Submitted For Your Perusal

1. Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This

“Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.”

2. How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

“Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.”

3. Hold the Egg Sandwich: Egyptian TV Is Calling

“Mr. El-Gamasy owns the Lotus Deli in Ridgewood, Queens, a place known for its sandwiches, extensive craft beer selection, and its gracious, friendly owner. But few of his customers — and likely, none of his viewers in Egypt — know that the man making egg sandwiches and small talk behind the counter is the same one who appears on popular Egyptian television news programs, holding forth on subjects from immigration policy to North Korea.”

4. Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains

“For about half a century, computer makers have built systems around a single, do-it-all chip — the central processing unit — from a company like Intel, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers. That’s what you’ll find in the middle of your own laptop computer or smartphone. Now, computer engineers are fashioning more complex systems. Rather than funneling all tasks through one beefy chip made by Intel, newer machines are dividing work into tiny pieces and spreading them among vast farms of simpler, specialized chips that consume less power.”

5. Bump in U.S. Incomes Doesn’t Erase 50 Years of Pain

“Since the 1950s, three-quarters of working Americans have seen no change in lifetime income.”

6. In Amish Country, the Future Is Calling

“The Amish have not given up on horse-drawn buggies. Their rigid abstinence from many kinds of technology has left parts of their lifestyle frozen since the 19th century: no cars, TVs or connections to electric utilities, for example. But computers and cellphones are making their way into some Amish communities, pushing them — sometimes willingly, often not — into the 21st century.”

7. When History’s Losers Write the Story

“The South, facing catastrophic loss of life and mass destruction on a European scale, wrote its own history of the war. It cast itself as an underdog overwhelmed by the North’s superior numbers, but whose cause — a noble fight for states’ rights — was just. The North looked the other way. Northern elites were more interested in re-establishing economic ties than in keeping their commitments to blacks’ constitutional rights. The political will to complete Reconstruction died.”

8. The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

“The ups and downs of his reputation reflect changes in key elements of Americans’ historical consciousness — how we understand race relations, the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the nature of the good society.”

9. The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here

“Millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. If new suburbs can hit the sweet spot that accommodates the priorities of that generation, millennial habitats will redefine everyday life for all suburbanites, which is 70 percent of Americans.”

10. How to Bring Your Vacation Home With You

“Beyond a week or two away from work, more time off isn’t going to make you happier or calmer or produce more lasting gains of another sort.”

11. The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled

“We often say what happened in Nazi Germany couldn’t happen here. But some of it, like the mistreatment and sterilization of the disabled, did happen here.”

12. The Ever-Changing Business of ‘Anti-Aging’

“The only real solution to aging is, of course, death, but our central mode of dealing with that inevitability is to delay and deny it.”

13. New Sentences: From Lower Ed, by Tressie McMillan Cottom

“Lower Ed is a dense little wonder. What seems like it might be a narrow academic study — a sociological analysis of for-profit colleges — turns out to be about the whole agitated essence of America: our markets, inequalities, prejudices, blind spots and guiding mythologies.”

14. What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

“For centuries, Western liberalism has ruled the world. The Chinese believe their time has come.”

15. RT, Sputnik and Russia’s New Theory of War

“You can tighten your internet security protocols to protect against data breaches, run counterhacking operations to take out infiltrators, sanction countries with proven links to such activities. But RT and Sputnik operate on the stated terms of Western liberal democracy; they count themselves as news organizations, protected by the First Amendment and the libertarian ethos of the internet.”

16. What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark?

“One lesson of publicly funded science is that Americans are not very good at predicting how useful it will be.”

1. Waiting for the Big One in Florida

“At first, we bought our supplies three and four days before a hurricane hit. Then we refined our strategy to a day or two. I filled the bathtub with water we could use in the toilet when we lost power. I cleaned and oiled our 9-millimeter pistols, then loaded them.”

2. A de Kooning, a Theft and an Enduring Mystery

“They are trying to determine if the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher — something of a renaissance man — who donned women’s clothing and took his son along as his accomplice, and then hung the masterwork in the bedroom of his own rural New Mexico home, where it remained. In other words, they are examining whether he stole a painting now valued at in excess of $100 million simply so he could enjoy it.”

3. How Henry Threadgill, Composer, Spends His Sundays

“I don’t worry about staying out late. I can stay up all night. I may be out at some performance until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, but I’ll still be up at 6:30 the next day. I take naps — in the morning, in the afternoon, it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is the work, the music. Researching and studying. I do it every day, no matter what day of the week it is.”

4. His Bravery Unsung, Varian Fry Acted to Save Jews

“Given the scope of his heroism and its implications for the momentum of 20th century cultural life, Fry remains relatively little known. He died in 1967, in Connecticut, a high school Latin teacher.”

5. The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick

“In Kaepernick’s absence, other players will kneel. Demonstrators will protest. Some will boycott. His jersey will be seen, more as a political statement than a sporting allegiance, as the game goes on without him.”

6. Ray Dalio Spreads His Gospel of ‘Radical Transparency’

“Is it a hedge fund, or a social experiment?”

7. What the Rich Won’t Tell You

“Their ambivalence about recognizing privilege suggests a deep tension at the heart of the idea of American dream. While pursuing wealth is unequivocally desirable, having wealth is not simple and straightforward. Our ideas about egalitarianism make even the beneficiaries of inequality uncomfortable with it. And it is hard to know what they, as individuals, can do to change things.”

8. How to Fix the Person You Love

“Today, we expect our spouse not only to make us feel loved, but also to be a kind of life coach.”

9. These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised

“Whether real or fictional, robots hold a mirror up to society. If Rosie and her kin embodied a 20th-century yearning for domestic order and familial bliss, smart speakers symbolize our own, more self-absorbed time.”

10. One Nation Under a Movie Theater? It’s a Myth.

“White supremacy is part of the heritage of Hollywood, which is to say of the American mainstream.”

11. Is Jake Paul a Social Media Genius or a Jerk?

“He has 10.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and seemingly five million haters. This high school dropout from Ohio has already outlasted Vine, the short-form video platform that gave him his first taste of fame; survived an ill-fated turn as a Disney star; cut a rap anthem (‘It’s Everyday Bro’) that became, simultaneously, one of the most viral and reviled songs on the internet; and established himself in the eyes of grown-up America as an embodiment of everything that is wonderful and horrible about Generation Z.”

12. What We Talk About When We Talk About and Exactly Like Trump

“Quick — try to recall anything Barack Obama, one of our most oratorically gifted presidents, said during his eight-year tenure outside of a written speech (and still nothing comes to mind as readily as President Trump’s ‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now’). Even Mr. Obama’s abstract ‘Yes we can’ campaign slogan seems to have been crushed by the concrete force of ‘Build the wall.’”

13. Fake News: It’s as American as George Washington’s Cherry Tree

“Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm.”

14. Americans Are Confronting an Alarming Question: Are Many of Our Fellow Citizens ‘Nazis?’

“The uncomfortable truth is that Nazi policy was itself influenced by American white supremacy, a heritage well documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book Hitler’s American Model. The Germans admired, and borrowed from, the ‘distinctive legal techniques that Americans had developed to combat the menace of race mixing’ — like the anti-miscegenation laws of Maryland, which mandated up to 10 years in prison for interracial marriage. At the time, no other country had such specific laws; they were an American innovation.”

15. Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost.

“It’s important to understand that what happened to Michigan’s schools isn’t solely, or even primarily, an education story: It’s a business story.”

16. ‘The Way to Survive It Was to Make A’s’

“An idea took hold of her. What would society look like if she exposed young wealthy white students to black scholarship students? Would the South change if its future leaders were socialized to be less bigoted? Her aim, using a few token blacks to mend the South’s racial divide from the top down, was utopian to say the least. It was also novel, a systematic effort by whites to help rid other whites of their prejudices. Providing a better life for black students was secondary.”

17. Who Benefits From the Expansion of A.P. Classes?

“Questions about the A.P. program’s purpose are complicated further by the fact that it provides a not-insignificant amount of revenue for the College Board.”

18. In a Topsy-Turvy World, Fashion Finds Solace in the Mundane

“When the world is falling apart around you, you just want to wear a cardigan.”

19. The Weird Brilliance of Joaquin Phoenix

“Phoenix’s life is remarkably simple compared to what people might imagine. He lives with Mara in the Hollywood Hills (he’s never been married and has no children) and is usually asleep by 9 p.m. and up at 6. When he’s not working his daily routine consists of answering emails, ‘chilling’ with his dog, meditating, taking a karate class, eating lunch, reading scripts and dinner — but for most of last year he’d been on location. He watches documentaries on Netflix (and he watched the 10-hour true-crime doc The Staircase recently because Mara wanted to) but rarely watches new movies.”

20. Who Will Save These Dying Italian Towns?

“There are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.”

21. Bruce Chatwin: One of the Last Great Explorers

“We think of travelers as people who have no attachment to things, but true travelers are people who really have no attachment to place. Home is not a beloved memory or something to yearn for and fetishize, but merely a matter of circumstance: a piece of land (sometimes large, but usually small) on which one eats and sleeps, sometimes for a lifetime, and sometimes for a day. Home, therefore, is anywhere, and yet nowhere as well. Chatwin was powerfully attracted to nomadism, and you might view his collective writings as a struggle to discard this idea of home as a kind of heaven, and to replace it with the radical notion that the person who found himself adrift, in perpetual motion, might already be at home — that movement itself might be the ideal human state.”

1. In Silicon Valley, Working 9 to 5 Is for Losers

“A century ago, factory workers were forming unions and going on strike to demand better conditions and a limit on hours. Today, Silicon Valley employees celebrate their own exploitation.”

2. Football Among the Old Believers, in Alaska

“There’s a fear by some that ‘We’re losing our culture, our identity.’ But the flip side is, if you don’t offer something, you’ll lose the kids.”

3. Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now

“In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.”

4. Jason Fried of Basecamp on the Importance of Writing Skills

“The other thing that is weird about the business world in general is the obsession with domination and winning and destroying and fighting. Why? What is that about? It doesn’t ring true with me at all. Can’t you just build a nice business and can’t other people have a nice business?”

5. Get Ready for Technological Upheaval by Expecting the Unimagined

“Rather than planning for the specific changes we imagine, it is better to prepare for the unimagined — for change itself.”

6. Goodbye, Yosemite. Hello, What?

“I agree with the photographer Ansel Adams that ‘on entering the Ahwahnee, one is conscious of calm and complete beauty echoing the mood of majesty and peace that is the essential quality of Yosemite.’ But I also think there is something inescapably sick about a hotel on the site of a torched town copping a little mysto-Indian vibe from the word used by the arsonists’ victims for the valley they called home, and deliberately designed with a pan-Indian motif meant to conjure white fantasy while avoiding reference to any particular Native people.”

7. Don’t Suspend Students. Empathize.

“What looks like disobedience may reflect the ways teenagers are learning how to navigate the world — not as troublemakers, but as adolescents, testing out new identities.”

8. Instagram Your Leftovers: History Depends on It

“With its vast reach and the technological savvy of its users, Instagram could go beyond mere glamour and open up a domestic world that has always been elusive. I’m talking about ordinary meals at home — the great unknown in the study of food.”

9. The Best Era for Working Women Was 20 Years Ago

“The late 1990s … may have been as good as it gets for American women in the workplace.”

10. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Tackle the Vietnam War

“The 79 onscreen interviews give the ground-up view of the war from the mostly ordinary people who lived through it: American veterans (including former P.O.W.’s), Gold Star mothers, diplomats, intelligence officers, antiwar activists, journalists, Vietcong fighters, North and South Vietnamese army regulars, even a (woman) truck driver from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

11. Paul Newman’s Rare Rolex Has Auction Watchers Buzzing

“It is basically the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous timepiece in the world, coveted all the more because for decades, no one outside the Newman family seemed to know where it was.”

12. Who’s Allowed to Hold Hands?

“There is a strange hierarchy of handholding that dictates who gets to express physical affection without repercussions. For straight couples it’s fine, of course. For white gay couples it’s a little less fine. For black lesbians like us, it can feel like a radical act.”

13. Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues

“Ms. Delzer is a member of a growing tribe of teacher influencers, many of whom promote classroom technology. They attract notice through their blogs, social media accounts and conference talks. And they are cultivated not only by start-ups like Seesaw, but by giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, to influence which tools are used to teach American schoolchildren.”

14. Jesmyn Ward: By the Book

“All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves — 6 percent of the total U.S. population — who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery’s frontier.”

15. ‘Good Booty’: The Sexual Power of Music

“Her argument, that ‘we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music,’ is intimately tied to the body: enslaved and objectified black bodies, the erotic sublimation and liberation of dance, the dialogue between charismatic performer and enraptured audience and the problem of ‘cyborg’ singers like Britney Spears.”

16. The Amish Guide to the Apocalypse

“Jacob, an Amish farmer and carpenter, serves as our tour guide to this disorienting psychological landscape. The novel takes the form of his diary, and his sentences proceed with Amish forbearance: His words are simple and, like a buggy-tugging horse, each pulls its weight. This stylistic staidness runs in satisfying counterpoint to the dramas unfolding in the outside world of the ‘English’ — the Amish term for non-Amish people. Without electricity or fuel, transportation systems fail and the English lose access to food shipments. Looting, murder and mass starvation result.”

17. The Real-Life Reality Show That Jumped the Shark

“Like the best episodes of Black Mirror, Made for Love provokes the disturbing realization that we are, more or less, already living in the time portrayed as a couple of steps beyond too much.”

18. Should Critics Aim to Be Open-Minded or to Pass Judgment

“The simplest prescription for better criticism of all kinds — electronic, journalistic, academic — remains: read more; think longer; write less.”

19. In Our Cynical Age, No One Fails Anymore — Everybody ‘Pivots

“The ‘pivot’ has assumed a peculiar place in our common lexicon. A word once used to describe a guard angling for position on the basketball court is now in wide circulation in politics and business. That’s especially the case in Sili­con Valley, where pivoting has become the new failure, a concept to describe a haphazard, practically madcap form of iterative development. With its sheen of management-speak, pivoting is well suited to our moment. And like any act of public relations, pivoting is also a performance. A key part of the act is acknowledging that you are doing it while trying to recast the effort as something larger, more sophisticated, highly planned. The pivot, though it arises from desperation, is nevertheless supposed to appear methodical.”

20. How to Write a Love Letter

“You need a minimum of one hour.”

21. The Incarcerated Women Who Fight California’s Wildfires

“When they work, California’s inmates typically earn between 8 cents and 95 cents an hour. They make office furniture for state employees, state license plates, prison uniforms, anything that any state institution might use. But wages in the forestry program, while still wildly low by outside standards, are significantly better than the rest … Inmate firefighters can make a maximum of $2.56 a day in camp and $1 an hour when they’re fighting fires.”

1. Memorize That Poem!

“Since ancient times, humans have memorized and recited poetry. Before the invention of writing, the only way to possess a poem was to memorize it. Long after scrolls and folios supplemented our brains, court poets, priests and wandering bards recited poetry in order to entertain and connect with the divine. For individuals, a poem learned by heart could be a lifeline — to grapple with overwhelming emotion or preserve sanity amid the brutalities of prison and warfare.”

2. Late Wages for Migrant Workers at a Trump Golf Course in Dubai

“Mr. Paindkhel is not familiar with golf. He does not understand the purpose of the lush grass that he and his co-workers have grown in the desert, though he admires its serene beauty. He cannot read the signs identifying the golf resort as a Trump property. He cannot read at all.”

3. The Worst (and Best) Places to Be Gay in America

“There’s no such thing as L.G.B.T. life in America, a country even more divided on this front than on others. There’s L.G.B.T. life in a group of essentially progressive places like New York, Maryland, Oregon and California, which bans government-funded travel to states it deems unduly discriminatory. Then there is L.G.B.T. life on that blacklist, which includes Texas, Kansas, Mississippi and South Dakota.”

4. Networking Is Overrated

“It’s true that networking can help you accomplish great things. But this obscures the opposite truth: Accomplishing great things helps you develop a network.”

5. The Secret to a Good Robot Teacher

“For millenniums, the environs in which we learned best were social ones. It was through other people’s testimony or through interactive discourse and exploration with them that we learned facts about our world and new ways of solving problems. And it’s precisely because of this history that we can expect the mind to be socially tuned, meaning that it should rely on and incorporate social cues to facilitate learning. When it comes to most educational technology, this insight has been ignored.”

6. There Once Was a Great Nation With an Unstable Leader

“As Caligula wreaked havoc, Rome also had values, institutions and mores that inspired resistance. He offended practically everyone, he couldn’t deliver on his promises, his mental stability was increasingly doubted and he showed he simply had no idea how to govern. Within a few years, he had lost all support, and the Praetorian Guard murdered him.”

7. Cure Yourself of Tree Blindness

“Just naming trees might sound a bit like a parlor trick to impress your friends. But it’s also a way to start paying attention. Then you notice more interesting things. Trees put on one of nature’s great sex shows. Each spring they break their winter dormancy with a burst of genitalia, also known as flowers.”

8. In Virginia and on TV, A Supremacist Summer

“To watch the movies or TV — or even to catch the hype for a certain boxing match — is to know that normalized white supremacy has been here all summer. It’s to know that the people who manufacture all sorts of popular culture have also, intentionally or not, tossed some racism onto the assembly line. It’s to know that whatever occurred in Charlottesville and then at that news conference didn’t happen in a vacuum. They were just the gnarliest flare-ups in a season of provocations that seem so business-as-usual that they scarcely feel provoked.”

9. Going Hyperlocal, Filmmakers Explore the Pain of Racism

“Only in America does it take movies to authenticate reality, and not the other way around.”

10. The Invisible Forces That Make Writing Work

“There are things the writer sees that the reader does not; things the reader sees that the writer does not; and things neither of us ever sees.”

11. A Grown-Up’s Travels Down the Rabbit Hole of Children’s Literature

“In pointing out how classic girl books aren’t always as conventionally girlish as you may think, he notes of the Little House on the Prairie series not only that Laura relishes playing, as though it were a balloon, with an inflated pig bladder that belonged to the animal her father has just skinned before her eyes, but also that ‘from the denatured vantage point of 21st-century urban fatherhood, where bantering with the super as he fixes your toilet counts as manly self-sufficiency, Pa cuts an intimidating figure: Not only does he feed and shelter his family using his own two hands … he also makes his own bullets.’”

12. How Chester B. Himes Became the Rage in Harlem, and Beyond

“Despite Himes’s literary output, wealth and sustained praise eluded him until the final third of his career. Disappointed by his American book sales and haunted by the fact that literary elites did not hold him in the same esteem as Ellison and James Baldwin, Himes took the advice of the French editor Marcel Duhamel and started writing detective novels.”

13. Don’t Panic, Liberal Arts Majors. The Tech World Wants You.

“According to both Anders and Stross, the ever-expanding tech sector is now producing career opportunities in fields — project management, recruitment, human relations, branding, data analysis, market research, design, fund-raising and sourcing, to name some — that specifically require the skills taught in the humanities. To thrive in these areas, one must be able to communicate effectively, read subtle social and emotional cues, make persuasive arguments, adapt quickly to fluid environments, interpret new forms of information while translating them into a compelling narrative and anticipate obstacles and opportunities before they arise.”

14. In ‘Campus Confidential,’ a Professor Laments That Teaching Is Not the Priority of Teachers

“Prospective students may be drawn to schools because of their esteemed faculty, but once they arrive on campus … they will find that these scholars want nothing to do with them. Instead, their education will likely be guided by part-time teachers and graduate students, who are paid a few thousand dollars a course. As Berlinerblau puts it, ‘While teaching undergraduates is normally a very large part of a professor’s job, success in our field is correlated with a professor’s ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.’”

15. An Educator Makes the Case That Higher Learning Needs to Grow Up

“The existing system dominates and discourages teachers who want to do better.”

16. How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

“Despite their participatory rhetoric, social platforms are closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic ones. It makes some sense that people with authoritarian tendencies would have an intuitive understanding of how they work and how to take advantage of them.”

17. How to Stand Still

“Recognize what’s happening, but don’t give in.”

18. Wonder Year

“While the world had little doubt Federer was done, Federer himself thought otherwise and plotted his return.”

1. How to Make Fun of Nazis

“Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit.”

2. Women of Sex Tech, Unite

“Dame, along with other new companies like Unbound, House of Plume and Sustain, is part of a tech-savvy and female-led women’s sexuality movement that has made its home in New York instead of, say, Silicon Valley. Women, many of them under 40, are updating sex toys and related products with their own needs in mind, and leading the companies that sell them.”

3. The Moral Voice of Corporate America

“Business leaders looking to the future are accepting that it is unwise to isolate swaths of the population by coming off as racist, sexist or intolerant. Instead, for the sake of the bottom line, it is imperative that they appeal to the widest possible audience.”

4. Trump Says More Jobs Will Help Race Relations. If Only It Were So Simple

“There’s not much evidence in recent history that racial attitudes are shaped by the ups and downs of the overall economy.”

5. Evidence of a Toxic Environment for Women in Economics

“The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women make for uncomfortable reading. In order, that list is: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for ‘baby’), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.”

6. How to Sell a Frank Lloyd Wright House

“The process is not easy, with many going on and off the market over many years, as owners try to find buyers willing to assume the responsibility while appreciating what they are getting.”

7. With Conrad on the Congo River

“In the midafternoon heat, as I lay on my bunk rereading Heart of Darkness, batting away tsetse flies, I had an uneasy sensation that for all that I’d come to Congo to follow Conrad, he’d never felt farther away. ‘Everything is hateful to me,’ he once told a confidante. ‘Men and things, but especially men.’ Yet I was having precisely the opposite experience: On board Primus I, I was becoming part of a dynamic floating village, where things had become familiar and people were becoming friends.”

8. What White Nationalism Gets Right About American History

“It is essential that we recognize that the white nationalist history embedded in American culture lends itself to white nationalist rallies like the one in Charlottesville. If you want to preserve Confederate memorials, but you don’t work to build monuments to historical black leaders, you share the same cause as the marchers.”

9. Is Your Sunscreen Poisoning the Ocean?

“Even in minute doses, the researchers found, oxybenzone rapidly bleaches coral and slows new growth: A single drop in 4.3 million gallons of water — about six and a half Olympic-size swimming pools — is enough to be deadly.”

10. Save Your Sanity. Downgrade Your Life.

“Over the past few years, as my work life has accelerated at boggling speed, my personal life has begun creeping backward toward the 20th century. Like carbon offsets, each decision to remove a technology at home makes the corresponding upgrade at work feel more acceptable.”

11. The New Authority in Great Books to Read: Who You Follow on Instagram

“Increasingly, book publicists are working to get new hardcovers into celebrities’ hands — not in hopes of a film option but a simple tweet, Instagram photo or Facebook post.”

12. Karl Ove Knausgaard: By the Book

“I’m convinced everything can be useful for my writing, so I buy a lot of books randomly, about subjects I think one day can make it into a novel. For instance a book about Chinese science from 1500 to 1900. I still haven’t read it, though. If I do, I’m afraid my dream of writing a wonderful Chinese novel will vanish.”

13. How the Radical Right Played the Long Game and Won

“He knew that the majority would never agree to being constrained. He therefore helped lead a push to undermine their trust in public institutions. The idea was to get voters to direct their ire at these institutions and divert their attention away from increasing income and wealth inequality.”

14. America Is Struggling to Sort Out Where ‘Violence’ Begins and Ends

“There is a rising idea that violence is embedded in everything from our social structures to our speech — that speech itself can be a form of violence, one every bit as meaningful as the physical kind.”

15. How to Survive a Bear Encounter

“If a bear is eating you, don’t play dead.”

16. Down the Breitbart Hole

“To the extent that there is a coherent ideology behind Breitbart, we’ve also done a crummy job of figuring out what it is.”

17. How Rebecca Solnit Became the Voice of the Resistance

“I am interested in almost everything, and it can sometimes seem like a burden.”

18. The Rooms Where Writers Work

“That’s my favorite thing about L.A., the constant golden light, which is a little bit unreal.”

19. The Familiar Promise of Health and Happiness in a Bottle

“As the world speeds up and its institutions crumble, we revert to rustic wizardry and the simple beauty and comfort found in nature’s bounty.”