Wes Phillips

Make mine music: "Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics."

It's the small wildcats that naturalists are all excited about.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda—some "superior" formats just didn't achieve dominance.

My first electronics project was the crystal radio I constructed to earn my Webelos badge in the Scouts. It was like magic—something I made pulled radio waves out of the air

Putting the "fun" into "functional kitsch." Sure.

As anyone who has talked me me even briefly over the last month knows, I loved reading King Dork. It's a young adult novel that's one-half rant against Catcher In the Rye, one-half spoof of The Da Vinci Code, and one-half Encyclopedia Brown in the 21^st Century. Yeah, I know that adds up to more than one, but that's how good it is. It's also very knowing about rock trivia and absolutely spot-on about what it feels like to be an "uncool" teen.

This Gay Talese Esquire profile of the chairman of the board is frequently cited as the best celebrity portrait ever published. I don't know about that—I'd rate both Wolcott Gibbs' New Yorker deconstruction of Henry Robinson Luce and Lillian Ross' Hemingway profile just as highly.