After five years as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I joined the Army because I wanted a challenge. I wanted adventure. Then I started basic training on September 11, 2001, and got more than I expected. After serving multiple tours in Iraq—patrolling city streets in the dead of night, hunting down insurgents, shooting at the enemy and being shot at—I will never be the same.

Soldier: Texas Monthly July 2008

Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

Annals of Medicine: The Itch

A new Alice Munro story.

Sally packed devilled eggs—something she usually hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy.

Deep-Holes

In this issue of the magazine, Paul Goldberger writes about Beijing’s changing skyline and the new headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV. “In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city,” Goldberger writes.

Here is a portfolio of photographs by Iwan Baan.

Forbidden Cities

Isabella Rossellini, well known as a supermodel and movie star, is now making short films for mobile devices that illustrate the sex lives of dragonflies, earthworms and other creatures. But they are not like standard nature shows. In these films, which she researched with the help of Wildlife Conservation Society experts, she not only details unusual aspects of the critters’ biology but also dresses up as them and mimics sex with paper cutouts. We asked Rossellini what she hopes to accomplish with the films on invertebrate love, dubbed Green Porno, which premiered May 5 on the Sundance Channel’s Web site.

Green Porno: SciAm Talks Insect Sex with Isabella Rossellini: Scientific American

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge.

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention.

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak.

When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

The Myth of Multitasking

This is a large photoset of old New York.

See also, A Little More New York in Black and White.

New York in Black and White

Like a Morricone-style dirge recorded by The Mamas and The Papas, Violent Femmes’ cover of Gnarls Barkley’s infamous “Crazy” is like nothing you’ve heard from the legendary alt-rock trio before. Their oft-imitated folk-punk sound is flavored with surf-rock guitar and Theremin, creating a tranquility that is somber and otherworldly.

Violent and Crazy

This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Uniformed Letter Carrier with Child in Mailbag

This seems like something we've talked about before.

Citysense was built to show you where the action is, right now.

When the Mission or Soma is busier than normal – you'll know immediately.

Citysense is an application that operates on the Sense Networks Macrosense platform, which analyzes massive amounts of aggregate, anonymous location data in real-time. Macrosense is already being used by business people for things like selecting store locations and understanding retail demand. But we asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city? Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer. This release is just a test, and we're interested in your feedback on how to make the application better. You'll find a feedback button in Citysense.

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