Matt Thomas

I don’t like the way the official Twitter app for the Mac currently handles retweets. You’re given two options, to use Twitter’s baked-in retweet feature, or to quote a tweet.

If you choose the quote option, the app does just that, it generates a new tweet that simply wraps the tweet you want to reference in quotes like so:

This, however, is far from ideal for all sorts of reasons having to do with everything from conventions to readability to aesthetics. Classic style retweets are the way to go.

Thankfully, there is a way to get classic style retweets in the Mac Twitter app.

1. Quit the Twitter app and open up the Terminal.

2. Copy and paste the following line into the Terminal and hit return.

defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac DebugMode -bool true

3. Re-open the Twitter app and open up Preferences. You should see a new preference pane called “Secret.”

4. Enter “RT @{USERNAME}: {TEXT}” in the Quote Syntax field.

5. To make this stick, click back on “General” and then back on “Secret” before closing Preferences.

6. Now, when you choose “Quote Tweet…” the app should generate a classic style retweet.

1. “My Car, My Sanctuary”

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

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

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

3. “Idealistic Lawmen Taking Crime Very Personally”

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

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

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

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

“All these guns are real.”

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

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

7. “Like the Video? I Wrote the Book”

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

8. “Let’s Go Reading in the Car”

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

9. “The Voice”

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

10. “Manageable Discontents”

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

11. “Books With 140 Characters”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 (from last Sunday’s Mad Men)

GINSBERG: I feel bad for you.

DRAPER: I don’t think about you at all.—
Matt Thomas (@mattthomas) May 15, 2012

2 (something I tweeted earlier)

If you find something original check to see where it was stolen from.—
Matt Thomas (@mattthomas) May 14, 2012

3 (a tweet that appeared in my timeline this morning)

“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.” — Coco Chanel quotevadis.com/post/230926157… #quote #fashion #people—
Quote Vadis (@quotesvadis) May 15, 2012

The Mac Susan Sontag was using before her death in 2004.

(Via.)

1. “Two Smooth Operators on the Line”

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

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

“I’ll be paying this forever.”

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

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

4. “Tiny Hand Over Hand”

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

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

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

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

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

7. “The Amygdala Made Me Do It”

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

8. “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths”

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

9. “The Human Disaster of Unemployment”

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

10. “The Digital Lost-Dog Poster”

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

11. “Back to Basics, Real Basics”

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

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

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

13. “Meet Your Neighbors, if Only Online”

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

14. “When You Text Till You Drop”

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

15. “Boggle the Mind”

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

16. “The Original Colonists”

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

17. “The Writer in the Family”

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

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

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

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

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

“[David] Graeber relates the story of a women he met who got a Ph.D. from Columbia University, but whose $80,000 debt load put an academic career off-limits, since adjuncts earn close to nothing. Instead, the woman wound up working as an escort for Wall Street types. ‘Here’s someone who ought to be a professor,’ Graeber explains, ‘doing sexual services for the guys who lent her the money.’”

—Thomas Frank, “The Price of Admission,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2012

(Via Boston Review.)

As KRS-One put it on “Questions and Answers” in 1992, “Kick up that money, ho. Oh, I mean tuition.”

“I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force, and pressures. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. If you study symbolism you will discover that it is a technique of rip-off by which figures are deliberately deprived of their ground.”

—Marshall McLuhan

(Via Michael Sacasas.)

From New York magazine’s profile of/hit piece on Cornel West:

“He famously reads for two or three hours before bed, and he has astonishing recall. Even in casual conversation, he uses ‘every intellectual resource at hand,’ says Obery Hendricks, who is now a visiting Bible scholar at Columbia University. In private-study sessions with West at Princeton, Hendricks remembers, ‘He was able to seamlessly incorporate black vernacular, black music, with the deepest Western philosophical thinkers. Once we were talking about jazz, and he extemporaneously wanted to talk about the similarities between bebop and a particular moment in the Italian renaissance. I thought, What kind of mind is this? I couldn’t believe it.’ West’s protégés describe seeing themselves, under the tutelage of their mentor, not as intellectual piece workers, toiling in small antechambers, but as heirs to a great, broad tradition.”

(Via Shaun Usher.)

Related post: “Edmund Wilson Regrets…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. “Whistling His Own Tune”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. “The Jobless Young Find Their Voice”

“Where are the advocacy groups for jobless youth?”

10. “The Outsourced Life”

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

11. “Future TED Talks”

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

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

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

13. “Black Women and Fat”

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

14. “In the Middle of a Food Fight”

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

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

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

16. “Comic Guerrilla Tries Sticking With the Script”

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

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

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

18. “Cherishing Sun-Baked Cinema”

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

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

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

20. “Adding a Little Flicker to Those Lights”

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

21. “Workouts, Times 2 (or 3)”

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

22. “Hello, Stranger”

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

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

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

24. “Unleashing the Power”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28. “Color Me My Way”

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

29. “Small Wonder”

“She only ate nuts.”

30. “In-Between Days”

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

1. “Directors Heading Down New Paths”

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

2. “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes”

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

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

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

4. “The Man Is a Coach. Period.”

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

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

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

6. “The New Family Dinner”

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

7. “The Never-to-Be Bride”

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

8. “Deception Tells Its Tale, Again”

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

9. “A Battered City, Through Local Lenses”

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

10. “Broadcasting a World of Whiteness”

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

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

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

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

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

13. “Warrior in Chief”

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

14. “The Imperiled Promise of College”

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

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

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

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

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

17. “Unexceptionalism: A Primer”

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

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

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

19. “An Introvert Steps Out”

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

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

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

“That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1844)

Yesterday morning, Google formally announced their cloud storage service Google Drive.

Yesterday evening, Merlin Mann quipped:

Imagine a guy who's REALLY into panties who makes ALL his money selling data about panties. Now he offers to store your panties.

Yeah—that.—
Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) April 25, 2012

1. “Trailing a Master Photographer in Los Angeles”

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

2. “The Secret Life of a Society Maven”

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

3. “The New Shades of Feminism?”

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

4. “Keeping Body and Image in Shape”

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

5. “When a Sugar High Isn’t Enough”

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

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

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

7. “The Flight From Conversation”

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

8. “Plato’s Body, and Mine”

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

9. “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart”

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

10. “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already”

“Ineffective therapy is disturbingly common.”

11. “Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?”

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

12. “Everyone’s Lives, in Pictures”

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

13. “Sacking a Palace of Culture”

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

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

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

15. “Poe Taunts Filmmakers Evermore”

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

16. “Watching Every Click You Make”

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

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

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

18. “Cheerful Debauchery”

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

19. “Her Calling”

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

20. “Race, the Remix”

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

21. “Who Made That Pie Chart?”

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

21. “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?”

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

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

“Exercise seems to make neurons nimble.”

24. “Post-Prozac Nation”

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

25. “The Maniac in Me”

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

26. “How the Comedy Nerds Took Over”

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

27. “The Ripped, Bikini-Clad Reverend”

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

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

—Diane Keaton as Sonja in Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975)

“We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation…. There are no precedents to guide us, no widsom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.”

—Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, 1914

1. “Robert Caro’s Big Dig”

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

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

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

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

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

4. “How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By”

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

5. “The Rise of the Independent Work Force”

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

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

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

7. “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage”

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

8. “Lefties Aren’t Special After All”

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

9. “The Provocateur”

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

10. “No Scrolling Required at New Dating Sites”

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

11. “Truly Food for Thought”

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

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

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

“This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’ They never say that.”

—Jack White

Well, Jack, meet Caine and his arcade:

1. “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. “A Radical Female Hero From Dystopia”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. “In Defense of Superstition”

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

10. “Making Crime Pay”

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

11. “The Mystery of the Flying Laptop”

“When is a laptop a laptop?”

12. “Inventing the Future”

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

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

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

14. “Just One More Game …”

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

15. “Jack Outside the Box”

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

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

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

“A fantastic resource for students of mental obstructions is a German work by Heinrich Schlüb called Gehirnkrampf: Eine Geschichte der Schreibblockade, which translates to Brain Cramp: A History of Writer’s Block. Schlüb, in a flash of mimetic genius, turned in a manuscript of 375 pages that was completely blank except for the title and a dedication to his wife, who was also his secretary. ‘Zu meiner wunderbaren Ehefrau Gerta: Haben Sie dies mit Ihren Füßen getippt?’ Translated, the dedication reads ‘To my wonderful wife Gerta: Did you type this with your feet?’”

—Mark Hunter

From the criminally under-appreciated Three O’Clock High (1987):

“Entrepreneurs should leverage the trend of obscurity: Obscurity is good. Seriously. Everyone focuses a lot on trying to blow up overnight and using social media to drive as much attention as possible to whatever you’re doing, but I think one of the best assets you have when starting out is that no one knows who you are and no one cares what you’re doing. This lack of attention gives you the space and time to experiment – and to make mistakes before too many eyes are on you. The smartest entrepreneurs I’m meeting with these days are just building, getting feedback from early users, and then seeing what works and iterating from there. They’re focusing on improving their product and getting it right, and then trying to attract more attention after they’ve figured things out.”

—Peter Rojas

ᔥ Tumblin’ Erb | ↬ André Brock

1. “Where Have All the Neurotics Gone?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. “Chasing Ghosts of Poets Past”

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

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

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

7. “The Human Voice, as Game Changer”

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

8. “Computer Science for the Rest of Us”

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

9. “The Bleaker Sex”

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

10. “What Baseball Does to the Soul”

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

11. “A Sontag Sampler”

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

12. “In Florida, a Death Foretold”

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

13. “Education’s Hungry Hearts”

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

14. “Not Waiting to Say Goodbye”

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

15. “Rockers at Sea”

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

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

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

17. “Plenty to Go Around”

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

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

“Who gets pubic hair in first grade?”

19. “How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey”

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

10. “The Know-It-All”

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

21. “Prick Up Your Ears”

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

From the NASA on The Commons’ photostream. Via Pop Loser.

1. “The Brain on Love”

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

2. “From Exile to Everywhere”

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

3. “A Smartphone Future? But Not Yet”

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

4. “It Riles a Village”

“What does N.Y.U. want?”

5. “Funny, You Don’t Look Fetish”

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

6. “How the West Was Filled With Loss”

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

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

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

8. “Download: Vincent Kartheiser”

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

9. “The Case for Sleep Medicine”

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

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

“The world is one big data problem.”

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

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

12. “Avalanches of Words, Sifted and Sorted”

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

13. “Not-So-‘Mad’ Ideas About Taxes”

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

14. “Leaving His Footprints on the City”

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

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

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

16. “Why Won’t They Listen?”

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

17. “Edison Illuminated”

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

18. “Mall Rats”

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

19. “You Can’t Ruffle Sandra Lee”

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

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

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

21. “The Best Nanny Money Can Buy”

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

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

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

23. “Jungleland”

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

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

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

25. “Hello, Cruel World”

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

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

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

1. “Creature Comfort”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. “My Life’s Sentences”

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

7. “The Way We Read Now”

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

8. “When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized”

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

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

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

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

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

11. “Bypassing the Password”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. “The Enthusiast”

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

17. “Without Gods”

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

18. “Why Some Countries Go Bust”

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

19. “Who Made That Lawn Mower?”

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

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

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

21. “Is Silence Going Extinct?”

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

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

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

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

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

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.”

—Morris Berman, author of Why America Failed

“If the founder of Philadelphia could have imagined the city as it exists now he would certainly have been shocked. Faceless confusion, loss of individuality, imprisoning miles of urban and suburban growth with their throughways are the exact denial of all the social ethics of the pietists of the seventeenth or the philosophers of the eighteenth century. What they contemplated was not a conurbation but a capital, a center for the cultural and commercial life of a region, for the coming together of cosmopolitan people and ideas and interests. Philadelphia – or New York or Chicago – are no longer centers for the surrounding countryside. It takes hours of frustration to reach them. The proper functions of a capital can be performed only if it be easily accessible and built on a proper human scale; only recently did people begin to suppose that any place of fewer than a million inhabitants must by definition be a provincial backwater.”

—Laurence Lafore, American Classic (1975)

Utopia Giordano takes paintings from the past and re-imagines what they’d look like if they conformed to 21st-century beauty ideals.