Mental Multivitamin's List: Read. Think. Learn.

"If you used Reader Share, you’re probably in mourning today. No longer can you click the share button at the bottom of a post in your Reader, sending it to a sidebar widget on your blog and popping it into the “people you follow” section of your friends on Reader. No longer can you count on that easy click in Reader to show you the links shared by the people you follow—those trusted curators of content whose taste and judgment you rely on."

"Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly? The victory of video was quick and merciless. Was it only a few years ago that I was patiently explaining how video would never win over the ancient and familiar method of light projected through celluloid? And now Eastman Kodak, which seemed invulnerable, is in financial difficulties."

"NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has spotted one of the largest new sunspots to appear on the surface of the sun in years. It is nearly 25,000 miles wide, or more than three times larger than the Earth. The enormous sunspot was seen rotating over the sun’s northeastern limb on Nov. 3."

"So, now everywhere you go, everything you do is being sent back to your Facebook friends and stored on company servers. Creepy, right? Maybe. But if you don't want your friends to know you love to read news stories about Lindsay Lohan or that you follow the details of every gruesome murder across the country, here's my advice: authorize wisely."

"There is a widespread nostalgic fondness for the first Penguins, with their bands of color that made every book look the same within whichever category of writing — green for crime, purple for . . . something else? The same is true of the early Modern Classics featuring drawings, but for someone of my age — born 1958, buying and reading from the mid-1970s — these editions were the stuff of used-book stores. They all looked pretty much the same: old, dreary and therefore oxymoronically unmodern. Whereas the 1970s livery with titles and authors’ names in sharply discreet Helvetica was the pristine look of modernity — sometimes modernism — itself."

"Nothing good ever comes to people who allow themselves to be moved to a remote location at the mercy of a violent predator. The police call such places “secondary crime scenes.” They are always better for the attacker and worse for his victim because they are more isolated than the first point of contact. And although your home may be the most familiar place on earth to you, the moment an intruder enters, it becomes the equivalent of a secondary crime scene. You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you’re inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn’t. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in. 60"

"The rover, nicknamed Curiosity, weighs in at nearly 1 ton and is a little bigger than a Mini Cooper. The probe is expected to survey the Martian landscape with HD cameras, examine the chemical surface composition within 20 feet of the rover, monitor the planet’s weather, and search for signs of habitability and life, past or present."

So is there anything new? Perhaps there is. When, in 1970, Kenneth Clark put the Apollo of the Belvedere alongside an African mask that had belonged to Roger Fry, he felt able to say: “I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask.” That was then. Today, when Neil MacGregor rates the significance of Michelangelo, Donatello and Cellini alongside a collection of bronze plaques from Benin, he manages to insinuate that the bronzes prove that in the sixteenth century, “Europe and Africa were able to deal with each other on equal terms.”

One of the most impressive features of brains—and especially human brains—is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes their way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master in a chicken-sexing task and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping, and operating space shuttle cockpits.

Psychologists and behavioral economists, meanwhile, are identifying the personality types and other traits that distinguish savers from spenders, showing that people who aren’t good savers are neither stupid nor irrational—but often simply don’t accurately foresee the consequences of not saving. Rewire the brain to find pleasure in future rewards, and you’re on the path to a future you really want.

It's a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It's called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney's first. A few days ago, Rebecca's father emailed me: "Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest." By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.

Just as the painters who met in Gertrude Stein's apartment were inspired and influenced by one another's pictures, Stein herself was influenced by the art on her walls. You can see the effects in her writing. "She began to deconstruct the written word in the way she felt that Picasso was beginning to deconstruct the visual motif," Rabinow says. Cubism was in the air at 27 Rue de Fleurus.

After roughly 30 years of service, the remaining space shuttles are headed for the final frontier: retirement. Museums around the country have been clamoring for a chance to take one home.

There has been a big jump in the number of single family homes shifting into the rental market since the country's housing boom started to bust.

Eric Belsky with Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies says during the boom years between 2001 to 2005, about 700,000 single-family homes became rentals. The latest survey tracking housing units from 2005 to 2009 showed a significant increase.

The only thing I knew was that if something was broken, I would have to fix it. I just assumed that everyone would be a good renter. I approached it in a very naive fashion.

- Jeanette Masterson

According to Belsky, 2.3 million single-family homes "flowed from having been owned to being rented, and they're not just being offered for rent, but they're actually occupied by renters."

There is not always rational thinking behind the choices you and I make. We buckle up to be safe and find it ridiculous not to do so. But the majority of accidents in cars do not come from the choices you make but from wrong doing from others. So why even bother? I believe that we all like to have, or believe we have, a choice or at least some control of our potential life span. We pretend to make decisions all day that keep us safe for yet another day.

I told her one time, "I worry about women." She said, "Don't."

Why does Amazon sell a product at a loss? Because, for Amazon, the Fire is a book store, and a movie theater, and a record shop. And (of course) Amazon is the one selling books, movies and records.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I am supposed to still be a writer but now on something new, and still run a small business and still do all those other things that we all do. And I'm supposed to do this because this is just how it is now, this is what it is like for the average 21st century author. The question I'm weighing - seriously weighing - is if it is worth it. Is this life, where you feel overlooked and underappreciated and sometimes just flat out angry, the life I want to have? Did I expect a NYTimes best seller? No - please. But I expected just one - just one - response from all those emails and mailings. So I have to think long and hard about where I go from here and how far on this road I'm interested in traveling now that I know how lonely it gets.

I am a firm believer in content meritocracy and the pay-what-you-will model as the future of publishing, but I am also profoundly saddened by the way editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked, regurgitated, and spat out as sellable commodities not benefiting the original creator or curator in any way.

But Shane's hard-line pragmatism makes Rick worry that his "good intentions" are making the group weaker. He's asking the wrong question; splitting up, sharing resources, and giving away guns unquestionably makes the group weaker. The question is whether or not that sacrifice is worth making.