Submitted For Your Perusal

1. “50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock”

“You can’t help wondering what those first Bay Area viewers 50 years ago must have thought as they watched this strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance unfold on the big screen, with the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s lush score — brazenly echoing the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ — swelling on the soundtrack. It wasn’t what they had come to expect from Hitchcock, the beloved portly ‘master of suspense,’ who had been making impishly macabre thrillers for 30-some years and had since 1955 also been the host and impresario of a very popular mystery-story anthology series on television.”

2. “At a Haven for Creative Souls, a Prolific Talent Is Affirmed”

“After two months, Mr. Bassett finally entered No. 503 to find that Ms. Grossman was, in fact, fiercely guarding an apartment nearly stuffed to the ceiling with hundreds of boxes, forcing her to live in her hallway and sleep on a deck chair. The boxes turned out to be jam-packed with a voluminous body of artwork, which Ms. Grossman had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.”

3. “Niko Bellic vs. Britney Spears and Indiana Jones”

“Wall Street analysts expected it to sell about five million copies in its first two weeks. Instead, it sold 3.6 million copies in just one day, April 29.”

4. “Gasol Ceding the Spotlight, but Still Shining”

“Bryant communicates with Gasol in Spanish on the court, but that is not why they have clicked. Their collaboration works because they are so fluent in basketball that neither one has to say much to the other.”

5. “For Griffey, the Roads Not Taken”

“His opportunity to challenge Ruth and Aaron has come and gone.”

6. “Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.”

“In setting the tone for ‘Swingtown,’ its producers … said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of ‘The Wonder Years,’ the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

7. “Mike Tyson Film Takes a Swing at His Old Image”

“But does the public have any appetite left for Mr. Tyson? Muhammad Ali, an Olympic hero with political cachet, has been feted in his postboxing life. Mr. Tyson, on the other hand, has been (unfairly perhaps) dismissed as a mere fighting machine.”

8. “Special Effects From the Real World”

“He acquired the rights to the film, and, he said, ‘I started to collect visuals.’

“‘It took me about 16 years,’ he added. In the meantime, he continued to work in commercials, for clients like Levi’s, Nike and MTV, as well as directing music videos for groups like Green Day and R.E.M.”

9. “1958: The War of the Intellectuals”

“In ‘The Un-Angry Young Men,’ an essay in the British monthly Encounter in 1958, Leslie Fiedler wrote that American popular culture ‘has never been in a duller or less promising condition.’ Meanwhile, ‘everyone, and not least the highbrows, wants to read about popular culture’ — to the point that ‘the study of popular culture threatens itself to become a branch of popular culture.’”

10. “Lexicographical Longing”

“As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.”

1. “Before Hours in the City That Always Sleeps In”

“This whole city-that-never-sleeps thing — on target when you’re looking for a place to dance at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, eat at 4 a.m. on a Wednesday or do yoga at 5 a.m. on a Thursday — can get a little dicey come 6 or 7 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.”

2. “Soccer Star’s Misadventure Leaves His Fans Smirking”

“For those fans, the essence of the so-called beautiful game is deeply masculine, and its big-name players are expected to be exemplars of heterosexuality.”

3. “At College, a High Standard on Divorce”

“College officials say, and students seem to agree, that it is appropriate to require members of their voluntary religious community to adhere to Christian standards of behavior. The controversy here is over what to do when the messiness of life gets in the way.”

4. “Dressed for a Meeting, Ready for Mayhem”

“From streets to stairwells, garbage bins to muddy riverbanks, the tradition of the dapper detective runs through years of law enforcement, surviving the rough-and-tumble of gritty streets and a trend in recent years toward dress-down Fridays and casual attire.

“Never mind that it can seem incongruous to wear business attire to make arrests, scrutinize the blood and debris of a murder scene, and confront killers and thieves.”

5. “New Album, New Fears, Same Old Attitude”

“I’m kind of like W .E. B. Du Bois/Meets Heavy D & the Boyz.”

6. “Here Comes Everyboy, Again”

“The male rejection of adulthood is now the dominant attitude in Hollywood comedy, even (or perhaps especially) in movies whose sexual frankness makes them officially unsuitable for children. Occasionally you will see a functioning if beleaguered dad, usually a widower, like Steve Carell’s character in Dan in Real Life. And sometimes, as in Little Miss Sunshine, a coeducational, multigenerational ensemble will carry the therapeutic and satirical burdens of the genre.

“But far more often the center of attention will be a guy, his buddies and his toys. He will, most of the time, be nudged toward responsibility, forgiven for his quirks and nurtured in his needs and neuroses by a woman who represents an ideal amalgam of supermodel and mom.

“It would be hypocritical of me to dismiss the appeal of this fantasy and silly to deny that a lot of these movies manage to be both very funny and disarmingly insightful about the male psyche. But I suspect I’m not alone in growing weary of the relentless contemplation of that psyche in its infantile state, and of the endless celebration of arrested development as a social entitlement.”

7. “Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?”

“Last year only 3 of the 20 highest-grossing releases in America were female-driven, and involve a princess (Enchanted) or pregnancy (Knocked Up and Juno). Actresses had starring roles in about a quarter of the next 80 highest-grossing titles, mostly in dopey romantic comedies and dopier thrillers. A number of these were among the worst-reviewed movies of the year, including Premonition (Sandra Bullock) and The Reaping (Hilary Swank), the last of which was released by — ta-da! — Warner Brothers. The days of Million Dollar Baby, for which Ms. Swank won an Oscar, and Speed, which rocketed Ms. Bullock to stardom in the summer of 1994, feel long gone.”

8. “Back to the City, for More Than Just Sex”

“One aspect of the women’s depiction that remains fixed is the sense that they have emerged from nowhere, with no lives to speak of before they were old enough for snakeskin and small dresses with tinier straps. Of all the fantastical elements contained in the series — the recherché clothing, the ample inventory of good-looking men — none seemed more mythic than the idea that Carrie and her friends existed apart from any notions of genealogy. In its refusal to incorporate parents, ‘Sex and the City’ always seemed to resemble most closely the classics of children’s literature.

“While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. ‘My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,’ he said. ‘The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.’”

9. “Indiana Jones and the Savior of a Lost Art”

“The tone and style of the films derive from the movie serials of the 1930s and ’40s, which Mr. Spielberg, growing up in the ’50s, used to see on Saturday mornings at a revival theater in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“‘They made a great impression on me, both because of how exciting they were and because of how cheesy they were,’ he said. ‘I’d kind of be involved in the stories and be ridiculing them at the same time. One week they’d give us a cliffhanger with the good guy going off the cliff, the car crashing on the rocks below and blowing up, and then the next week he’s fine. They forgot to show us the cut of the guy jumping out of the car? That we weren’t going to do in the Indiana Jones series.’

“In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies’ action sequences, because ‘every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.’ So his goal is ‘to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.’

“Warming to the subject, he went on: ‘The idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum, is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.’”

10. “Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise”

“The proliferating number of blogs, user-generated content services and online news sources has created a dense information jungle that no human could machete his or her way through in a lifetime, let alone in an afternoon of surreptitious procrastination at work.”

11. “Not on Our Blog You Won’t”

“The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women’s magazines (or ‘glossy insecurity factories,’ as Jezebel describes them). It quickly developed a loyal following and has seen an influx of new visitors, after being name-checked on the official blog for ‘Gossip Girl,’ the prime-time soap opera.”

12. “His Father’s Siren, Still Singing”

“Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s editor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on 3-by-5-inch index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter).”

13. “A Fiery Theology Under Fire”

“Black liberation theology was, in a sense, a brilliant flanking maneuver. For a black audience, its theology spoke to the centrality of the slave and segregation experience, arguing that God had a special place in his heart for the black oppressed. These theologians held that liberation should come on earth rather than in the hereafter, and demanded that black pastors speak as prophetic militants, critiquing the nation’s white-run social structures.”

14. “An Animated Life”

“Procrastination technique: I heard David Sedaris say he couldn’t write in the afternoons because he would spend hours looking in the mirror trying to find where his hair parts. Me? I troll iTunes. That’s a time sink.”

15. “Hoop Data Dreams”

“Basketball, meanwhile, might seem too hectic and woolly for such rigorous dissection. It is far more collaborative than baseball and happens much faster, with players shifting from offense one moment to defense the next. (Hockey and football present their own challenges.) A lot of things happen on a basketball court — picks, passes, defensive shifts — that aren’t routinely quantified. This is not to suggest that basketball teams don’t think statistically. But only recently have a few teams begun to hire a new breed of stathead to scrutinize every conceivable variable.”

16. “This Joke’s for You”

“It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, ‘Awesome — how much for that?’”

17. “Blame the Messager”

“If you want a decent R.S.V.P., you may have to resort to the tactic of a British friend of White’s: ‘Print engraved invitations, on the thickest stock,’ she suggested, her voice dropping to an awe-struck whisper. ‘The regrets were handwritten.’”

1. “Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design”

“What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image. Some were untouched photographs, but, in an era before Photoshop, some were created by the primitive technique of cutting and pasting, using photographs, clip art and sometimes hand-drawn elements.”

2. “Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt”

“Burt Flickinger, a longtime retail consultant, said the last time he saw such significant changes in consumer buying patterns was the late 1970s, when runaway inflation prompted Americans to ‘switch from red meat to pork to poultry to pasta — then to peanut butter and jelly.’

“‘It hasn’t gotten to human food mixed with pet food yet,’ he said, ‘but it is certainly headed in that direction.’”

3. “Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills”

“Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.

“‘I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,’ she said.”

4. “The Race of Truth: 40-Yard Times Can Tell the Future”

“Based on an examination of the last 10 years of data from running backs at the combine, and comparing that to the same players’ subsequent N.F.L. statistics, it is clear the 40-yard dash does help predict whether a college running back will be an effective professional.”

5. “The Spirit of ‘68”

“More than any other art form, cinema captured the energy, the truth, of the times. To an extent rarely matched before or since, filmmakers did not simply record the upheavals and crises of the time; they were participants and catalysts. None more so than Mr. Godard. It seems apt that the Film Forum and Lincoln Center programs share La Chinoise, one of a flurry of films he began, completed or released in 1968, and one in which he indulges his fondness for epigrams and proverbs. One of his slogans proclaims that with vague ideas, we need clear images.”

6. “Material Woman, Restoring Her Brand”

“Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years — sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality — Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She’s disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn’t momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: ‘Blonde Ambition.’”

7. “Next on His Docket: A Supreme Challenge”

“Marshall is akin to Mr. Fishburne’s many mentor-teacher figure roles, among them Furious Styles in Boyz N the Hood and Morpheus in the Matrix movies. In these roles, through his poised demeanor and his precise, confident intonation, Mr. Fishburne exudes intelligence and moral authority.”

8. “Hard Lessons Learned in the Ring”

“All fighters are sad.”

9. “Public Radio Tries to Reignite Its Public”

“‘A lot of the research that guided public radio’s direction in the last 30 years focused on us discovering a niche we could serve and serve well,’ of highly educated, news-craving listeners, said Maxie Jackson, WNYC’s senior director for program development. But, he added, that formula ‘didn’t appeal to people of color.’ He called it an issue of tonality.”

10. “Dude! Like, Those Ads Live Forever”

“For viewers the advertisements have offered a comedic crash course in the evolving vernacular of the 21st-century American male. For their creators and the brewery behind them, the spots have provided a different lesson: that young consumers are using the Internet and other technologies to express the ways they want to receive (and even control) advertising, and it’s up to advertisers to hear this message.”

11. “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Worries”

“The real boom in nude vacations is coming at the high end of the business, as upscale hotels and resorts, and even some luxury cruise lines, have begun to see the economic potential in the no-clothes crowd — particularly those who want to shed their clothes but not their pampered lifestyles.”

12. “A Literary Critic Drops His Ax and Picks Up His Pen”

“‘You have to be prepared to live on $20,000, which is not impossible, even in New York.’ (Mr. Gessen, who lives in Prospect Heights with two roommates, said he never earned more than $25,000 a year until he was 30.)”

13. “Mexican for the Soul”

“‘I like that they have a nod toward the metropolitan lifestyle, as opposed to Berlin’s more Bohemian lifestyle,’ he said as he passed around his cellphone, which displayed an image of his Parisian girlfriend in bed holding a tiny dog. ‘Paris has breakfast time and lunchtime, and disciplines like that. I find it helps the rhythm of life, and reflects what you do with your life. It has a little bit more momentum.’”

14. “From a Time Before BlackBerries”

“‘I love how it’s designed out of heavy steel but with great grace, like the Eiffel Tower. I can’t turn it at any angle where it doesn’t excite me.’”

15. “Let’s Say You Want to Date a Hog Farmer”

“The couple is among a growing number of people who have found love on dating sites that pair members based on a specific shared interest or background — sites like HorseandCountrySingles.com, Nerdsatheart.com, DateMyPet.com, STDmatch.net (for singles with sexually transmitted diseases), MatureSinglesOnly.com (for people over 50) and Veggielove.com.”

16. “When the Times Make the Man”

“[McCain] inhabits a more serious historic role, as the latest — and almost certainly the last — hope for Americans born in the 1930s to send one of their own to the White House. The 1900s, the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1940s have all been represented in the White House. But not the 1930s.

“It is the missing decade. A demographic blip? Perhaps. But it might also be that Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.”

17. “BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone”

“Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers. An industry once characterized by brain-numbing acronyms and droning discussions about enterprise security is now defined by buzz around handset design, video games and mobile social networks.”

18. “Is Hollywood Warming to Its Favorite Villains?”

“Businesses and business people remain some of Hollywood’s most reliable villains. But the next crop of corporate heavies appears to have something attractive in its villainy. Perhaps that means a long-overdue acceptance by movie makers that at least some of those who pump oil, sell stock, run airlines and build our increasingly fuel-efficient cars are not completely without value.”

19. “The Catastrophist”

“For all of Amis’s testimonies about the transformative impact of Sept. 11 — which ‘will perhaps never be wholly assimilable,’ whatever that means — there is at least one way in which he has been thoroughly untouched by the atrocity: he is still busy with the glamorous pursuit of extraordinary sentences.”

20. “You’re an Author? Me Too!”

“But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.”

21. “Empowering by Disempowerment”

“That poster image she saw was one of many Demotivators created and sold by a company in Austin, Tex., called Despair Inc. It sells scores of posters satirizing the banalities of the motivation industry (including the inevitable cute cat clinging to something, although in this case it says: ‘Give up: At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser’), along with calendars, T-shirts, a book and a clear coffee mug marked to show precisely when it’s half empty.”

1. “Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami”

“In his correspondence, Mencken adhered to the most basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he believed writing back was, in his words, ‘only decent politeness.’ He reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would expect the same courtesy. ‘If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.’”

2. “A Novelist With a Story Attached”

“Her editor at the time made two suggestions: Don’t take forever to write another, and for God’s sake, don’t write a novel. So much for that good advice. And to make things worse, her novel is about a 46-year-old Oxford-educated American, a writer, who is married to a glamorous Briton.”

3. “On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My’”

“The rise of sites with the ‘my’ prefix is an outgrowth of an increasingly customized world of technology, such as the iPod and TiVo…. But they illustrate how corporations are striving to show that they can be as intimately connected to their customers as in-vogue social networking sites. They’re not just impersonal businesses; they are your close, intimate friends.”

4. “Been Up, Been Down. Now? Super.”

“There were rehabs that did not work, followed by jails that did not impress, ending in hard time, twice, including a one-year stint in a state lockup where he had to fight to find a place to stand.

“A winking nod to that tumultuous history is baked into the banter in Iron Man. The movie opens with Mr. Downey’s mitt wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey, rumbling along in a Humvee, AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ blasting on the soundtrack and Mr. Downey acting all lusty and incorrigible. And when Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, the dewy-eyed, ever-loyal assistant he sees with new eyes by the end of the film, learns about his alter ego, Mr. Downey’s Tony Stark goes deadpan.

“‘Let’s face it,’ he says. ‘This is not the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.’

“That running dialogue — between audience and actor, between Mr. Downey’s past and present — gives the film a symbolic power not usually found in comic book movies.”

5. “Stirring Things Up, Regionally Speaking”

“In his latest show, at Joe’s Pub every Monday night through May 11, Mr. Daisey makes a series of provocative arguments about how regional theaters, in pursuit of growth, have lost sight of their original mission: They have put more money into expensive new buildings than grooming and rewarding actors; despite lip service about promoting diversity and community, artistic directors want to keep theater as a luxury item for the wealthy; the importing of actors, mainly from New York, has divorced theaters from their communities.”

6. “Mining Post-9/11 America for Laughs”

“The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience. ‘When we start to write, we’re under the assumption that everyone knows racism is bad,’ Mr. Schlossberg said. ‘If you don’t know that, you’re a moron. Harold and Kumar’s attitude toward racism is more frustration at having to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where racism is stupid.’”

7. “Domains | Bill Nye: Greener Pastures”

“My house is attached to L.A.’s main power grid, but I make more power than I use. So, I send my excess energy back to the grid and my bill is just $7 a month, which is a connection charge.”

8. “Broadcast Spoofs”

“The Simpsons is past its prime. The Daily Show is admired but partisan. And each incarnation of Saturday Night Live bugs its audience in a new way. The Onion, though, is like overwork or pizza. It’s your patriotic duty to not not like it.”

1. “For Housewives, She’s the Hot Ticket”

“I cannot tell you how many of the e-mails that we got from last year’s ‘Work Out’ reunion that were women saying, ‘I am married. I have never looked at another woman. I have a huge crush on Jackie.’”

2. “In Job Search, Gonzales Sees No Takers”

“I wouldn’t say ‘rebuffed,’ said the lawyer, who asked his name not be used because the situation being described was uncomfortable for Mr. Gonzales. “I would say ‘not taken up.’”

3. “Requiem for Two Heavyweights”

“Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer represented something different. More than public intellectuals, they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas…. The point is not that Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer deigned to mingle with the common folk, but rather that they defied the conventional distinction between words and deeds and with it the boundaries that insulate so many intellectuals from the broader world.”

4. “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets”

“Five years later, Ronald Reagan entered the White House, elevating Mr. Friedman’s laissez-faire ideals into a veritable set of commandments. Taxes were cut, regulations slashed and public industries sold into private hands, all in the name of clearing government from the path to riches. As the economy expanded and inflation abated, Mr. Friedman played the role of chief evangelist in the mission to let loose the animal instincts of the market.

“But with market forces now seemingly gone feral, disenchantment with regulation has given way to demands for fresh oversight, placing Mr. Friedman’s intellectual legacy under fresh scrutiny.”

5. “Roger Ebert, the Critic Behind the Thumb”

“His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.”

6. “A Young Actor With Nothing to Hide”

“In the opening minutes of the film (which is scheduled for release on April 18th) Mr. Segel, the 28-year-old actor who is also a screenwriter of the movie, has just stepped out of a shower when his girlfriend declares that she is breaking up with him. Too devastated by the news to put on his clothes or grab a towel, Mr. Segel — for 73 excruciating frames — remains literally and utterly exposed.”

7. “Jazz on Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic”

“Classical music, like classical narrative filmmaking, prefers to execute detailed plans. Jazz starts with a spare, flexible plan and finds its magic in solo flourishes and the give and take of musical conversation. It encourages happy accidents and flights of fancy, phenomena that are often verboten in filmmaking because there’s so much money at stake.”

8. “After a Decade Away, Portishead Floats Back”

“Now Portishead has rematerialized, resuming a career that has always moved in slow motion. ‘It’s amazing how quickly 10 years can go,’ said Adrian Utley, who plays guitars and keyboards, over coffee at an elegant Munich hotel the night before the band’s performance.”

9. “Pure Science”

“One other question lingers: What makes a scientific experiment beautiful? Johnson favors simplicity — not just clean, artful experiments, but those that let us replace convoluted theories with simple explanations. Galileo applied uniform mathematics to the motion of all objects, contradicting Aristotle’s idea that heavier objects fall at faster rates. William Harvey showed that one form of blood circulates throughout the body, not two. Newton proved colors are refracted light beams, not Descartes’s complex ‘spinning globules of aether.’

“Historically, few people seeking beauty in science have displayed a baroque sensibility. The traditional aesthetic is classical, invoking the simplicity and symmetry of revealed forms — whether they have been revealed on a cluttered lab bench or through elegantly spare theorizing.”

10. “Total Recall”

“Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.”

1. “Ask Me About My Flux Capacitor”

“Ms. Reilly, a design enthusiast, began the hunt for her DeLorean six years ago — as a birthday present to herself. She spent a year doing research, learning all she could about the DeLorean’s characteristics and quirks. She spent another year looking for the right car — black interior, gas flap (in later models, access to the tank was under the hood), the optional automatic transmission — before settling on one. She bought it on eBay for $13,000 in 2004. Since then, life has been a chain of small adventures.”

2. “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop”

“To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.”

3. “Suzuki Is Nearing Milestones at an Unprecedented Pace”

“The Japanese-born Suzuki, in his eighth season in the major leagues, is on the verge of several significant achievements. He entered the season 130 hits short of 3,000 for his two-country career and could become the youngest player in history to reach that professional milestone, although it would not be an official major league record. He is also approaching the most career hits for a Japanese player, needing 216.

“In addition, he is seeking 200 hits for a record eighth consecutive season, which would tie him with the turn-of-the-19th-century star Wee Willie Keeler, who did it from 1894 to 1901.”

4. “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.”

“Now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere — the part that sees the individual trees in a forest — the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.”

5. “Online Commercials: Now That’s a Hard Sell”

“Hulu has only short clips for other programs, rather than full episodes. That’s understandable for ‘Saturday Night Live’ but not for ‘Law & Order.’ It also has 110 movies, mostly titles that failed to impress critics, like Dude, Where’s My Car?, and fills out its catalog with long-forgotten television shows like ‘Adam-12.’”

6. “Stretching for a New Film Role: The Lead”

“He has played characters created by John Updike and the Coen brothers. He was the psychiatrist in There’s Something About Mary who pretended to listen as Ben Stiller’s character droned on about his romantic problems. In Flirting With Disaster he was the gay federal agent who ran through the desert in his underwear after inadvertently eating a meal laced with drugs. He’s been the ghost of an undertaker who gets pulverized by a bus in Six Feet Under and Woody Allen’s doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters.

“But now, after playing supporting roles for the better part of three decades, he is finally getting his shot at being the leading man.”

7. “First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd”

“Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and ‘everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.’ When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become ‘Run,’ he could not believe his ears.

“‘As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,’ he recalled. ‘I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.’”

8. “Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism”

“Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

“They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of An Inconvenient Truth, if not Mad Max.”

9. “Al Gore’s New Logo”

“A logo is routinely the most difficult component to design because it is so important, and usually the client wants to be closely involved. An effective logo is a kind of calculus, the sum of disparate parts that adds up to a memorable image or icon.”

10. “The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett: Making It”

“Sennett’s book gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind. Moreover, it is through his insistence that thought arises in relation to craft that Sennett comes to one of his more intriguing interventions, a reimagining of the Enlightenment in terms not of ideas but of how craftsmen learned to work.”

11. “Our First Black President?”

“To anyone who tracks it down today, Chancellor’s book comes across as a laughable partisan screed, an amalgam of bizarre racial theories, outlandish stereotypes and cheap political insults. But it also contains a remarkable trove of social knowledge — the kind of community gossip and oral tradition that rarely appears in official records but often provides clues to richer truths. When he toured Ohio in 1920, Chancellor claimed to find dozens of acquaintances and neighbors willing to swear that the Hardings had been considered black for generations. Among the persuaded, according to rumor, was Harding’s father-in-law, Amos Kling, one of the richest men in Harding’s adopted hometown of Marion. When Harding married his daughter, Florence, in 1891, Kling supposedly denounced her for polluting the family line.”

1. “Ode to an Onion Ring, and Other Fast Food in the Slower Lane”

“Why then should I have an intrinsic preference for fast-food restaurants whose franchises number in the hundreds or thousands rather than the tens of thousands? It might be because their smaller sizes make them more amenable to culinary innovation — a burger served with an onion ring on the patty; a menu that offers three different kinds of fries, or chicken and tacos at the same time.

“Or maybe it’s because these restaurants strike the right balance between familiarity and the possibility of unpredictability.”

2. “Edison …Wasn’t He the Guy Who Invented Everything?”

“The reality is that the ‘Aha’ moments of industrial creation are preceded by critical moments far less heralded. Behind and beside every big-name inventor are typically lots of others whom history forgot, or never knew. And it’s unusual that an innovation is created in a vacuum (including the vacuum, which itself claims several progenitors).”

3. “Sisters in Idiosyncrasy”

“Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.”

4. “Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal”

“And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.”

5. “Gatekeepers to the Art World”

“In the money-frenzied, celebrity-stoked sprawl that has become the New York gallery world over the last five years, the pittance-paying job of front desk assistant (a k a receptionist, gallerina, gallery girl) has become hungrily sought as an entree into the commercial, rather than creative, side of the business. From this modest, occasionally humiliating rung, women can indeed ascend. They have become dealers, curators and, increasingly, art consiglieri — advisers to corporate and private collectors.”

6. “The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights”

“But on the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried her through the mostly grim jobs of work that followed. (Though the will was there from the start, and her formidable technique never wholly deserted her.) In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. She looked moviegoers straight in the eye and dared them to look away.”

7. “Alleys for Cool Cats”

“In the tradition of a city whose literary legacy includes both the Beats and Sam Spade, those out-of-the-way addresses also include hipster bars and Zagat-rated speakeasies like Bix, an alley-front favorite whose Jazz Age ethos includes tuxedo jackets and torch songs.

“Indeed, unlike many cities that have built over or ignored their old service streets, San Francisco has embraced them, with tourist-friendly spots like Belden Lane downtown, which is home to a row of restaurants specializing in everything from Spanish food (B44) to vodka (Voda).”

8. “Sexual Advances”

“Roach belongs to a particular strain of science writer; she’s interested less in scientific subjects than in the ways scientists study their subjects — less, in this case, in sex per se than in the laboratory dissection of sex. She delights in medical euphemism and scholarly jargon; you can hear her titter as she rolls out terms like ‘vaginal photoplethysmograph probe,’ ‘nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring’ and ‘vaginocavernosus reflex.’”

9. “Who’s a Good Boy?”

” Sutherland … says that the most important lesson she learned from studying animal trainers was that whether you’re training a hyena to pirouette or a husband to stop speeding, the best results come when you reward behaviors you like and ignore ones you don’t.”

10. “Frankly, My Dear …”

“This breathtakingly trashy biography does not skimp on sordid anecdotes.”

11. “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books”

“Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. ‘It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,’ said Beverly West, an author of Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives. Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. ‘Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,’ she said, but ‘now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.’”

12. “Show Stopper”

“I’m not technically a tight lacer. It’s a fetish, in which you wear extremely tight corsets all the time. I don’t sleep in my corsets, and I’m not obsessed with obtaining the world’s smallest waist. My waist is around 18 inches.”

13. “The Case for Fitting In”

“Lab-based research supposedly furnished slam-dunk evidence that, as the social psychologist Solomon Asch put it, ‘the social process is polluted’ by ‘the dominance of conformity.’ That research, though, was rooted in its time and place: The United States in the aftermath of World War II, when psychologists and sociologists focused on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes.

“Lately, however, some researchers have been dissenting from the textbook version. Where an earlier generation saw only a contemptible urge to go along, revisionists see normal people balancing their self-respect against their equally valuable respect for other people, and for human relationships.”

14. “Students of Virginity”

“The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity.”

1. “At Cineplexes, Sports, Opera, Maybe a Movie”

“From nickelodeons to drive-ins to multiplexes, American movie theaters have always evolved with the times. But the latest evolution, set off by stagnating attendance and advances in digital technology, marks the first time that movie theaters have reinvented themselves without motion pictures as the centerpiece.”

2. “Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone”

“Michael Roskell, 33, a technology project manager from Jersey City, N.J., said he and a friend from high school periodically visit electronics stores. While Mr. Roskell expresses interest in buying an item, his friend acts as though he is dissatisfied with the price and threatens to leave. ‘We play good cop, bad cop,’ Mr. Roskell said.

“In February, he said, the friends got $20 off a pair of $250 speakers at 6th Avenue Electronics in the New York area. Earlier, he and the same friend negotiated to buy two 46-inch high-definition Sony televisions at P. C. Richard & Son, a New York-area electronics chain. List price: $4,300. Price after negotiation: $3,305.50.”

3. “Basketball Reigns in the Northwest”

“‘Washington State is a basketball hotbed, no question,’ said Jim Marsh, a former N.B.A. player and current Amateur Athletic Union coach. ‘Just look at the N.B.A. Just look at the college tournament. How many kids are from the 206?’”

4. “Fear of Not, Er, Flying”

“A friend just back from a bachelor party in Las Vegas told me that at the beginning of the weekend, the group of 10 revelers took a survey inspired by current events: four of them had paid for sex. By the end of the weekend, he said, the number had risen to six. Eliot Spitzer: role model.”

5. “A Sage for Our Time”

“Political incorrectness can have its place. Margaret Seltzer, the author of Love and Consequences, a memoir about growing up a gang member in South Central Los Angeles, was exposed earlier this month as a fraud.
Nobody gave her a grilling like [Larry] David would have if he had introduced himself at her book party. After chatting her up, and joking that she didn’t look like a gang member, he would probably lean in, grin on his face, and ask: ‘Really? You were a gang member?’ And never let it go.”

6. “Phenom Director Goes to War”

“Then when her brother returned home on leave, he brought reams of video made by soldiers, often with cameras mounted on guns or Humvees, shot mostly for posting online. Some were romantic homages to patriotism backed by Toby Keith songs, others pure gore, with bodies piling up and heads splitting open, set to rap and heavy metal.

“‘I have to admit I would get adrenalized watching,’ said Ms. Peirce. ‘We’ve never gotten this close to the soldier experience before. We’re literally seeing it, feeling, hearing it, and they’re cutting it, so they’re seeing their fantasy of themselves. I just knew a movie had to be born from that kind of representation.’”

7. “The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway”

“Mr. Tolle, 60, is the German-born spiritual speaker and author of The Power of Now. With a seemingly limitless pool of middle-class discontent to tap into — and a major push from Ms. Winfrey — he has become the most popular spiritual author in the nation.”

8. “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking”

“The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

“What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.”

9. “‘The Ten-Cent Plague,’ by David Hajdu: Penny Dreadfuls”

“The comics’ impact on American life is an inexhaustibly fascinating topic — which is probably why it has nearly been exhausted as a topic. Hajdu, the author of the well-received Positively 4th Street is but partly successful at making it fresh again.”

10. “God’s Workout”

“CrossFit has 450 chapters in 43 states (and several other countries). The network has a message for the merely healthy: ‘Your workout is our warm-up.’ Every day, its members consult CrossFit.com like a Book of Common Prayer, receiving instructions for their workout rites and periods of rest. Performing caveman feats like hauling, clambering, trudging, snatching, hurling and deadlifting, CrossFitters deliberately overwhelm and distress their bodies, executing near-impossible stunts with as much weight as they can bear. A Workout of the Day, or W.O.D., might include 50 kettlebell swings, 3 800-yard dashes in rapid succession and 10 pull-ups. Then repeat. No breaks. No weight machines. All you need is a body built for discipline and a mind that can justify so much apparent self-abuse.”

1. “The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls”

“They are three young women practicing the 21st-century version of the oldest profession, inhabitants of the secret world of the high-priced call girl that was thrust into the spotlight last week when Gov. Eliot Spitzer was identified as one of 10 clients of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. caught on a federal wiretap. None are involved in the case – though Ms. Xi’an said she interviewed with the Emperor’s Club and was turned away for lack of a modeling portfolio – but they provide a glimpse into the prostitution industry, a sprawling and rapidly growing underground universe that in the last decade has almost wholly migrated online.”

2. “When Omaha Met Cinema”

“Omaha still doesn’t have a Brooks Brothers, but last July Rachel Jacobson opened Film Streams, a nonprofit independent cinema that is betting on the belief that the town’s interest in movies has – or might be – broadened.”

3. “A Crash Course in Online Gossip”

“Messages skew toward discussions of Greek societies and students’ sex lives: hottest fraternities, ‘sluttiest’ sororities, and who gave herpes to whom. The site’s most-viewed forums usually trade in gossip at small colleges with strong fraternity and sorority systems.”

4. “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales”

“The politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?”

5. “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias”

“To scholars, the ready access to updated information online is a net gain for the public. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t mourn the passing of a household icon – a set of knowledge-packed books on their own reserved shelves that even parents had to defer to.”

6. “Driving Miss Chloe”

“That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third.”

7. “A Proposed Diet for the U.S. Budget”

“Expenditures on science, space and technology; arts and the humanities; foreign aid and international relations; and the programs formerly known as welfare – all favorite targets of so-called budget hawks – accounted for only about 4 percent of total government expenditures.”

8. “Against Happiness, by Eric G. Wilson: Woe Be Gone”

“The author is a gloomy man who tried jogging, yoga, tai chi, Frank Capra movies, smiling, good grooming and eating salads, and finally decided to embrace his gloominess. This makes him an odd duck in America….”

9. “When Girls Will Be Boys”

“Indeed, as one transmale student I spoke to at Wellesley pointed out, women’s colleges are uniquely suited to transgender students. ‘There’s no safer place for transmen to be than a women’s college because there’s no actual physical threat to us,’ he told me, adding, ‘I have more in common with women because of that shared experience than I do with men.’ And even though Rey chose to leave Barnard for a coed school, he also says that women’s schools can – and should – act as havens for transmale students, that they are, in fact, natural beacons for trans people, because ‘feminists and trans activists are both interested in gender.’”

1. “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?”

“An era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.”

2. “Batman’s Burden: A Director Confronts Darkness and Death”

“Mr. Nolan, for his part, said he felt a ‘massive sense of responsibility’ to do right by Mr. Ledger’s ‘terrifying, amazing’ performance. ‘It’s stunning, it’s iconic,’ he said. ‘It’s going to just blow people away.’”

3. “Man, Godard and Nature (and Bardot, Too)”

“Jean-Luc Godard’s radiant, ambiguous, serenely perverse Contempt, 45 this year, is being revived again, in startling color and elegant, ribbony CinemaScope, for the second time in just over a decade, and it’s beginning to look like one of those movies we can’t do without for very long: a classic.”

4. “Prelates and Rappers Strike a Pose”

“As with the clerical figures in his studio, the rappers sport their typical vestments: jeans, Louis Vuitton backpacks, flashy watches and diamond-encrusted medallions and crosses. Mr. Melamid has rendered each figure larger than life with loosely expressionistic brush strokes against a dark abstracted background in a style that recalls the court portraits of Velázquez.”

5. “A Glossy Rehab for Tattered Careers”

“‘A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab,’ said Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. ‘Some people go to Utah,’ she said, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox program, where Ms Lohan was treated. ‘Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot.’”

6. “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)”

“Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.”

7. “Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?”

“Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.”

8. “They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know”

“We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents.”

9. “Hormones, Genes and the Corner Office”

“Pinker quotes a female Ivy League law professor: ‘I am very skeptical of the notion that society discourages talented women from becoming scientists,’ the professor writes. ‘My experience, at least from the educational phase of my life, is that the very opposite is true.’ If women aren’t racing to the upper echelons of science, government and the corporate world despite decades of efforts to woo them, Pinker argues, then it must be because they are wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.”

10. “The Medium and the Message”

“Ah, those great enemies, Word and Image! Their battle rages on in a thousand editorial offices, through the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines. The partisans of Word denigrate their adversaries as dumbers-down, seeking to replace depth and nuance with cartoons and dingbats, encroaching ever farther on their precious line counts and column-inch real estate. The champions of Image cast their rivals as condescending literalists, unwilling to recognize that there are things their precious verbiage is inadequate to express. Occasionally some do-gooder will point out that the two work best together, but page space and attention is limited, and the temptation to battle over the word-to-picture exchange rate — pegged long ago by literary bankers at a thousand to one — is too great.”

11. “Amis and Islam”

“On the phone last month, Amis conceded his original comments in The Times were ill-considered, but held fast to the uneasiness that informed them. ‘When I made this rather stupid suggestion, or talked about the urge to make the stupid suggestion to make Muslims put their house in order, I was at the peak of my anger’ about the aborted plot to blow up airliners. ‘Everyone else’s anger gets respected all over the place but not that of a normally very peaceful British novelist.’”

12. Magic Man: Wladimir Klitschko”

“The heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko originally wanted to be an ear-nose-and-throat specialist; instead, he settled for a Ph.D. in sports science and philosophy. (His dissertation was on ‘the pedagogic control over young athletes, ages 14 to 19, in the old Soviet system.’)”

13. “Indiana Jeans”

“‘Denim is like a canvas that paints itself through time,’ he explained. ‘A 1950s jean bought secondhand will outlast a 2007 jean.’”

14. “Real Men Eat Meat”

“Vegetarianism may occupy the moral high ground, but among men it’s regarded as, if not a girl thing, then at least a girlie thing — an anemic regimen for sensitive souls subsisting on rabbit food and tofurkey. Meanwhile, meat eating persists as a badge of masculinity, as if muscle contained a generous helping of testosterone, with the aggression required to slay a mammal working its way up the food chain. Although men can no longer legally exclude women from their private clubs, a new male sanctum has arisen that seems at no risk of being invaded by women: the mahogany-paneled steakhouse.”

15. “Splay It Like Beckham”

“Having survived the postfeminist generation, I allow myself a smile of satisfaction now that poster boys are being given the hypersexualized treatment meted out for so long to my own gender.”

16. “The Muckraker”

“Let’s be straightforward: there’s a huge part of the country that until 9/11 did not know the difference between an Israeli and an Arab. They thought the Middle East was just a bunch of guys with towels on their heads. Syriana was an attempt to show a world that’s still unclear to most Americans. “