We cordially invite you to turn off the Internet until Monday morning at 9 a.m. Or, fine, if you insist:

One year ago: • Das Racist: "We're Not Racist, We Love White People: Ford Trucks, Apple Pies, Bald Eagles" • The Global Casino • Who is the Greatest Diva of the Last 25 Years? We Offer Scientific Proof!

Two years ago: • Longplayer: Q-Bert • The Britney Spears Tailgate Parking Lot, Ticketmaster, Bruce Springsteen, the Death of the Live Music Video and You • Terror Anniversary Prompts Outpouring of Eloquent Expression

Photo by Thierry Draus.

"Citythings would become Venuetastic. Pivot completed." —If you haven't read the Wired story on startup incubator Y Combinator, it's worth it! Makes me want to go to summer camp.

Did you miss attending the Second Annual Conference on Male Studies? So did almost everyone else… except for one intrepid male traitor. By his account, it was, on average, about as misguided as you might expect. The very sight of working mothers compel men to not work. The magazines are no longer controlled by men! Hillary Clinton and bat mitzvahs! And male hopelessness leads to violence. Our intrepid correspondent writes: "It was easy to chalk up the whole scene to a category error: Someone mistaking the biographical decline of a man—namely himself—for a historical Decline of Men."

Anonymous students at Arkansas' Harding University have published this zine about being gay at the conservative Christian school. Their website has been blocked on campus. This is a fascinating development: in previous generations, gay students at such a school would simply have left, or, you know, killed themselves.

"Home is where I climb out of my mecha-suit-of-a-poised-persona and power down. Home is where my house pants live. And they’re hideous. I am devoted to my friends and we can graphically detail our love lives and talk extensively about how much I make but no single confidant has seen all or even most of my homes." —Obviously you will need to be reading this. No, for real, clickety clicky click.

Millennials Magazine is live. If you think the children are terrifying, this will cement the deal. If you can handle young people talking about their feelings and their world views and publications that actually print IM chats and also the sentence "I was in eighth grade when the pilot episode of The O.C. aired," then you'll be fine with the rest.

Ann Finkbeiner's A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery documents the founding of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-and is out today! "Delightful," says Publisher's Weekly! "Totally awesome," says The Awl! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, begun ten years ago, is mapping 100 million celestial objects-and measuring distance between a million galaxies, giving us the first real map of where we live. And here, an excerpt!

"I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. He was older, he’d done it before, and, I had been told, all men were dying to have sex at all times, so it would be easy enough to get him on board with my project. It was harder than I thought. He was eager to make out and grope, but to my surprise and disgust, he seemed very uneasy about engaging in actual intercourse once I admitted—in [...]

Guess who's back, after a year of silence? Firmuhment, the world's most legendary Tumblr proprietor. Today he's reading an Elisa Gabbert poem to us! Where has he been? What has he seen? I don't really know, but I feel like I'll figure it out between the lines.

It's always delightful to read about places that one has no temptation to visit and will never, ever see! So today's travelogue of Kazakhstan and its 16-year-old capital, Astana, is fantastic, and as you are a subscriber to the New Yorker, you will have no problem reading it online or in the magazine, yes? Plus there are some excellent and blunt surprises—if, I suppose, corruption and horror and vast wealth going hand-in-hand are ever a surprise—mid-tale for those who are similarly and happily uninformed as I. Gosh, I hope I never live to see this frosty new hell-hole in person.

"This is the easiest of connections; I don’t even have my thinking cap on. Apple is the most valuable technology brand in the world. Their products are sold to People Of Wal-Mart but the aesthetic still shimmers diamond-hard, like faith beyond reason. When the first iPhone came out the cast of the Apple store applauded every buyer.

Radiohead is the most valuable band in the world. Their music references the phone book but sounds like nobody else. They’ve turned hard sell/soft sell into their own loud-quiet-loud solution. Their intelligence burns even at street level; the more they refuse to dumb it down the less they alienate even dumb people." [...]

By way of the intellectual jungle that is HuffPo comes news from the archives of Analecta, UT Austin's literary journal. It's director Wes Anderson's 1989 short story from his undergrad years! It has some anomie and some irony!

The extraordinarily abstruse Triple Canopy has a new issue up. Most of it is beyond my interests and/or understanding, however I greatly enjoyed this interview with Bob Stein, who for the last six years has run the think tank Institute for the Future of the Book (I don't know, really; one of its goals is that it has "no deliverables") and also founded the Criterion Collection and spent a lot of time thinking about LaserDiscs and HyperCard (oh man!) and also worked at Atari, trying to create the encyclopedia of the future. Basically he makes Clay Shirky's jobs look very task- and result-oriented.

This story by Jessica Soffer from Granta last year, called "Beginning, End," seems to me to be a better and more pleasingly economical take on the same conceit at Jonathan Safran Foer's recent New Yorker story, "Here We Aren't, So Quickly." (Fun fact! Jessica Soffer recently received her MFA from Hunter, where Foer's spouse, Nicole Krauss, is an instructor. So maybe they both learned from the best!)

The upcoming season of 'Celebrity Rehab' features such TMZ listers as Sean Young and Lindsay Lohan's dad. If Drew's right, it seems like a contradiction at best and a cruel joke at worst to put these troubled people in front of cameras, which reinforces rather than challenges their narcissism. Drew's heard this criticism before. 'Here's the thing: These are unmotivated people who want to be on TV and make money. That's why they're there,' Drew insists. 'And in spite of that, they end up getting treatment, feeling good about it, being transformed by it.' According to his informal data—follow-up calls, e-mails, what you read on Perez Hilton—about 20 [...]

Today in stupidity: "Holding up the supermarket industry as a model for the equitable distribution of life's necessities is like holding up the NFL as a model of gender parity. Evidently, you can become a professor of economics—and can write on economics for the opinion page of the nation's leading business newspaper—without knowing anything at all about how and where the most basic, everyday goods might be bought and sold in America."

Enjoy your government shutdown and your Turbotax, ladies and gents! I know I certainly am. That's right: just hanging out, measuring my "home office." Looking for some procrastination? Here, we can help, with some things you might have missed this week. See you Monday!

• "The big-step strut is usually done by female soul singers, none better than Tina Turner, who turned the big-step strut into a marketing campaign."

• "I probably failed to think of a half dozen people who would have been willing and able to write a blurb. If my own mother were Oprah Winfrey, I'd have skipped her and been like, 'Well, who [...]

Holiday confessions from a charity call-center employee: "You start off nice and easy, saving lives £2 at a time, but once you really realize how easy it is to save lives (just £2 a life!), it becomes harder and harder to draw any kind of line. A life! you think. For the price of a coffee!"

The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology contains "25 of the best short stories published on the web in 2009 and 2010 as chosen by the editors of ChamberFour.com, a website dedicated to making reading more enjoyable and more rewarding." (It may or may not be published by a subsidiary of Halliburton or something but it's a free download!)

I have read two excerpts of Kevin Guilfoile's novel The Thousands now and it is really weird! Obviously though I would pretty much read any book about a cybernetically enhanced jury consultant and a secret society probably.