"I think exploration and adventure are essential to the happiness of every person, but I can't presume to present this as anything but my own opinion. Most people are pre-naturally more happy than I am, out the gate."

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

n the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers? -- In photography, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand are hailed as masters by those well-versed in the medium. Whereas Ansel Adams or Annie Liebowitz are popular with the masses and often derided by the cognoscenti (though I happen to like all four of them).

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

John Seddon explains why targets make organisations worse and controlling costs makes costs higher. This elegant dissection of the organisational madness that pervades our culture was given at the 2009 conference of the Human Givens Institute.

Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.

research also seems to support Ms. Boyd’s contention that social media “mirrors and magnifies” our social divisions, rather than removes them. “We can use technology as a tool to connect with people, but we can’t assume that it will eliminate all of the serious issues we have to face in this country,” Ms. Boyd said at PDF. “Pervasive social stratification is being reified in a new era.

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal. To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data. To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.

Our music, our culture, our science and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In his award-winning new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws.

It may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs publicly controlled search

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.

Seemingly, the culture of “open” has infused even the most conservative and blood-thirsty organizations with companies falling over each other to claim the mantle of being the most open of them all. So we won, right? I wouldn’t say that. In fact, I think it’s now when the hard work begins.

I think that there's something to be said for how today's youth are thinking differently than their parent's generation. But I don't think that it's simply "caused" by new technologies. I think that we're living in a society that has different priorities and I think that multi-tasking is more deeply prioritized than sustained attention by professional circles today. I think that we are being trained to be "creative" thinkers rather than productive doers and I think that this means that we are encouraged to draw connections between new things. I think that we are living in an environment that is structurally divided and that sociality is increasingly mediated. But I don't think that the technology is to blame. I would argue that we're addicted to our friends, not the computer.

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any.

Onze 21e-eeuwse economie, ons werkend leven, is doordrenkt van het wantrouwen. Eerst een handtekening! Niet voordat jij... Hoe ga je dat aanpakken? Ik denk dat we dat ons niet langer kunnen veroorloven. Bovendien: veel van dat wantrouwen is volstrekt overbodig én contraproductief.

I tried a little experiment in 2008: living smaller. I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I froze my own dumplings. I didn't buy any gadget. I didn't buy any CD. I didn't get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV; no new art; no gin. I only took one international trip (which was quite important) and two domestic flights (to my dear parent's 80th birthdays) but turned down several work opportunities that involved flying, even though it meant less satisfactory participation at SC34 WG1. I let my passport lapse.

Objective truth is no longer significant in discussions of political and social matters. _True Enough_ is about how this has happened, and what it looks like. We hear the phrase "marketplace of ideas" quite a bit; Farhad digs into work by psychologists and sociologists to uncover why it is that it is a marketplace in which bad ideas drive out good. I think it's a fascinating book that's full of interesting ideas, and I think these are ideas that we need to be talking about.

Shirky distils his observations of passive and interactive activities into a general principle: "It’s better to do something than to do nothing." But Stephenson makes the case that both activities have their place. Sometimes switching off your brain and w

Physical money is disappearing and we are moving towards a cashless society where hard cash only exists to avoid taxes or to buy illegal services and goods. A suitcase of money even had a magic cinematic effect making people do or believe in almost anythi

For our latest mission, we filled a subway car with identical twins, creating a human mirror. Enjoy the video first and then see below for our report with tons of photos

There are many reasons why cities are abandoned; some, like the ghost towns of the American West, have become tourist destinations while others have been condemned or simply forgotten. These 20 abandoned cities of the world share an eerie, haunted quality

Recently I spent some time considering the differences between traditional office e-mail and facebook e-mail: the lack of bc, cc and forward buttons, the way links and videos and sound files are attached, the absence of spreadsheet and document and presen

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retire

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction.

Article about the fundamental difference between a steady-state economy and continuous growth economy. A steady state — a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth.

"It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many o

Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

Podcasts on culture and education

Head's argument is much like that of David Noble in Forces of Production: we had a choice about how to use new technology. We could use it to turn employees into ever-more-skilled craftspeople, allowing them to be more effective and creative in their jobs

Tim Wu schreef een week geleden een artikel op Slate over zijn tevergeefse zoektocht naar torrents van cultfilms zoals die ook op het Sundancefestival worden vertoond. Wu stelt dat je op torrentsites alleen maar blockbusters kunt vinden en dat de lange st

Any picture can speak 1,000 words, but only a select few say something poignant enough to galvanize an entire society. The following photographs screamed so loudly that the entire world stopped to take notice.

Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.

a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

aylor McDowell Mali is an American slam poet and high school teacher. His most popular poems include "What Teachers Make", "Like Lilly Like Wilson" and "The Impotence of Proofreading".

Now that the dust has settled on ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' Stephen King reflects on why no review did it justice, and whether kids (and their grown-ups) will ever read the same way again

Magazine over media.

Opiniestuk van Francisco van Jole over het effect van 'gratis' diensten op internet op onze cultuur. Volgens mij is geen van de gratis diensten echt gratis. Er staan advertenties omheen, je persoonlijek informatie wordt gebruikt/verkocht, etc.

Web 2.0 heeft de prosumer voortgebracht, de producent en consument ineen. Ook bewees het dat de menigte slimmer en sneller kan zijn dan professionals en bedrijven. Haar encyclopedieën, besturingssystemen en media zijn vaak betrouwbaarder, innovatiever en

Reference list by Danah Boyd

"Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation

Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.

In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of “culture jamming” by activists. These techniques defy repressive corporate culture through parodies, hoaxes, and pranks.

Isn’t it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their time and money performing menial labors when they don’t have to? Just as the radio and phonograph proved to be powerful substitutes for the piano, the forces of technol

Online advertising is a revolution for marketers, who now can take advantage of previously unavailable data about readers' online behaviors and preferences to send commercial messages to individuals rather than to broad demographic groups. [..]

"If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy."

"Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?" What happens when one of the best violin players starts playing a Stradivarius in a metro station.

"One of the world's largest online libraries of feature films and documentaries. Cascade, Jaman's global peer to peer network, delivers movies with better-than-DVD quality to Macs, PCs or home entertainment systems. Join Jaman - join the world."

"Ik voorspel dat er de komende tijd nieuwe hybride vormen gaan ontstaan tussen geen baan, een “half” bedrijf, en nieuwe vormen, waarbij het generen van meerdere inkomstenstromen de kern van de activiteiten gaan vormen van mensen. Ontplooing, het verke

"Ik voel me connector tussen de bovenstroom en de onderstroom, waarbij ik probeer de bovenstroom (daar verkeren de meeste van ons de meeste tijd en daar vind je de vanzelfsprekendheid, het alledaagse, de systemen, de verkokering, de verzuiling, de verbrok

The most underrated benefit of the face-to-face effect of conferences is INSPIRATION."

Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to pu

"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any aca

"The idea that we could better understand ourselves by looking at how we employ technology was and remains the driving force of my work as a journalist."

World of Ends What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.