·http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf

Before he won a MacArthur Fellowship, before he won the Aga Kha Prize for Fiction, before he was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and before he became a literary legend and the reluctant voice of a generation, David Foster Wallace was just a novelist scraping by and writing occasional essays for Harper's Magazine. This essay, published only a month before his groundbreaking novel, Infinite Jest, made him famous, is classic Wallace, chockfull of never-ending, manic footnotes, crushing sadness, side-splitting insights, and, perhaps above all, beautiful, almost magical, sentences. Take these first lines, for example: "I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as 'Mon' in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line." For readers who are looking for a brief introduction to this prodigious talent, this essay will provide the entry they've been looking for. 

·http://qz.com/

Launched in 2012, Quartz is a web-based (i.e. "digitally native") news publication with a scrolling stream designed primarily for tablets and mobile phones. Aimed at "business people in the new economy," the writing tends toward the laconic, rarely saying anything in 1,000 words that could be stated equally well in 500. Recent articles have argued against loosening Twitter's 140 character limit, exposed Big Pharma's habit of massively increasing drug prices, and covered the increasingly commonplace practice among executives of commuting across the globe for their jobs. In addition to scrolling down the screen for the latest news stories, readers may also scout the site using tools, such as The Brief (which offers a single short paragraph of each of the latest stories, with links), Our Picks, and Popular, Latest. A powerful built-in search engine also helps. 

·http://insideclimatenews.org/

Three reporters from the online magazine, InsideClimate News, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for their work uncovering a giant, and largely unpublicized, Canadian oil spill. Since then, the magazine has continued to publish hard-hitting journalism on a range of climate-related topics. Coverage of Exxon's own research into global warming in the 1970s — and its subsequent public campaign to discredit and block further investigation — is a case in point. In this multi-part series, published in late September of 2015, InsideClimate News reporters examine primary sources, including internal company files, to expose Exxon's outright war on the science of global warming. Readers may also scout the site by eight other categories, including All Stories, Carbon Copy, Tar Sands, Clean Economy, Today's Climate, Gas Drilling, ICN Books, and Big Oil, Bad Air. 

·http://www.nobelprize.org/podcast/index.html

There are few honors on earth as significant as winning a Nobel Prize. For readers who are curious about the scientists, authors, thinkers, and doers who have been awarded Nobels, this site provides the perfect window into the characters and curiosities of these most unusual women and men. For instance, May-Britt Moser, the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, describes her passionate co-investigation with her co-Laureate and husband, Edvard Moser, saying, "We didn't care about salaries and having a nice car. We just cared about science and were really ambitious." In fact, the passion for discovery runs through most of these narratives. As Tim Hunt, who won the prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001, puts it, "If we really understood things, there would be no sense of discovery."