Published from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, our headlines contain links to the most pressing, interesting, or odd stories and sites we find around the web.
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Print for the commute: Why do nations exist, and why do particular nations exist in particular forms?
Wall-E’s plant apocalypse as seen from a botanist’s point of view.
Also highly printable, “Through God’s Left Eye” in Cabinet.
Satirical maps of the first World War.
The exhaustive Times obit for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He emptied the vials of his wrath over Americans who liked rock music. Hitchens on Solzhenitsyn.
Break up via answering machine, and other sly tricks now that you can skip straight to voicemail.
How to get the Madonna-Demi-Olsen face for $30,000.
Eighty-five works of art “improved” by modern gadgets.
Replica of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest in Legos; great stop-motion video; trailer for Ghost Town.
See also: Banana peels in London.
Who the other side would pick for Veep.
Reporter hatches Obama-too-svelte story on Yahoo! message boards.
Op: The real reason newspapers are dying: They no longer dispense social currency.
Every phase of sleep is necessary—“unconscious rehearsal” aids memory, crucial cognition.
Video: Britain’s digital trails, seen from the skies.
Badminton: Bit off opponent’s ear; disqualified. Jack Handy on his Olympic trials.
Jennifer Finney Boylan on what it means to test athletes’ genders.
Audio: Four American women discuss their experiences as soldiers deployed in Iraq.
Video: John Carpenter’s The Thing, reinterpreted by G.I. Joes.