You Are Not Special Commencement Speech from Wellesley High School

(Thanks, Garo)

The Gift of Siblings

For those of us who have them, they color our characters and shade our lives as much as anything or anyone else. Read more in the NYT. (Thanks, Alessia)

Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros

Read more in the NYT. (Thanks, Alessia)

Some of My Best Friends Are Germs

The first paragraph says it all!

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  

As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome — that is, the genes not of “me,” exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body.  

These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

Read more in NYT Magazine. (Thanks, Claire)

The Guide To Trading Candy

So true during my childhood! Taxes, haha.

(Thanks, Bren)

World's Best Bartender

(Thanks, Bren!)

Soraya Chemaly: The Problem with 'Boys Will Be Boys'

Soraya writes up her views on parenting styles and how it could impact long-term relationships. Very interesting! Read more in the Huffington Post. (Thanks, Alessia)