Chadwick Matlin made it his mission. I really can't imagine a greater hell than visiting all those little police-states with shopping.

Peter Campbell rants about museum audio tours:

It’s illegal to drive while you’re on your mobile phone, so why do galleries ask you to listen on headsets while you look at pictures? There is plenty of evidence – intuitive, anecdotal (scientific too, for all I know) – to show that concentrated listening and concentrated looking interfere with one another. Is it the money the headsets bring in?

"The Idea Of Beauty" by Meleagros from the 3rd century B.C.E., was translated by Brooks Haxton, and appeared in the Atlantic in June of 1998:

Shy, he stepped off into the cornfield. I could see
   his back muscles under the damp shirt quiver and go slack.
Turning again to face the shade, he smiled at me, not
   squinted, smiled, and finished tugging shut his fly.
Now, when the cornstalks in the night wind slide
   like fire, I see him. He steps closer in my dream.
I don't know, where he sleeps, if sleep refreshes him,
   but here it works me like hot metal over a flame.

(Image by Flickr user Philippe Leroyer)

Ed Yong recounts how the spider mite Stigmaeopsis longus gets a little OCD with the cleaning:

[H]ygiene is paramount. For example, the colony’s members all use a toilet at the entrance of the nest, never defecating inside. They’re also fastidious cleaners and Miki Kanazawa from Hokkaido University has found that they scrub using the same substance that they build their homes with: silk.

Nick Summers profiles Jake Weisberg, Slate's chairman and editor in chief (and former fellow intern and editor at TNR and next door neighbor with yours truly). Summers tries to understand the head start the fourteen-year-old website had and where it finds itself now:

A reader writes:

Your discussion of doubt and America can't sensibly omit C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, who described himself as a fallibilist, and indeed, as a defender of contrite fallibilism. (He extended this even to mathematics.) Money quote:

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@theatlantic.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, courtesy of Blurb. Have at it.

Dan Ariely interviews customers at a nightclub lining up for "free tattoos." He concludes:

When we face a decision about a tattoo, one would hope that the long term permanency of the decision, coupled with the risks of getting different types of infections would cause people to pay little attention to price, and certainly not to be swayed one way or another by the power of free.  But sadly, the reality (at least in the nightclub scene in New York) suggests that the power of free can get us to make many foolish decisions.