David Brooks:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.

The Great Seduction by Debt

J.K. Rowling:

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

FREUD, DORA (NO, NOT THAT DORA), AND SURFING’S SECRET AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ROOTS

DISCUSSED: Surfing’s Premier Nihilist, Yet Another Papa-Centric Tale, Double-Secret-Crypto Jews, Something You Buy vs. Something You Do, Weimar on the Pacific, A Man Named Tubesteak, Hitchcockian Voyeurs, Sexual-Coming-of-Age Novels, Teaching Sally Field to Surf

The Believer - Gidget on the Couch

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Also:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

And finally:

The widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Loitering as the Foundation of All Things Great

How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate.

Everyone's a historian now

The following is Samantha Power's address to the graduating class of Pitzer-Claremont College in California earlier this month.

Samantha Power: Message to Graduates: "Be a Good Ancestor"

Michael Lewis:

Here's a question you probably have never asked yourself:

What, at bottom, is a toilet?

To an ordinary person, it's a device for transferring ordinary human waste from the body to the sewer, as discreetly and sanitarily as possible. But just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

From the recent archive:

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Pre-order now!

And also:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Getting to the Bottom of a Russian's 26 Toilets

"I never thought I'd see the day when a laptop was better at picking up girls than a Ferrari. That's it, I'm ditching Windows."

From the archive:

"No fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV."

Also:

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Jonathan Ive's Sharia Style

The nation’s carbon footprint has a distinct geography not well understood or often discussed. This report quantifies transportation and residential carbon emissions for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, finding that metro area residents have smaller carbon footprints than the average American, although metro footprints vary widely. Residential density and the availability of public transit are important to understanding carbon footprints, as are the carbon intensity of electricity generation, electricity prices, and weather.

Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America

In four photographs of Albert Einstein, taken over a 30-year span between 1911 and 1942 and reproduced in Silvan Schweber's "Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius" (Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95), he positions himself, whether in a group or alone, so that his left hand is caught by the camera. He holds that hand in a distinctive gesture, with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a little ellipse. Though he tends to face away from the camera, as though indifferent to appearances, he is clearly at pains to keep that left hand visible. The gesture is as much a signal as a symbol.

Geniuses and the Men Hidden Inside Them