Category Archives: new york times

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.”

1. “Privacy, Technology And Law”

“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.”

1. “Blogs vs. Term Papers”

“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.”

1. “The Rise of the New Groupthink”

“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?’”

1. “Why Authors Tweet”

“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.”

1. “The Joy of Quiet”

“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.”