The Electric Typewriter

Though envy is by consensus a bad thing — one of the Seven Deadly Sins, after all — it’s also an underappreciated forum for cultural communication and transmission.

It is sometimes possible to define the depth of an experience by means of how radically it slows or hastens your sense of time. Swimming, fighting, nightmaring, enduring a migraine, having sex: these are all activities that move at exceptional rates. Shopping, too, and if you don’t believe me, just enter a mall before sundown and see how you feel when you reemerge into darkness.

Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling.

On a pleasant spring evening, several weeks before the city was convulsed by the rape of the woman jogger in Central Park, Richard Ravitch found himself in the heart of Queens, as he often does these days, pressing his long-shot candidacy for mayor - trying to sell optimism to a room full of pessimists.

The past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. This story is about the next 10 years.

Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know that Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism crucial to its own prospects.

Is it time to shutter America’s bloated schools?

Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

Two centuries of heedless gorging and historic wastefulness has left us with an intractable environmental problem: What do we do with our trash? 

The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic. To ask the obvious-why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels where only doughnuts could be obtained from room service-was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman.

The Naked Face by Malcolm Gladwell - The window to your soul may be easier to unlock than you ever thought possible.

Want to Remember Everything you’ll Ever Learn? by Gary Wolf - Meet the inventor of a program that could revolutionise learning.

The Possibilian by Burkhard Bilger - How the subtlest shift in perception can create whole a new way of seeing the world.

The Science of Success by David Dobbs - The double-edged sword of extraordinary mental potential.

Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch - Are you getting the best out of the introverts in your life?

Mind vs. Machine by Brian Christian - An intrepid reporter takes on the latest in artificial intelligence in a battle for humanity.

Why Men Lie by Vince Passaro - Essential reading for anyone who has to deal with men on a day-to-day basis.

Adventures in My Bed by Bucky McMahon - A journey through the emotionally charged world of the lucid dreamer.

TV Makes You Smarter by Steven Johnson - How increasingly sophisticated TV programming may be driving up our IQs.

Spacewar by Stewart Brand - How one of the first video games was instrumental in the development of computer technology.

Video Games: The Addiction by Tom Bissell - A classic personal essay about the irresistible lure of the joypad.

Working for the Man by Steven Poole - Are video games really a leisure activity? Or are we working for our consoles?

Master of Play by Nick Paumgarten - A reporter travels to Japan to meet the creative force behind Nintendo, the man who’s shaped imaginary worlds that are explored by millions.

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer by Julian Dibbell - What happens when the computer game economy spills over into reality?

The Economics of Video Games by Brad Plumer - It takes a certain type of economist to know what to do when a belligerent spaceship fleet attacks an interstellar trading post, causing mineral prices to surge across the galaxy.

We are, apparently, in the midst of an economic revolution brought about the internet. But is it possible that we’ve been dazzled by the catalogues and forgotten the roads?

The ultimate David Foster Wallace resource. A complete list of his uncollected fiction and essays (links to everything that’s online).

The site also hosts a full list of published essays from his books (also has links where available).

5 timeless essays selected by LA Times columnist, essayist and author of 3 excellent books, Meghan Daum:

The End of Gay Culture, by Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic, 2005 - Does assimilation mean the death of disitinctive gay culture?

The Devil in Long Island, by Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Times Magazine, 1993 - Between NYC and the upscale weekend retreats of the hamptons lies an island full of dark secrets.

And a few you’ll need to break out your credit card to read:

The Junket by Mike Albo, an Amazon Kindle single, 2011 - “A gimlet-eyed account of the back-biting media scene, a glimpse into the inner workings of the fashion crowd, and a candid portrait of what it takes to survive as a writer in today’s chattering and watchful New York City.”

I Shit My Pants in the South of France, by Jonathan Ames - This one pretty much does what it says on the tin.

My Heroin Christmas, by Terry Castle - An author explores her addiction to honesty in literature over a Christmas spent absorbed in the autobiography of jazz legend Art Pepper.

My romance with ADHD meds.

The idea of a school of journalism first dawned on Pulitzer in 1892, while he was confined to a dark room, suffering from asthma, insomnia, exhaustion, diabetes, manic-depression and failing eyesight. It took Pulitzer more than a decade to persuade Columbia to accept his money. Even then, the critics’ main question was never really answered: What would they teach at the Columbia Journalism School? A few weeks ago I went to find out.

The name Mato Grosso translates as “dense forest,” but in recent years, the state has been subject to some of the most rampant deforestation on Earth, with land being cleared in a mad rush to graze cattle and grow crops — principally soybeans.

When it comes to the language of money, credit cards are nouns. Dull, concrete, limited by rules and restrictions and creepy fine print, credit cards have all the élan of aluminum foil. Personal checks - the coward’s stand-in for cash - are ugly and static pronouns. But a twenty-dollar bill, now, that’s a thing of beauty. Nothing static about a twenty. Used correctly, a twenty is all about movement, access, cachet.

“I’m sure our reputation on the Street is that we’re completely insane,” says a current Bridgewater employee. An executive recruiter who works with hedge funds confirms that suspicion, describing Bridgewater as a “bunch of fucking nutcases.”