually reserved for addicts.”

5. “She’s Playing Games With Your Lives”

“Jane McGonigal is a cross between Tim Ferriss and Kelly Osbourne.”

6. “The New Family Dinner”

“I think it’s really powerful for kids to hear their parents say, ‘I had a fight with my boss and had to go to my bathroom to cry.’”

7. “The Never-to-Be Bride”

“We lived on the Internet, our own little planet of ‘us’-ness separated by LCD screens. We spent superhuman amounts of time talking online, with him in his bedroom in one state and me in my office in another. When our relationship was ‘on,’ we would talk, on average, several hours a day, five days a week. And I would think about him every second – even the spaces between seconds (the Internet makes it possible, even probable, that you’ll never escape the thought of someone).”

8. “Deception Tells Its Tale, Again”

“The Self, that cherished modern idea of a unique personal identity, may be on a par with the printing press as one of the greatest inventions of the last millennium.”

9. “A Battered City, Through Local Lenses”

“After decades of decline and neglect and the exodus of more than half of its population, Detroit now owns a cityscape that is often described as post-apocalyptic. Abandoned prewar skyscrapers, immense dilapidated factories, downtown streets devoid of people, entire neighborhoods nearly vacant and returning to brush: all provide epic vistas of blight, warning about the fickle nature of capitalism.”

10. “Broadcasting a World of Whiteness”

“Television is nowhere near diverse enough – not in its actors, its writers or its show runners.”

11. “Role to Role, From Sherlock to Star Trek”

“You could stick a knife in my thigh, and I wouldn’t tell you. Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.”

12. “O.K., Google, Take a Deep Breath”

“Talking about failure? Sharing feelings? Sitting quietly for long, unproductive minutes? At Google?”

13. “Warrior in Chief”

“Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”

14. “The Imperiled Promise of College”

“Because of levitating costs, college these days is a luxury item. What’s more, it’s a luxury item with newly uncertain returns.”

15. “Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.”

“Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones?”

16. “The Post-Cash, Post-Credit-Card Economy”

“Money is not what it used to be, thanks to the Internet.”

17. “Unexceptionalism: A Primer”

“To achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following…”

18. “Hello, Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain”

“The Martians riffled through Moby-Dick at top speed. Then they consulted translate.google.com™ for an expression that would best convey their reaction. ‘Holy crap!’ they said. ‘Does this mean what we think it means?’ they said.”

19. “An Introvert Steps Out”

“Promoting my work requires doing the very thing my book questions: putting down my pen and picking up a microphone.”

20. “How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre”

“I get paid all day, every day – which is almost too much for a sensitive artist.”

1. “Trailing a Master Photographer in Los Angeles”

“Unlike the monuments of other cities, those of Los Angeles require you to work for them. Many are not even open to the public. Some that are, are off the beaten path. As a result, when you arrive at some of the city’s greatest architectural masterpieces … you’re often all alone, or touring with a few other people, communing with the building and reliving a photograph.”

2. “The Secret Life of a Society Maven”

“I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to discover who he already was.”

3. “The New Shades of Feminism?”

“I recently learned about an activist group called Spark in the world of real-life youthful Brooklyn, a collective of girls spanning age 13 to their early 20s who have bound together to fight retrograde sexual and gender stereotyping. Members surreptitiously place Post-it notes in stores, on toys and games they deem questionable. Beginning in late December, when Lego was about to release its first girl-specific building set, called Friends, which succumbed to the familiar purple and pink and heart-shaped fantasia, Spark began a petition that has claimed 55,000 signatures.”

4. “Keeping Body and Image in Shape”

“I do check the Weather Channel, because that determines my wardrobe. I hate it when they’re wrong. Last week I put on my leopard suit, went outside, and it was 63 degrees; I had to come back in and change.”

5. “When a Sugar High Isn’t Enough”

“Everyone here is either making snacks or eating snacks they have just made. Some are snacking as they make snacks.”

6. “Don’t Be Evil, but Don’t Miss the Train”

“Arrogance can come easily to phenomenally well-educated people who have always been at the top of the class.”

7. “The Flight From Conversation”

“Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

8. “Plato’s Body, and Mine”

“Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”

9. “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart”

“We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts.”

10. “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already”

“Ineffective therapy is disturbingly common.”

11. “Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?”

“Annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 – more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.”

12. “Everyone’s Lives, in Pictures”

“Maybe, instead of trying to make our new photos look more like old ones, we are trying to make our new photos look like art that looks like old photos.”

13. “Sacking a Palace of Culture”

“My earliest was an awareness that the profile of the guy next to me in the microfilm reading area (nobly illumined by the refraction of an image he had selected, focused and enlarged) was that of Arthur Miller. What might such a distinguished cardholder be studying with such absorption? I passed behind him and sneaked a peek. It was an old news article about Marilyn Monroe. Illustrated, natch. Something about the stillness of his shoulders touched me. Great playwright and aspiring hack, we were searching together in the city’s principal repository of memory.”

14. “Filmmaker’s Newest Work Is About … Something”

“Believers will confront a fiction that purports to tell a truth about their world, without specifically portraying them, at least by the filmmakers’ claim.”

15. “Poe Taunts Filmmakers Evermore”

“Poe’s work – violent, frightening, romantic, and distinctly unwholesome – seemed made for the movies then, and now it still does. Times have changed, but filmmakers’ fascination with his wild, sensation-based art seems destined to linger into eternity.”

16. “Watching Every Click You Make”

“The ghostly forces of the Internet can wreak especial havoc for people who have recently gone through a breakup or divorce.”

17. “The Creator of HBO’s Girls Shares Her Reading Habits”

“If you couldn’t tell, I mostly like confessional books by women.”

18. “Cheerful Debauchery”

“Sluts are the best – hungry for experience and generous with themselves in its pursuit.”

19. “Her Calling”

“In her lexicon, lonesomeness means the opposite of isolation. It envelops the mind and heart in unsullied nature, allowing focused apprehension of the miracle of creation, as when she remembers kneeling alone as a child ‘by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion – feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.’”

20. “Race, the Remix”

“Black life has taught America how revolutionary pleasure is against the capitalism of the Pilgrim, the plantation and plagiarism. ‘Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.’”

21. “Who Made That Pie Chart?”

“Playfair’s graphic innovations went beyond the pie chart: he also invented the bar graph.”

21. “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?”

“What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it’s the capacity to manipulate the information you’re holding in your head – to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low. Understanding a metaphor or an analogy is equally dependent on working memory; you can’t follow even a simple statement like ‘See Jane run’ if you can’t put together how ‘see’ and ‘Jane’ connect with ‘run.’ Without it, you can’t make sense of anything.”

23. “How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain”

“Exercise seems to make neurons nimble.”

24. “Post-Prozac Nation”

“Our modern conception of the link between depression and chemicals in the brain was sparked quite by accident in the middle of the last century. In the autumn of 1951, doctors treating tubercular patients at Sea View Hospital on Staten Island with a new drug – isoniazid – observed sudden transformations in their patients’ moods and behaviors. The wards – typically glum and silent, with moribund, lethargic patients – were ‘bright last week with the happy faces of men and women,’ a journalist wrote. Patients laughed and joked in the dining hall, as if a dark veil of grief had lifted. Energy flooded back and appetites returned. Many, ill for months, demanded five eggs for breakfast and then consumed them with gusto. When Life magazine sent a photographer to the hospital to investigate, the patients could no longer be found lying numbly in their beds: they were playing cards or dancing in the corridors.”

25. “The Maniac in Me”

“It starts with a thought – a what if or a should have been or a never will be or a could have been – and metastasizes from there, sparking down the spine and rooting out into my body in the form of clamminess, fatigue, palpitations and a terrible sense that the world in which I find myself is at once holographically insubstantial and grotesquely threatening. On more than one occasion my anxiety has paralyzed me over something as inconsequential as the choice between blue cheese and vinaigrette on a salad.”

26. “How the Comedy Nerds Took Over”

“A real comic can’t stand the idea of not being funny or of an audience he can’t win over.”

27. “The Ripped, Bikini-Clad Reverend”

“Despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.”

1. “Robert Caro’s Big Dig”

“There was never a plan. There was just a series of mistakes.”

2. “Increasingly in Europe, Suicides ‘by Economic Crisis’”

“Researchers have found that severe economic stress corresponds to higher suicide rates.”

3. “The Chic, Lethal Salons on the Screens of France”

“We ask you to share your story, and then we try to destroy you.”

4. “How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By”

“Sony makes too many models, and for none of them can they say, ‘This contains our best, most cutting-edge technology.’ Apple, on the other hand, makes one amazing phone in just two colors and says, ‘This is the best.’”

5. “The Rise of the Independent Work Force”

“I am 36 years old and a 21st-century employee.”

6. “A Veteran’s Death, the Nation’s Shame”

“An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes.”

7. “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage”

“Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages – and more likely to divorce – than couples who do not.”

8. “Lefties Aren’t Special After All”

“After reviewing hundreds of such studies for a book on left-handers, I found that the evidence of positive qualities associated with left-handedness was anecdotal at best, while the scores of studies associating left-handedness with all manner of afflictions were generally too unreliable to have any practical consequence.”

9. “The Provocateur”

“He cut an odd figure for a conservative, holding forth with lectures on political theory that name-dropped Michel Foucault and other leftist thinkers. He could also be mordantly funny. (His Twitter avatar was an echo of the apocryphal Jesus imprint on a piece of toast.) … He was conversant in pop culture – the Cure and New Order were particular musical favorites – and thought nothing of wearing in-line skates, his longish hair trailing behind him, as he confronted protesters at a rally outside a conservative event hosted by David and Charles Koch in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2011. Once he was done berating the protesters, he took some of them to dinner at Applebee’s.”

10. “No Scrolling Required at New Dating Sites”

“They’re trying to combine the power of the Internet with the best of retro dating, with singles parties so big they are organized through Web sites, and real-life matchmakers who use Klout scores to help match couples.”

11. “Truly Food for Thought”

“This new academic field, taking shape in an expanding number of colleges and universities, coordinates the food-related instruction sprinkled throughout academia in recognition that food is not just relevant, but critical to dozens of disciplines. It’s agriculture; it’s business; it’s health; it’s the economy; it’s the environment; it’s international relations; it’s war and peace.”

12. “How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze …”

“The big things, the weirdest things, the things you’d assume would have to be made up, happened exactly as the movie says they did. The trial lawyers really did wear Stetsons and cowboy boots and really were named Danny Buck Davidson and Scrappy Holmes. Daddy Sam’s barbecue and bail bonds, just a few blocks from the courthouse in Carthage (population: 6,700), really does have a sign that says, ‘You Kill It, I’ll Cook It!’ And they really did find my Aunt Marge on top of the flounder and under the Marie Callender’s chicken potpies, wrapped in a Lands’ End sheet. They had to wait two days to do the autopsy. It took her that long to thaw.”

1. “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?”

“Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society.”

2. “Trying to Find a Measure for How Well Colleges Do”

“We used to hear a lot more of, ‘The value of college can’t be measured,’ and now we hear more of, ‘Let’s talk about how we can measure.’”

3. “Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data”

“Making sense of Big Data is, in fact, a holy grail of computer science these days – and technology companies, academic institutions and the federal government are investing heavily in the endeavor.”

4. “Actor Rushes to Aid of Damsel in Pink Wig”

“Mr. Gosling has not commented publicly on the incident. No visual evidence of a good deed has surfaced, as it did last August after Mr. Gosling broke up a fight on Astor Place over a painting. And yet the legend has grown.”

5. “A Radical Female Hero From Dystopia”

“One reason Katniss may be speaking to so many is that she doesn’t just seem to be a new kind of female character but also represents an alternative to an enduring cultural type that the literary critic R. W. B. Lewis described as the American Adam. Lewis saw this type as ‘an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.’”

6. “The Phones Are Out, but the Robot Is In”

“To me, being a C.E.O., being a manager, was really a direct extension of being a programmer, which I think explains some of the things I’m good at and some of the things I’m bad at. When you’re programming, you have a very specific goal that you want to accomplish, and you do it by basically pulling together blocks of code. When I became a C.E.O., I was basically doing the same thing, except I was working with people who needed to accomplish some stuff, and it was still kind of very functional.”

7. “Taking a Chance on Love, and Algorithms”

“At the end of the day, the human algorithm – neural tissue in our cranium called a brain – has evolved over a long period of time to size up people efficiently.”

8. “What 23 Years of E-Mail May Say About You”

“Computers are good at spotting patterns, and Dr. Wolfram thought an analysis of his own personal data might reveal patterns in his life – for example, when he was most likely to come up with new ideas, ‘preferably good ones.’”

9. “In Defense of Superstition”

“To believe in magic – as, on some deep level, we all do – does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human.”

10. “Making Crime Pay”

“‘Never walk across a wet floor,’ Mr. Mulholland advised, saying you might mess up the work of the prisoner manning the mop. And then he might kill you.”

11. “The Mystery of the Flying Laptop”

“When is a laptop a laptop?”

12. “Inventing the Future”

What causes innovation? Why does it happen, and how might we nurture it?

13. “What’s the Easiest Way to Cheat on Your Taxes?”

“Who is the greatest accountant of all time? Many consider Luca Pacioli, a 15th-century Italian bookkeeper who hung out with Leonardo, as their standard-bearer.”

14. “Just One More Game …”

“Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.”

15. “Jack Outside the Box”

“On his desk sat a cowbell, a pocketknife, a George Orwell reader and an antique ice-cream scoop. There was also a stack of business cards that read: ‘John A. White III, D.D.S. – Accidentist and Occidental Archaeologist.’”

16. “Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter”

“There is no longer any honor in musical obscurity.”

1. “Where Have All the Neurotics Gone?”

“I think some of the qualities we once attributed to neurotics have simply been normalized.”

2. “Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool”

“Do not mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject.”

3. “Young Writers Dazzle Publisher (Mom and Dad)”

“What’s next Kiddie architects, juvenile dentists, 11-year-old rocket scientists? Any parent who thinks that the crafting of engrossing, meaningful, publishable fiction requires less talent and experience than designing a house, extracting a wisdom tooth, or supervising a lunar probe is, frankly, delusional.”

4. “Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous”

“For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and other diseases.”

5. “Chasing Ghosts of Poets Past”

“Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, ‘Passing Stranger,’ is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.”

6. “Birds Do It, Bees Do It (Fill Screens)”

“In a sense animals are encoded in the DNA of the cinema.”

7. “The Human Voice, as Game Changer”

“Until now … we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too – and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?”

8. “Computer Science for the Rest of Us”

“Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals. They don’t argue that everyone needs to be a skilled programmer. Rather, they seek to teach ‘computational thinking’ – the general concepts programming languages employ.”

9. “The Bleaker Sex”

“There’s a biological reason why women feel about sex the way they do and men feel about sex the way they do. It’s not as simple as divesting yourself of your gender roles.”

10. “What Baseball Does to the Soul”

“If soccer is the world’s game, then baseball belongs to those who have left their worlds behind. This is not so much nostalgia as it a sense of saudade – a longing for something that is absent.”

11. “A Sontag Sampler”

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.’”

12. “In Florida, a Death Foretold”

“A study released in 2006 by Duke University on attitudes on race in Durham, N.C., a city with one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country, found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos – 78 percent – felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53 percent of them felt they had the least in common with blacks. So it would make sense for those respondents to act with the same assumptions about blacks that they perceive are held by native whites. In fact the Latino respondents, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites. Nearly 60 percent reported feeling that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted, while only 10 percent of whites held that view.”

13. “Education’s Hungry Hearts”

“The best students and the ones who get the most out of their educations are the ones who come to school with the most energy to learn.”

14. “Not Waiting to Say Goodbye”

“And perhaps he was lonelier than he let on.”

15. “Rockers at Sea”

“Fans willing to pony up somewhere between $900 and $1,400 – not including airfare or bar tab – can rub shoulders with their favorite acts and enjoy three to five days of food, music, Caribbean sunshine and extras like a photo with the band (no autographs, please). Everyone from oldies acts like Frankie Avalon to current artists like R. Kelly and Blake Shelton are taking to the seas.”

16. “A Trip Across Water, and Time, From Seattle”

“‘We’re not all crazy hippies!’ a sprightly, white-haired organic farmer declared. Then she handed me a business card that identified her as the ‘Contessa of Compost.’”

17. “Plenty to Go Around”

“He’ll give you dozens of reasons, some highly technical, why it’s half full. Then he’ll explain that your cognitive biases are tricking you into seeing the glass of water in a negative light, and cart out the research of acclaimed psychologists like Daniel Kahne­man to prove his point. Finally he may suggest you stop fretting: new technologies will soon fill the glass up anyway. Indeed, they are likely to overfill it.”

18. “Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?”

“Who gets pubic hair in first grade?”

19. “How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey”

“For roughly a decade, from the early ’80s to the early ’90s – marked by high-water films all weirdly clustered together, like Commando (1985), Aliens (1986), RoboCop (1987) and Die Hard (1988) – the great American action film was a robust genre, as complex and thematically rich and aesthetically unified as the musical or the western.”

10. “The Know-It-All”

“Anything that eats has a system of organizing the world.”

21. “Prick Up Your Ears”

“People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.”

1. “The Brain on Love”

“Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly. Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones – all of which revamp the brain. When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun ‘I,’ a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.”

2. “From Exile to Everywhere”

“Nearly 25 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, which forced Mr. Rushdie into hiding for a decade after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the novel and issued a fatwa calling for his death, Mr. Rushdie has emerged as an indefatigable presence on the New York night-life scene.”

3. “A Smartphone Future? But Not Yet”

“I’m just one member of a small but hardy contingent (a convoy, if you will) of smartphone holdouts, people who seem like the ideal iPhone owner (under 40, urban, professional) but shun it and its app-friendly cousins for a low-tech ‘dumbphone.’”

4. “It Riles a Village”

“What does N.Y.U. want?”

5. “Funny, You Don’t Look Fetish”

“I once dated a very frugal guy in New York City who expected me to walk 16 blocks to dinner in seven-inch heels. Maybe that’s why we never twice dated.”

6. “How the West Was Filled With Loss”

“Fort Apache is one of the great achievements of classical American cinema, a film of immense complexity that never fails to reveal new shadings with each viewing. It has been the subject of reams of critical discourse, most often fastened on its historical and ideological aspects.”

7. “Real ‘Mad Men’ Pitched Safety to Sell Volvos”

“Our advertising was tough. It was not done with nuance; it was done with a stylish hammer in the face.”

8. “Download: Vincent Kartheiser”

“I’m an adult. I don’t do blogs. I’m not a fan of the Twitter. I’m not a fan of the Facebook. I’m vehemently anti-, actually. I think those things are – stupid. I search for things online, but I feel I shouldn’t tell you the things I’ve searched for recently. They’re probably dirty.”

9. “The Case for Sleep Medicine”

“Sleep deprivation ratchets up the stress system, leaving you more susceptible to even relatively mild sources of strain.”

10. “Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them.”

“The world is one big data problem.”

11. “Insuring Hollywood Against Falls (but Not Flops)”

“As movies become more expensive and complex, so has insuring them.”

12. “Avalanches of Words, Sifted and Sorted”

“We don’t have the human power to read and tag all this information.”

13. “Not-So-‘Mad’ Ideas About Taxes”

“In April 1968, Fortune magazine published a list of those Americans whose net worth exceeded $100 million; the list ended at 153.”

14. “Leaving His Footprints on the City”

“Many people have walked every street in Manhattan. The local historian John McNamara, who died in 2004, walked every street in the Bronx. But Mr. Green believes he is the first to try for every block in all five boroughs – a distance he calculates at roughly 8,000 miles, counting parks, paths, cemeteries and occasional overlaps. He estimates that the project will take him more than two years of full-time walking to complete.”

15. “Where the Sheen on Your Shoes Says, ‘Respect’”

“Regulars have this to say about the merits of a shined shoe: The way you dress says something about the way you do business. Some liken dirty shoes to a dirty car; others to a filthy mind.”

16. “Why Won’t They Listen?”

“If you want to change people’s minds … don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.”

17. “Edison Illuminated”

“Edison was quite capable of experimenting for 95 hours at a stretch, neglecting food and sleep in his obsessive quest for ‘life & Phenomenon.’”

18. “Mall Rats”

“For Ballard, who died in 2009 at the age of 78, the true horrors of our collective future don’t concern what might happen hundreds of years from now in a spaceship; rather, they reverberate in the very ordinary now-ness of freeway overpasses, sports stadiums, high-rise apartment complexes and gated communities.”

19. “You Can’t Ruffle Sandra Lee”

“It’s shtick. That’s how some people get their press. There are 17 million children in this country going hungry every day, and we’re worried about my Kwanzaa cake from 10 years ago? That’s what I think is ridiculous. Yes, I can laugh about it.”

20. “Do Women Like Child Care More Than Men?”

“Is it really true that women end up shouldering more of the parenting burden simply because they like it more – or at least dislike it less?”

21. “The Best Nanny Money Can Buy”

“How does a nanny earn more than the average pediatrician? The simple answer is hard work – plus a strange seller’s market that follows a couple of quirky economic principles.”

22. “Mark Leyner, World-Champion Satirist, Returns to Reclaim His Crown”

“I never thought of what I did as ironic. And I think that’s a fundamental mistake in David’s take on my work. I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity. And transparency. Neither of which can be defined as irony.”

23. “Jungleland”

“For six and a half years, the neighborhood has undergone a reverse colonization – nature reclaiming civilization.”

24. “Post-Traumatic Stress’s Surprisingly Positive Flip Side”

“The name for Beltran’s change is post-traumatic growth.”

25. “Hello, Cruel World”

“Classicists aren’t particularly in demand even when the economy’s thriving, but I was optimistic that I’d at least be able to find an opening as a barista, which, considering my love for tea and coffee, would actually be pretty fun for me. I never would have thought that researching and writing a 10-page paper about societal attitudes toward marriage in ancient Rome and Greece would be easier than finding a part-time job.”

26. “Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise”

“If you wanted to spend several hours a week baring your soul to a stranger who was professionally obligated to listen and react, you went into therapy. Today you join a writing workshop.”

1. “Creature Comfort”

“APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF ROLLS OF FILM USED ON THE AMELIA PROJECT: 3,000.”

2. “63 Years Flying, From Glamour to Days of Gray”

“More than 40 percent of the roughly 110,000 flight attendants in the United States are 50 or older.”

3. “John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies”

“Had he been, as he and his family claimed, a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Germany and Poland who made his way to America and became a victim of mistaken identity? Or had he been, as prosecutors charged, a collaborating guard who willingly participated in the killing of Jews at the Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor death camps?”

4. “Lessons on Vice, Liberties and the Law”

“The book recounts the details of a party attended by Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens at which 144 bottles of Champagne were consumed by 33 people, before a near-naked 16-year-old girl emerged from an enormous pie.”

5. “As Cars Are Kept Longer, 200,000 Is New 100,000”

“In the 1960s and ’70s, when odometers typically registered no more than 99,999 miles before returning to all zeros.”

6. “My Life’s Sentences”

“My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.”

7. “The Way We Read Now”

“Are some reading materials better suited to one platform than another?”

8. “When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized”

“To be successful in the new world of work, we need to create a structure for capturing, clarifying and organizing all the forces that assail us; and to ensure time and space for thinking, reflecting and decision making.”

9. “In New Office Designs, Room to Roam and to Think”

“Some employees don’t even claim permanent workspaces; they call themselves free-deskers, and they simply take whatever is available each day – with a preference, naturally, for good views and proximity to their teams.”

10. “Making Sure Your Exit Music Is Loud and Clear”

In 1974, Ron Rosenbaum at The Village Voice approached his new boss, ripped up a paycheck, declared that no amount of money could keep him at the paper – and stormed off. ‘Who was that?’ the editor, Clay Felker, said.”

11. “Bypassing the Password”

“Continuous monitoring of a user’s behavior is an essential element of Darpa’s requirements.”

12. “My Personal To-Do List? The Concierge Has It”

“Time, as the saying goes, is money, which is why companies and organizations like Campbell’s Soup, Meridian Health and the Boston Red Sox, to name a few, are also spending big bucks to offer personal concierge services to their employees.”

13. “In India, Eternal Rhythms Embody a National Spirit”

“India has no fewer than eight genres of dance that have been officially deemed classical (as well as innumerable folk forms).”

14. “Napoleon Is Lost, Long Live Napoleon!”

“When you find yourself with a completed film, you are still far from having realized your dream.”

15. “Please Won’t You Be My Inspiration?”

“I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”

16. “The Enthusiast”

“I couldn’t tan, hated cars, refused to surf and flunked volleyball, grunion-hunting and puberty rite. Like lonely kids everywhere, I entered into books as if into a conspiracy – for company, of course, and for narrative and romance and advice on how to be decent and brave and sexy. But also for transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft; for a slice of the strange, the shock of an Other, a witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored or despised; that radioactive glow of genius in the dark: grace notes, ghosts and gods.”

17. “Without Gods”

“While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom.”

18. “Why Some Countries Go Bust”

“The wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy.”

19. “Who Made That Lawn Mower?”

“I used to walk five miles a day, but that’s boring. I’d rather walk behind a lawn mower.”

20. “Whit Stillman and the Song of the Preppy”

“His preferred place to write is Dunkin’ Donuts. He says he has no assets but finds having no assets to be ‘pathologically exhilarating.’ His having no assets is, in and of itself, confounding given his lineage of prosperous sea captains, merchants and bankers, including his great-grandfather James Jewett Stillman, the president of National City Bank and one of the richest men in America when he died in 1918.”

21. “Is Silence Going Extinct?”

“Last March, a group of ecologists and engineers taking advantage of advances in collecting, storing and analyzing vast quantities of digital data declared a new field of science: soundscape ecology.”

22. “The Everyday, Anytime Egg-Combination Generator”

“You know that eggs are simple, almost infinitely useful; these are clichés I can barely bring myself to repeat. That people have trouble embracing them – this is perpetually baffling.”

23. “How to Be a Pioneer Woman Without Ever Leaving the Couch”

“It’s not that we crave suffering so much as we crave suffering for valid reasons.”

1. “The Go-Nowhere Generation”

“Sometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes and Americans – particularly young Americans – have become risk-averse and sedentary.”

2. “Lights! Cameras! (and Cheers) for a Rock Weighing 340 Tons”

“We’ll never see this again in our lifetimes. I cried when I first saw it.”

3. “Everybody Wants a Piece of Nerlens Noel”

“Grown men are fighting over a kid.”

4. “Beyond Mile-High Grub: Can Airline Food Be Tasty?”

“Even before a plane takes off, the atmosphere inside the cabin dries out the nose. As the plane ascends, the change in air pressure numbs about a third of the taste buds. And as the plane reaches a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, cabin humidity levels are kept low by design, to reduce the risk of fuselage corrosion. Soon, the nose no longer knows. Taste buds are M.I.A. Cotton mouth sets in.”

5. “The Prestige Chase Is Raising College Costs”

“Universities have responded vigorously to escalating student demands for elite degrees. Their main strategy has been to bid more aggressively for the most distinguished researchers, which explains not only the rapid salary growth for top faculty members in the last several decades, but also the fact that teaching loads at many elite schools have decreased by more than 25 percent.”

6. “A Chicken Without Guilt”

“Really: Would I rather eat cruelly raised, polluting, unhealthful chicken, or a plant product that’s nutritionally similar or superior, good enough to fool me and requires no antibiotics, cutting off of heads or other nasty things? Isn’t it preferable, at least some of the time, to eat plant products mixed with water that have been put through a thingamajiggy that spews out meatlike stuff, instead of eating those same plant products put into a chicken that does its biomechanical thing for the six weeks of its miserable existence, only to have its throat cut in the service of yielding barely distinguishable meat?”

7. “When the Music Stopped for Don Cornelius”

“The creator, owner, producer and host of ‘Soul Train,’ which showcased a number of black musicians and dancers in a partylike atmosphere to millions of homes around the country, was himself a loner who never thought he got the credit or support that was his due.”

8. “Can’t Help Myself”

“Bad habits are overcome by learning new routines and practicing them over and over again.”

9. “Standing Alone”

“It’s no more possible to explain an act of conscience than it is to dissect a dream.”

10. “Peter Marino Likes Playing Bad Cop”

“Shanghai is about 23 million people. I come back here, and New York feels like Iowa.”

11. “Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist”

“Greenwood tends to wince when he walks into a room, as if in anticipation of mortification to come.”

1. “In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books”

“Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information, but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books.”

2. “Star-to-Be Who Never Was”

“What went wrong?”

3. “The Second Screen, Trying to Complement the First”

“Many TV viewers are using a computing device of some kind while they watch.”

4. “That Seat Is So Taken”

“Interests: Unpredictable and decontextualized screaming; stretching; trying to remember the lyrics to that Archies song; cracking my knuckles; licking my lips; humming; whistling; this game I made up that involves sticking my index finger in people’s mouths when they yawn and pulling it out before they bite down again.”

5. “Confessions of a ‘Bad’ Teacher”

“Teaching was a high-pressure job long before No Child Left Behind and the current debates about teacher evaluation. These debates seem to rest on the assumption that, left to our own devices, we teachers would be happy to coast through the school year, let our skills atrophy and collect our pensions. The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning. Good administrators use the evaluation processes to support teachers and help them avoid those painful classroom moments – not to weed out the teachers who don’t produce good test scores or adhere to their pedagogical beliefs.”

6. “The Indoctrination Myth”

“Does attending college actually make you more liberal and less religious? Research indicates that the answer is: not so much.”

7. “Does Couples Therapy Work?”

“The kind of person who tends to become a therapist – empathic, sensitive, calm, accepting – is generally not the kind of person who is a good couples therapist.”

8. “The Naughty Knave of Fashion’s Court”

“If you are standing there naked, people are going to think you are an extrovert with nothing to hide.”

9. “Farewell to Youth, but Not Beauty”

“With its even more bewitching Dowager Countess, played by Maggie Smith, this is a show that put to rest the idea that women should hold tight to a particular age, a particular look, rather than giving their faces permission to move through the life cycle.”

10. “Homeward Bound”

“What both authors strongly imply is that our debates about the family, which are nothing if not debates about how people take care of one another, are nothing indeed if we lack the collective political will to take care of one another in the fullest sense.”

11. “Who Made That: Little Trees Air Fresheners”

“Samann, a German-Jewish chemist who fled the Nazis, had studied Alpine tree aromas in the forests of Canada. He was interested in the technology used to transport and disseminate them.”

12. “Leader of the Pack”

“Years of traveling have taught Bruce Pask exactly what to bring – and where it all fits.”

13. “Born to Run”

“Running and running shoes are cool right now. But a random fashion trend this is not. These latest shoes are a result of 40 years of sneaker culture, an eon of human evolution and the eureka moment of a track-and-field star turned Nike designer named Tobie Hatfield.”

1. “In the Details” & “The Fact-Checker Versus the Fabulist”

“It’s called art, dickhead.”

2. “Go Directly, Digitally to Jail? Classic Toys Learn New Clicks”

“Classic toys are becoming much less classic because of upgrades meant to entertain technology-obsessed children.”

3. “Moral Hazard: A Tempest-Tossed Idea”

“Moral hazard sounds like the name of a video game set in a bordello, but in economic terms it refers to the undue risks that people are apt to take if they don’t have to bear the consequences.”

4. “Driven to Worry, and to Procrastinate”

“‘To tell the chronic procrastinator “Just do it,” would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, “Cheer up,”’ he said.”

5. “True Innovation”

“For a long stretch of the 20th century, it was the most innovative scientific organization in the world.”

6. “Why Less Isn’t Always More”

“As an aesthetic category, it’s strangely aspirational. It can become a mode of luxury, even excess.”

7. “‘Salesman’ Comes Calling, Right on Time”

“In both its small details – paying off a mortgage after 25 hard years is a plot point – and its implied questions about the hollowness of some cherished American ideals, the play feels unusually, perhaps unhappily, timely.”

8. “He’s Wild About Khakis”

“He doesn’t have that sort of dour, he-man thing to him. He admits fear when he’s fearful.”

9. “For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse”

“It’s all too easy to assume that Stevens was some tortured artist forced into a life of Babbitt-y corporate drudgery. In fact, evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford – his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.”

10. “Why Are Harvard Graduates in the Mailroom?”

“There are a number of professions in which workers are paid, in part, with a figurative lottery ticket. The worker accepts a lower-paying job in exchange for a slim but real chance of a large, future payday.”

11. “A Mustache for My Son”

“The mustache is a hairy and mysterious creature.”

1. “John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74”

“At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler. Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.”

2. “For Space Mess, Scientists Seek Celestial Broom”

“NASA is taking it very seriously.”

3. “In Lin, Knicks Find a Textbook Point Guard”

“Jeremy Lin has transformed the Knicks’ offense by executing many fundamental elements of a traditional point guard.”

4. “The Art of Distraction”

“It is the attempted standardization of a human being and of a notion of achievement that is limiting, prescriptive and bullying.”

5. “Economics Made Easy: Think Friction”

“It may seem heartless to worship efficiency at any cost, including lost jobs and decimated communities, but it is important to understand that increased efficiency is the only way a society’s standard of living will improve.”

6. “Building Self-Control, the American Way”

“In any culture, the development of self-control is crucial. This ability, which depends on the prefrontal cortex, provides the basis for mental flexibility, social skills and discipline. It predicts success in education, career and marriage. Indeed, childhood self-control is twice as important as intelligence in predicting academic achievement. Conversely, poor self-control in elementary school increases the risk of adult financial difficulties, criminal behavior, single parenthood and drug dependence.”

7. “Cindy Sherman Unmasked”

“How can such a mild-mannered, nice woman have such a wicked imagination that keeps inventing these fantastical characters over and over again?”

8. “Posting to Mourn a ‘Friend’”

“For some strange reason, there is this desire, or need, or maybe some sort of competitiveness, that drives me to want to be one of the first people to post about a major event, or to say something new about it.”

9. “Learning to Love Airport Lit”

“I finally found the literature that stands up to the tests of travel. The secret, dear reader, lies in narrative drive. Plain, old-fashioned, unrelenting, compelling storytelling. You’ve got to reach for the best-seller shelves.”

10. “Can a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization?”

“Barrett, who is 61, has dedicated his life to unlocking the mysteries of paper, which he regards as both the elemental stuff of civilization and an endangered species in digital culture.”

11. “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”

“There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.”

12. “The Upside-Down Appeal of ‘Downton Abbey’”

“It’s a Hegelian fable in which master and servant recognize their mutual dependence and give in to it, realizing that in the grand scheme they are equal.”

13. “A Star Is Born (and Scorned)”

“Sitting in her producer’s Chelsea studio in jeans and an oversize sweater, smoking Pall Mall Blues that share space – in a beat-up snakeskin bag – with an old Tennessee Williams paperback, Lana Del Rey tries to shrug off the suggestion that her father bought her success, that her face went under the knife, that she is some sort of industry creation, all accusations floating around the Internet. It’s absurd or maybe flattering, but despite her laugh and smile, it hurts.”

1. “Whitney Houston, Pop Superstar, Dies at 48”

“Ms. Houston’s range spanned three octaves, and her voice was plush, vibrant and often spectacular. She could pour on the exuberant flourishes of gospel or peal a simple pop chorus; she could sing sweetly or unleash a sultry rasp.”

2. “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It”

“The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement.”

3. “It’s the Economy, Honey”

“Economics pervades their personal lives.”

4. “It’s Not About You, Facebook. It’s About Us.”

“Facebook has begun creeping ever deeper into the texture of life, rolling out new features and partnerships that help bind it even more tightly to the fabric that keeps us connected. This has alarmed some people, convincing them that it’s time to pull the plug and forgo the service altogether.”

5. “Here’s Looking at You (but I’m Still Texting)”

“Researchers have created a prototype for a touch screen that can be used to send messages while it’s concealed in a jacket or pants pocket.”

6. “The Age of Big Data”

“There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

7. “The M.R.S. and the Ph.D.”

“They are more likely to receive as well as give oral sex, to use a greater variety of sexual positions and to experience orgasm regularly.”

8. “The Dubious Science of Online Dating”

“Can a mathematical formula really identify pairs of singles who are especially likely to have a successful romantic relationship?”

9. “In Hitchcock’s World of Fallible Mortals”

“It’s with Hitchcock that many of us begin to sense the presence of the director, to understand that movies are more than a matter of attractive people reciting their lines in front of a camera. Along with Orson Welles, Hitchcock is the filmmaker most responsible for making viewers aware of form, for showing us that what we have here is something distinct from novels and plays, a medium with its own things to say and its own way of saying them.”

10. “Don’t Tell Me, I Don’t Want to Know”

“A study published last month in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking found that the more time people spent on Facebook, the happier they perceived their friends to be and the sadder they felt as a consequence.”

11. “A Nation Lulled to Sleep”

“Americans spent $740 million on sleeping pillows in 2010.”

12. “America: Single, and Loving It”

“We need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone.”

13. “Tramps Like Them”

“The problem, Murray argues, is not that members of the new upper class eat French cheese or vote for Barack Obama. It is that they have lost the confidence to preach what they practice, adopting instead a creed of ‘ecumenical niceness.’ They work, marry and raise children, but they refuse to insist that the rest of the country do so, too.”

14. “Inside Intelligence”

“It’s time to establish ‘a greater balance of power’ between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think.”

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.”