Although open-form essays are a standard approach that goes back more than four-hundred years to the father of the modern essay, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne...

http://classweb.gmu.edu/rnanian/ThesisGuidelines.html

But one of my students, a 12-year old boy of Algerian-descent brought up the subject of race. "You're lucky that you live in the U.S.," he said. "Don't you like living in France?" I asked. "No," he replied with grim certainty. "People are racist here. They take one look and decide they don't like you."

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/11/how-france-built-discrimation-its-cities/3881/

"How can one truly be free if responding to things only with the amygdala?"

http://pocket.co/sdduP

For the oldest galaxies in the image, the light now reaching us first shone some 13.2 billion years ago, more than 8.6 billion years before Earth even existed.

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-deepest-portrait-of-our-universe-yet/263077/

Lohman has partnered with the Brooklyn Brainery, one of many ad-hoc educational institutions that have sprung up in Brooklyn, adding to the borough's progressive but discomfiting image as a place where thirty-somethings act like they're still in college.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/09/sarah-lohman-foodie-historian.html

People devote hours to winning video games for no other reward.

"There's a broader lesson to be learned here: Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later," Obama said in an interview scheduled before the North African violence. "And as president, one of the things I've learned is you can't do that. It's important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts and that you've thought through the ramifications before you make them."

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/09/12/analysis-romneys-attack-on-obama-over-libya-assassination-could-backfire/

I probably never would have listened to most of those recordings. But when I got the opportunity to produce a story about that period, I had to go back and listen to a lot of that old tape and it was awful. Most of it was mundane and it's unclear why I thought any of it was worth committing to tape, though I did discover a few gems. Like that argument I had with Mark in the bar. I had forgotten about it until I found the recording of it.

He was totally right about posterity only being good in small doses. I realise that now. Having to slog through hundreds of hours of my own boring life has made that very, very clear to me.

They did better for a simple reason: They tried harder.

Trying to be better than everyone else is a loser's bet,

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/here-is-everything-i-learned-in-new-york

Albert Einstein, who navigated the twilight turf between consciousness and matter for much of his life, argued that "Man" suffers from an "optical delusion of consciousness" as he "experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest." His cure? Get some n/um. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," he said. "It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed."

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic

Is Facebook a company with a Google-y or Apple-y future? Maybe. Nobody knows. Is Facebook's stock performance embarrassing? That's a simpler question. And so, it is the question tech writers are answering today.

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/what-does-groupons-collapse-mean-for-tech-stocks-how-about-nothing/261359/

"My greed does not exceed my self respect." -Richard Pryor

"Never lose anything again." How's that for a slogan?

http://mobile.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/mat_honan_the_four_things_you_need_to_do_right_now_to_avoid_getting_hacked_.html

"We're problem solvers on our feet. If the day falls apart due to weather or maintenance, we just smile and work a longer day," she said. "We work 14 to 16 hour days. We eat standing up. We get nine hours on the ground. We turn around and we do it all over again. We're smiling the entire way through it."

http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/local_news/comair-employees-to-get-job-assistance

You just had an anomalous experience.

http://m.psychologytoday.com/articles/201206/your-sixth-sense

It is difficult to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.

Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom.

In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted

“If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.”

all organisms tend to do what the world around them rewards them for doing

The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe.

“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”

We’ve bought into the morality of the market completely. Economic success is a matter of morality, of working hard and doing all the right things. If you fail, you deserve all the hardships, degradation and shame you’ll get. If you don’t have any money, you are a loser.

Is the market-based distribution of income fair or unfair, and if unfair, what should the government do about it?

One day Seung would like to map an entire human brain, that's 80 billion neurons with roughly a 100 trillion connections between them.

http://m.npr.org/story/149685880?url=/blogs/krulwich/2012/03/30/149685880/neuroscientists-battle-furiously-over-jennifer-aniston

Gunther appears to have exhausted himself to the point of contradiction.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/money/work-blog/2012/mar/29/job-rejection-letter-to-end-all-others?cat=money&type=article

"I have a motto: it's never too late to give up. It's never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realise you love."

http://howtomakeadifference.net/2012/03/28/hans-rosling/

in the abstract, whoever plays power forward for Kentucky is really just another impermanent pawn, contributing to a physical art form that will exist long after the death of everyone reading this column.

http://m.espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=7744477

"You can make a strong case that her theorem is the backbone on which all of modern physics is built."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/science/emmy-noether-the-most-significant-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of.xml

Broccoli and cucumbers bought with the best of intentions turned squishy with neglect.

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/25/surprised_to_see_me/singleton/?mobile.html

If you see people acting like something is no big deal, you assume the same.

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/24/its_true_cities_are_meaner/singleton/?mobile.html

If we make sectors like health care and education cheaper, where will the people go?

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-secret-cost-baked-into-the-price-of-everything-its-people/254968/

Football is supposed to have the madcap gallantry of a World War I cavalry charge, not the mean cowardice of a drone attack.

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/21/can_tebow_find_salvation/singleton/?mobile.html

America's rich continue to grow richer —and many of them (and their heirs) are being lulled into lives whose hardest task is summoning the help.

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/burn_the_safety_net/singleton/?mobile.html

The central fiscal issue in American politics is the Republican Party's insistence on cutting taxes for the rich everywhere and always with no compromise possible.

http://www.nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/how-obama-tried-to-sell-out-liberalism-in-2011.html?imw=Y

the children of ethnics who fled integration in the 1960s are returning from white suburbs to live in some of the same neighborhoods where their grandparents did, only now they're made up less of immigrants from Poland and Mexico than of young professionals from Northbrook and River Forest.

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/meet-the-new-boss/8899/

"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison."

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/why-conservative-bestsellers-are-widely-ignored/254692/

The Internet is a hypertext system

Does the moth remember its life as a caterpillar? Does it feel as though it’s the same individual as it was during the prechrysalis days? Where is the “self” of the caterpillar?

"Whole streets flipped from white to black, almost overnight," Casey-Leininger said. "Real estate practices of the day were largely unscrupulous."

One method was known as "blockbusting," when an agent or lender would start a rumor that a black family was moving onto a street, that whites were moving out and homeowners should sell to avoid plummeting property value. Real estate listings in The Enquirer in 1954 advertised homes for sale in Avondale as "Colored Man's Dream" and "Unrestricted."

http://m.cincinnati.com/enquirertopnews/article?a=2012303190016&f=880

"As you get older and you accumulate more things in life through the game here, then it becomes how much do you still love to play?" Baker said. "Then it becomes if you have pain, how much more pain can you tolerate. I know he loves to play, and right now he's not in pain."

http://m.cincinnati.com/sports/article?a=2012303140157&f=881

One day I'm sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I've been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world's largest collections of personal data.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

Falling oil consumption is rare and, in the absence of recession, almost unprecedented. In fact, the United States has only experienced declining oil consumption without an accompanying recession once -- during a 12-month period from 1980 to 1981. In every other instance -- 1973, 1979, 1981, 1990, 2001, and 2008 -- a fall in oil use has gone hand in hand with recession. And, in each case but 2001, rising oil prices were implicated as a cause of the economic slowdown.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/05/the_petrostates_of_america

It's reasonable to conclude that speculators are also playing a key role in the current oil-price run-up, in addition to the sabre-rattling over Iran and other geopolitical and economic factors. A study by none other than Goldman Sachs has found that each million barrels' worth of speculation adds 10 cents to every barrel of oil. There were about 233.9 million crude oil contracts that were the subject of speculation as of Feb. 28. Thus speculation added $23.39 to the price of a $108 barrel of oil, which translates to 56 cents a gallon at the pump. Without speculation, Forbes writer Bob Lenzner notes, a barrel of oil would have cost as little as $74.61, and the cost of fuel would have been $3.12 a gallon on Feb. 28, and not the price it was actually commanding in the northeastern U.S.: $3.68.

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/07/the_real_way_to_hold_down_gas_prices/singleton/?mobile.html

Whenever Julio received his reward, his brain activity would spike in a manner that suggested he was experiencing happiness.

http://mobile.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/02/an_excerpt_from_charles_duhigg_s_the_power_of_habit_.single.html

But increasingly I think these issues --how we move "freely" online, or more properly, how we pay one way or another -- are actually the leading edge of a much bigger discussion about the relationship between our digital and physical selves. I don't mean theoretically or psychologically. I mean that the norms established to improve how often people click ads may end up determining who you are when viewed by a bank or a romantic partner or a retailer who sells shoes.

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/im-being-followed-how-google-and-104-other-companies-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/

a 250-qubit quantum computer would contain more bits that there are particles in the universe.

"Whereas psychologists tend to view humans as fallible and sometime even self-destructive, economists tend to view people as efficient maximisers of self-interest who make mistakes only when imperfectly informed about the consequences of their actions."

http://neurosciencenews.com/economics-brain-how-people-make-decisions/