"Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live this way, by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal, and it’s the premise on which a lot of single people base their lives. If you’re ambitious and you’ve had to navigate a tough job market, alone can seem the best way to approach adulthood."

On the art world's most recent hit, The Clock, and its creator. Lots of interesting tidbits here, such as his willingness to turn a blind eye to other's copyright to create his art while insisting that its display be under his control. I still want to see it, mind you.

"The goal: to walk from the Empire State Building, on West Thirty-third Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West Forty-eighth, without ever setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenue—to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays. A writer for this magazine accomplished the feat in 1956, and a photographic attempt appeared on our Web site last year. A recent lazy Friday seemed like a good time to try the experiment again."

Maybe I should have bought the paper copy after all. (This is more of an aide memoire to come back if I ever get a subscription.)

Benjamin Franklin was sure that the document had its faults, and just as sure that the framers were fallible.

If you liked the idea of the Atlas of Remote Islands, the New Yorker has a slideshow of maps of the islands (including two British territories, Ascension Island and Diego Garcia).

I was reminded of this today on Twitter, but I don't seem to have a bookmark, so: on mathematics, with an interesting bit about how the differences in how languages render numbers affecting the speed on which we learn numeracy.

"As people came to recognize the futility of the Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era placebos and sops (duck-and-cover, Bert the Turtle, back-yard fallout shelters), they stopped thinking about preparing. Prevention was all. But a terrorist attack is different: harder to prevent, easier to survive."

"Living without a fridge, and other experiments in environmentalism. By Elizabeth Kolbert". Well worth reading, a dissection of experiments in lifestyle from Thoreau to this year.

John Lanchester's pocket portraits of the central bankers at the heart of Lords of Finance, a book about the decade running up to the 1929 crash - and the role gold-backed currency played in that crash.

A profile of Garrett Lisi, the E8-set unification theorist and surfer who made the headlines last year. Ironically I read this in a university library while waiting for candace to finish talk about PhDs.

A fantastic piece about lifts, including phrases like "arrival immediate prediction lantern", "body ellipse" and "Improved Hoisting Apparatus", hung around the tale of Nicholas White, stuck in one for 41 hours. Lifts sound a lot like tube trains.

An interesting piece on the retreat of reading. There's some good stuff about literate vs graphical thinking in the middle (I'm kind of obsessed since reading The Alphabet vs The Goddess).

Subtitled "The war on light pollution", this is a glorious overview of the problems it causes and what we're all missing due to the human-generated glow in our skies. Well worth a read.

Interesting review of an interesting book about democracy, through the lens of economics. It's not hard to persuade me that democracy is a bit wonky, but the solution seems worryingly close to "let market forces rule" to me.

On the Poincaré conjecture, Grigory Perelman, and Shing-Tung Yau. Long, but worth it.

"Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile" Satellite navigation (is that a British term only?) in a historical context