Submitted For Your Perusal

1. Facial Recognition: Dawn of Dystopia, or Just the New Fingerprint?

“There are no national guidelines for how facial recognition should be used.”

2. Facebook’s A.I. Whiz Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up

“The task is made more difficult because ‘bad activity’ is often in the eye of the beholder and humans, let alone machines, cannot agree on what that is.”

3. The Suburbs Are Coming to a City Near You

“In some ways, living in a dense urban area has become much more pleasant for certain types of people — namely the affluent and those who prize proximity to the action above all else. You can now live within easy walking distance of your favorite restaurants, go see a play and shop at Target nearby. But what does it mean when urban living becomes a luxury good and a lifestyle brand?”

4. You’re Not Alone When You’re on Google

“Why do I — why do many of us — consistently act in ways that are directly at loggerheads with the privacy values we profess to hold dear?”

5. Spring Can Be a Sad Season

“For those who are trapped in despair, spring can feel like an affront, the gulf between outer and inner worlds too wide to cross.”

6. Power Is a Story Told by Women

“Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one. Stories give shape to experience, sometimes by accommodating traditional literary forms, sometimes by turning them upside down, sometimes by reorganizing them. Stories draw readers into their web, and engage them by putting them to work, body and soul, so that they can transform the black thread of writing into people, ideas, feelings, actions, cities, worlds, humanity, life. Storytelling, in other words, gives us the power to bring order to the chaos of the real under our own sign, and in this it isn’t very far from political power.”

7. How High School Ruined Leisure

“As the sports and activities kids once did ‘just for fun’ sometimes led to prestigious academic opportunities, the grown-ups caught on and took over, and everything from baseball to math modeling was commercialized and turned into a means to an end.”

8. Museums Must Reject Tainted Money

“Are museums, opera houses, food pantries and other nonprofits to be held responsible for how their donors have made their money? It is a question being asked more and more as a century-old taboo shatters.”

9. Religious Men Can Be Devoted Dads, Too

“It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives.”

10. How Hollywood Stopped Fearing Lesbian Teens

“Hollywood filmmakers have not been especially comfortable depicting desire that is either female or queer, and the teen comedy has long been a kingdom ruled by hormone-riddled straight boys. That’s why the space given to these lesbian teen protagonists feels like a breath of fresh air.”

11. 1994 Was a Prison of My Own Making + Stuff Your ‘Rules’ + It Smelled Like Gen X Spirit + This Gen X Mess

“25 years ago was yesterday and a million years ago.”

12. How Was Polynesia Populated? Two New Books Explore the Pacific’s Mysteries

“Their customs, their clothing, their languages — and the design of their long-distance sailing canoes — turned out to be common to scores of South Pacific places. They had settled themselves on islands as distant from each other as Maui and Tokelau, Samoa and Mangareva, the Cooks and Kermadec, Easter Island and Norfolk Island. Exactly how they had done so was central to solving the enigma.”

13. Dismantling the Myth of ‘The Heartland’

“Far from an ‘insulated core,’ the Midwest — particularly during the period between the Civil War and World War I — was a place where borderlands converged, a region dependent upon the flow of cattle across the borders of Canada and Mexico and imported British hogs that had been crossbred with Chinese stock.”

14. How to Do the Splits

“Start by stretching every day after you get out of the shower (heat increases muscle and ligament flexibility).”

15. How Much Alcohol Can You Drink Safely?

“Sorting through the latest research on how to optimize your well-being is a constant and confounding feature of modern life. A scientific study becomes a press release becomes a news alert, shedding context at each stage. Often, it’s a steady stream of resulting headlines that seem to contradict one another, which makes it easy to justify ignoring them.”

16. Can CBD Really Do All That?

“It seems to interact with multiple systems: increasing the quantity of native cannabinoids in the human body; binding with serotonin receptors, part of the ‘feel good’ molecular machinery targeted by conventional S.S.R.I.s; and stimulating GABA receptors, responsible for calming the nervous system. With more than 65 cellular targets, CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level.”

17. Was It an Invisible Attack on U.S. Diplomats, or Something Stranger?

“Dozens of leading neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, meanwhile, have offered an alternative narrative: that the diplomats’ symptoms are primarily psychogenic — or ‘functional’ — in nature. If true, it would mean that the symptoms were caused not by a secret high-tech weapon but by the same confluence of psychological and neurological processes — entirely subconscious yet remarkably powerful — underlying hypnosis and the placebo effect. They are disorders, in other words, not of the brain’s hardware but of its software; not of objective injuries to the brain’s structure but of chronic alterations to how the brain functions, typically following exposure to an illness, a physical injury or stress. And the fact that the State Department and doctors the government selected to treat the diplomats have dismissed this explanation out of hand does not surprise these experts. After all, they say, functional neurological disorders are among the most misunderstood, debilitating and denigrated ailments known to medicine.”

18. Can Monkeys Help Unlock the Secrets of Trauma?

“What does something like Hurricane Maria actually do to a community, beyond the initial, obvious physical effects? As it turns out, one of the best places to begin looking for answers may be a small, strange island full of monkeys.”

1. Life as We Know It

“‘Biodiversity’ — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — ‘is declining faster than at any time in human history,’ it says, estimating that ‘around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,’ unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.”

2. The End of the Warriors as We Know Them

“No place tries like California, a mind-set as much as a place. California always leans toward reinvention. It is closer to the future than anywhere else. Nothing feels permanent, even without earthquakes and fires.”

3. They Got Rich Off Uber and Lyft. Then They Moved

“Once their wealth was assured, these tech workers quit the companies and fled California, which has the nation’s highest state income tax, at more than 13 percent, to reside in lower-tax states like Texas and Florida, where there is no personal state income tax.”

4. Grappling With a Style Legacy

“For better or worse, the expectations set by our parents creep into the homes we build as adults, influencing how we decorate and maintain our space, and setting a standard that we either strain to meet or try to flee.”

5. It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

“Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.”

6. Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer

“Success should not be penalized.”

7. Welcome to the World of Subprime Children

“What’s the appeal of an I.S.A. over a regular student loan? From a capitalist’s perspective, the federal government has a weakness: It treats all borrowers the same. Borrowers face the same interest rates whether they are mediocre art students or valedictorians studying quantum computing at a top engineering school. But private I.S.A. lenders can skim the cream of students off the top.”

8. Can You Trust Generic Drugs?

“Nearly forty percent of all our generic drugs are made in India. Eighty percent of active ingredients for both our brand and generic drugs come from abroad, the majority from India and China. America makes almost none of its own antibiotics anymore.”

9. Why We Still Care About America’s Founders

“If the central figures in our creation story have frequently been embalmed in reverence, they nonetheless remain beguiling, worthy of perpetual scrutiny and, often, of emulation.”

10. Math Teachers Should Be More Like Football Coaches

“A growing body of research shows that students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of learning that encourages resilience in the face of failure — not unlike a football practice.”

11. Grizzlies in the Backyard

“Can people share landscapes and their properties with bears that can top 1,000 pounds and have four-inch claws?”

12. Money, Ethics, Art: Can Museums Police Themselves?

“In the space of barely a year, the very foundations of museums — the money that sustains them, the art that fills them, the decision makers that run them — have been called into question. And there’s no end to questioning in sight.”

13. Drone Shots Here, There, Everywhere

“Over the past few years, shots taken by drone — steadily gliding images looking down at houses and cities and fields below — have become epidemic in documentary, no matter the subject.”

14. Howard Stern Says He Has Changed. How Much?

“I meet people and they go, ‘I have a radio show,’ and I want to strangle them. I’m like, ‘No, you don’t. You’re doing a podcast.’ People just talk and talk and there’s nothing exciting going on. To do a good interview, there’s a certain knowledge you must bring to it, a certain intelligence, a certain empathy. You have to not only do research but also have a sense of what keeps people interested, when to cut them off, when to help them out. It’s a whole process, and you have to labor over it.”

1. Why You Should Start Binge-Reading Right Now

“In book after book, if you do push on through one chapter break, and then on through the chapter break after that, something amazing happens. Subplots that would once have been murky to the point of incomprehensibility (what was the deal with that dead sea captain again?) step into the light. Little jokes and echoes, separated by dozens or even hundreds of pages, come rustling out of the text forest. A writer’s voice — Grace Paley at her slangy best, Nicholson Baker at his hypomanic craziest — starts to seep into and color the voice of your innermost thoughts.”

2. Nearly Half of College Students Surveyed in a New Report Are Going Hungry

“Stories about college hunger have been largely anecdotal, cemented by ramen and macaroni and cheese jokes. But recent data indicate the problem is more serious and widespread, affecting almost half of the student population at community and public colleges.”

3. Giannis Antetokounmpo Is the Pride of a Greece That Shunned Him

“When Antetokounmpo was still an ordinary mortal, he was seen as just another migrant in Greece illegally. Now that he is a basketball star, ‘he has become the ambassador for Greece.’”

4. To Combat Climate Change, Start From the Ground Up (With Dirt)

“Dirt is dead, soil is alive.”

5. A Century Ago, America Built Another Kind of Wall

“Race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree…. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.”

6. What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With

“At the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.”

7. Why the Rich Don’t Get Audited

“Today, the wealthy and corporations have the I.R.S. outgunned. The ultra-affluent — with the help of legions of tax professionals — make domestic income disappear overseas or hide it in a pyramid of partnerships. It’s like trying to take on a modern army while armed with spears and clubs.”

8. The End Is Nigh: Time to Talk It Over

“The United States has been at war how many years now? And we’ve had these long-running movies that are just war movies, again and again. Yes, they are overtly depoliticized, but they certainly are political in another way. Each movie’s a justification of war.”

9. Riot Grrrl United Feminism and Punk. Here’s an Essential Listening Guide.

“This is a list of essential riot grrrl music, one song per artist — a starting point, not a totality. If you don’t like our list, make your own. That’s the point, really. Do it yourself.”

10. A Manifesto for Opting Out of an Internet-Dominated World

“She argues that because the internet strips us of our sense of place and time, we can counter its force by resituating ourselves within our physical environment, by becoming closer to the natural world.”

11. Why Are There So Many Books About Dogs?

“After at least 14,000 years of living with dogs, why are we only now getting around to considering what goes on inside their heads?”

12. Almost All the Colleges I Wanted to Go to Rejected Me. Now What?

“If your self-worth is tied to being better than others, then, you’re headed for trouble.”

13. Letter of Recommendation: Jury Duty

“It’s one thing to know, abstractly, how our legal system works and quite another to sit in the rusty conflict-resolution machine itself and understand that it really does fall to rooms like this and people like you to say whether someone died wrongly, and whether someone else should receive millions of dollars because of that. Life is mostly an accumulation of habits, slight turns, chance occurrences, but here we were tasked with making a decision that would instantly and probably irrevocably alter the course of our fellow citizens’ lives.”

1. World on Fire

“The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.”

2. Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’

“Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother.”

3. I’m Done Mowing My Lawn

“Every summer, I imagine a different landscape, one that I do not have to mow. My sunny front lawn would be a great place to grow a vegetable garden: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and maybe some chard. But if my dandelions raise eyebrows, imagine the reaction I would get to a raised garden bed just a few feet from the sidewalk.”

4. Who Will Defend the American Family?

“Today’s political conversation tends to overlook those women who would prefer to raise their children in one-breadwinner families like the ones they grew up in.”

5. The Rich Kid Revolutionaries

“Class privilege is like white privilege, in that its beneficiaries receive advantages that are, in fact, unearned. So for them to conclude that their own wealth is undeserved, and therefore immoral, constitutes a powerful critique of the idea of meritocracy.”

6. Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?

“Only here is the word ‘socialism’ freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. In every other free society with a functioning market economy, socialism is an ordinary, rather general term for sane and compassionate governance of the public purse for the purpose of promoting general welfare and a more widespread share in national prosperity.”

7. The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age

“The poor often bear the burden of both ends of the spectrum of privacy harms; they are subjected to greater suspicion and monitoring when they apply for government benefits and live in heavily policed neighborhoods, but they can also lose out on education and job opportunities when their online profiles and employment histories aren’t visible (or curated) enough.”

8. Can Bar-Stool Democracy Save America?

“This migration from social to virtual drinking spaces may be good for our livers, but not for our body politic.”

9. The Empty Promises of Suicide Prevention

“Antidepressants can’t supply employment or affordable housing, repair relationships with family members or bring on sobriety.”

10. The Raisin Situation

“The American raisin industry, which is estimated to be worth about $500 million, is particularly fractious.”

11. By the Book: Gary Snyder

“Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially, but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked.”

12. Savior Complex

“Androgynous images of God, rejection of traditional gender roles and the promise of economic security on a quasi-Christian commune held special appeal for women, especially those who needed a way to leave toxic marriages and survive on their own.”

13. After Reconstruction

“The German word for this effort is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — coming to terms with the past — and it carries connotations of a painful history that citizens would rather not confront but that must be confronted in order not to be repeated. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essential for understanding the American past as a whole.”

14. How to Be a Nose Breather

“Humans naturally do most of their breathing through their nasal passages, which serve to heat, humidify and filter the air. It’s not uncommon, though, to slip into a mouth-breathing habit. Test yourself by inhaling through your nostrils.”

1. The Healing Power of Gardens

“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.”

2. Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion.

“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies.”

3. The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet

“At the top of the world’s largest and most volatile video platform is a calm, levelheaded person. But her deliberate style may be at odds with the pace and scale of horrors and just plain stupidity that relentlessly arises on YouTube.”

4. Let’s Celebrate the Easter Bug.

“Much candy on the market is coated with confectioner’s glaze, a.k.a. ‘shellac’ — a natural, F.D.A.-approved, edible lacquer created through cultivating and processing the resinous discharge from teeny tiny lac bugs in India and Southeast Asia.”

5. Finding the Beauty in Cultural Appropriation

“Through my travels, I’ve come to see appropriation as a form of communication: Sometimes what people are trying to say is trivial, hurtful and condescending — a bindi to proclaim that they’re ‘exotic’ for instance, or cornrows to say they’re ‘cool.’ But other times, what is being said is difficult and important.”

6. The Earth Is Just as Alive as You Are

“The history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth.”

7. We Built an ‘Unbelievable’ (but Legal) Facial Recognition Machine

“If you’re an adult in America, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that you’re already in a law enforcement facial recognition database.”

8. Reverend, You Say the Virgin Birth Is ‘a Bizarre Claim’?

“We need a new way entirely to think about what it means to be a human being and what the purpose of our lives is. For me, this moment feels apocalyptic, as if something new is struggling to be born.”

9. Lil Nas X’s Smash Makes Country Wonder if Rap Is Friend or Foe. Again. + A History of Country-Rap in 29 Songs

“Pop, more than ever, is an identity playground.”

10. Stepping Out on Easter Sunday

“Spring is more than a ritual — it’s a necessary reminder that these hardships we endure are only temporary. And what better way to celebrate a time of year marked by life and vitality than elaborate rituals of beauty, bodily adornment and anointment?”

11. Robert A. Caro, Private Eye

“He slowed down. Thought takes time. Truth takes time. When the research had filled in the blanks, he compiled first drafts in longhand, second and third and fourth drafts, too, and on a Smith-Corona Electra 210, writing 1,000 words a day.”

12. A Meditation on Our Relationship to the Landscapes We Inhabit

“Lessard devotes much of the book to exploring what she terms America’s ‘atopia,’ our vast, seemingly unplanned, inchoate, exurban sprawl, which remains to her largely inscrutable and tragic. She writes about such places from what you might call an exalted literary remove. The mode is epistolary, poetic, occasionally honest to a fault.”

13. Alex Jones Under Oath Is an Antidote to a ‘Post-Truth’ Age

“It is not really possible anymore to say where Jones’s universe ends and mainstream conservatism begins.”

14. Letter of Recommendation: Digging a Trench

“I’d dug holes before, to plant trees and post fences, and I’d chopped wood to heat the house in winter, but those jobs took place in one spot. Their focus was stationary, whereas the trench had a vector that carried me into the unknown.”

15. Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

“If prison, in its philosophical origin, was meant as a humane alternative to beatings or torture or death, it has transformed into a fixed feature of modern life, one that is not known, even by its supporters and administrators, for its humanity. In the United States, we now have more than two million incarcerated people, a majority of them black or brown, virtually all of them from poor communities. Prisons not only have violated human rights and failed at rehabilitation; it’s not even clear that prisons deter crime or increase public safety.”

1. Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change

“Average temperatures have risen by about two degrees Fahrenheit in Central America over the past several decades, making the cultivation of coffee difficult, if not untenable, at lower altitudes that were once suitable. That has forced some farmers to search for land at higher altitudes, switch to other crops, change professions — or migrate.”

2. Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

“Anytime a technology company creates a system that could be used in surveillance, law enforcement inevitably comes knocking.”

3. Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.

“The history of society is intertwined with the history of script.”

4. How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy

“The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangement — and therefore a contingent and impermanent state of affairs.”

5. What the Bible Says About Secrets

“Beyond the spiritual considerations, for any sort of moral formation, some privacy is necessary. To develop human relationships and a sense of the social self, we need privacy.”

6. The Infinite Scroll

“We are much more likely to be looking at our digital slabs than at our fellow human beings.”

7. A.I. Is Changing Insurance

“This is the cutting edge of the insurance industry, adjusting premiums and policies based on new forms of surveillance. It will affect your life insurance, your car insurance and your homeowner’s insurance — if it hasn’t already.”

8. What Women Know About the Internet

“It isn’t just that real-life harassment also shows up online, it’s that the internet isn’t designed for women, even when the majority of users of some popular applications and platforms are women. In fact, some features of digital life have been constructed, intentionally or not, in ways that make women feel less safe.”

9. The Only Answer Is Less Internet

“A movement to restore privacy must be, at some level, a movement against the internet. Not a pure Luddism, but a movement for limits, for internet-free spaces, for zones of enforced pre-virtual reality (childhood and education above all), for social conventions that discourage career-destroying tweets and crotch shots by encouraging us to put away our iPhones.”

10. Facebook Is Stealing Your Family’s Joy

“I came to a simple conclusion about getting the reactions of friends, family and acquaintances via emojis and exclamations points rather than hugs and actual exclamations. It’s no fun. And I don’t want to do it any more.”

11. How Tough-on-Crime Prosecutors Contribute to Mass Incarceration

“In Charged, a persuasive indictment of prosecutorial excess, Bazelon argues that the lawyers who work in the more than 2,000 prosecutors’ offices around the country — conducting investigations, filing criminal charges and trying cases (or, much more commonly, striking plea bargains) — bear much of the responsibility for over-incarceration, conviction of the innocent and other serious problems of the criminal justice system.”

12. Animal Videos Are How We Escape the Internet (While on the Internet)

“The online world is an interactive museum of humiliation, sadism, greed, bleak news, bad faith and gross memes. This is why we need animal videos. They are small windows of grace.”

13. Letter of Recommendation: Spuds MacKenzie

“Spuds, an anthropomorphized bull terrier, was dreamed up by a 20-something advertising exec in the mid-1980s in an attempt to target beer drinkers between the ages of 21 and 34. He was rich, impossibly cool, unabashedly heterosexual and responsible for increasing Bud Light sales 20 percent between 1987 and 1988. (The campaign was so popular that Miller Lite released a T-shirt that featured a dead dog run over by a Miller Lite truck.)”

14. How to Laugh at Yourself

“Your underlying mind-set should be playful.”

15. How Big Business Is Hedging Against the Apocalypse

“Depending on whom you ask, climate change doesn’t exist, or is an engineering problem, or requires global mobilization, or could be solved by simply nudging the free market into action. Absent a coherent strategy, opportunists can step in and benefit in wily ways from the shifting landscape.”

16. Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready

“For Pinkerton, the bet is twofold: first, that there’s no real material difference between climate change and any other conflict — as the world grows more predictably dangerous, tactical know-how will simply be more in demand than ever. And second, that by adding data analytics, Pinkerton stands to compete more directly with traditional consulting firms like Deloitte, which offer pre- and postdisaster services (supply-chain monitoring, damage documentation, etc.), but which cannot, say, dispatch a helicopter full of armed guards to Guatemala in an afternoon. In theory, Pinkerton can do both — a fully militarized managerial class at corporate disposal.”

1. The Con of the Side Hustle

“The ‘side hustle’ is one of a growing roster of trendy corporatized idioms, like ordinary household appliances that are now ‘smart’ or plain vanilla businessmen and women remade into the more exotic ‘entrepreneurs.’ Our jobs are now ‘flexible,’ although we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we are professionally ‘nimble’ because we are trying to survive on freelance gigs.”

2. Fungus Immune to Drugs Quietly Sweeps the Globe

“For decades, public health experts have warned that the overuse of antibiotics was reducing the effectiveness of drugs that have lengthened life spans by curing bacterial infections once commonly fatal. But lately, there has been an explosion of resistant fungi as well, adding a new and frightening dimension to a phenomenon that is undermining a pillar of modern medicine.”

3. In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash

“A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.”

4. How to See a Stamp: As a 55-Cent Canvas

“The process can take years.”

5. The Moral Peril of Meritocracy

“When people are broken open in this way, they are more sensitive to the pains and joys of the world. They realize: Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain. I am ready for a larger journey.”

6. You Are Not as Good at Kissing as You Think. But You Are Better at Dancing.

“People tended to overestimate how they compared with others in their ability to dodge a fraud, win a trivia contest or cuddle. But they tended to underestimate how they ranked in their ability to predict the outcome of a sporting event, win a fistfight or dance.”

7. Why Do We All Have to Be Beautiful?

“Challenging social norms about who can be beautiful is vital work, and of course it is true that representations of beauty in the media are pathetically white, thin, able-bodied and hetero, and of course this should change. But somewhere along the way, the message of inclusivity went from ‘every kind of person can be beautiful’ to ‘every person is beautiful.’ I’m increasingly convinced that this message isn’t only less radical than we might like to believe, but also actively harmful.”

8. If Prisons Don’t Work, What Will?

“Now, with public opinion shifting far and fast and politicians hurrying to catch up, you could even argue that criminal justice reform has become the new marriage equality in terms of the turnaround in public attitudes.”

9. It’s Your iPhone. Why Can’t You Fix It Yourself?

“The growing complexity of electronic devices … means that people need help from manufacturers. And companies have taken advantage of that shift in power.”

10. Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing, From Mail Art to Instagram

“‘We have been sending postcards and snapshots since the early time of photography,’ Mr. Chéroux said, though noting that the volume and intensity of communication have of course grown with social media.”

11. Like, Comment, Subscribe, Weep

“I’ve made a digital product for you to consume. It’s a video series about internet culture, and it is branded around me. It’s called ‘Internetting With Amanda Hess’ and it’s about the downfall of cat memes, the rise of Instagram cyborgs, the creeping dominance of hands videos, and more. I want you to watch it and share it with everyone you know, and everyone you don’t. I want you to Tweet it, Facebook it, Pin it, Instagram it and post it everywhere else influence is sold.”

12. By the Book: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“I just donated 14,000 books to Spelman College, so I’m starting the organizational process all over.”

13. A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

“To understand what isn’t working for so many people it’s necessary to scrutinize the coders themselves, their personalities and biases. The very particular culture they’ve created infuses everything they produce for the rest of us.”

14. Robert A. Caro on the Means and Ends of Power

I don’t believe that I’m writing a ‘great-man theory of history.’ I believe that what I’m writing about are the rare individuals who can harness political forces and bring something out of them, either for good or for ill.

15. How to Dig Up a Grave

“If you’re lucky, the remains will be contained in an intact coffin.”

16. How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation

“Around the time when Allen found SteadyHealth, there were, by one count, 12 whispering channels on YouTube; three years later, that number had more than tripled. Soon a hard-won Wikipedia page would further extend the reach of the term — and further enshrine the new video genre. By 2015, the ASMR Group had made itself irrelevant. When Allen set out to name the weird sensation, she thought she was simply describing what she felt. She couldn’t foresee that her term would enable a whole new form of entertainment — or possibly something that transcended entertainment — born of the kismet of algorithmic fate as it brushed up against the crossed wires of the brain.”