Psychology/biology:

• "Ann Roe's scientists: original published papers" (One of the very few data sets, excluding TIP/SMPY, of extremely intelligent people. I am still reading through them but one impression I get is that the education system in America when most of them were growing up around 1910-1920 was grossly inadequate and unchallenging; many of them seem to only drift into their field when they happen to run into a challenging course in college. Quite a few mention incredibly little access to books and severe poverty (although interestingly, they all come from what are clearly middle/upper-class descent families, even if in some cases they are so poor as to be unable to afford shoes). Smart kids are so much better off these days with Internet access to anything at all they want to read. As I've noted in reading biographies of American scientists, the academic environment pre- and post-WWII is strikingly different than the pressure-cooker race to the bottom we are familiar with now. Relative underperformance in grades compared to females is also a running theme. With the chemists and physicists, home chemistry kits seem to have been nigh universal - which is something that sure doesn't happen these days!)
• "Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow? Longitudinal Changes in Ability and Achievement in Elementary School", Lohman & Korb 2006 (Challenges in gifted education in elementary or earlier: IQ scores are unstable and so regression to the mean implies that few children in G&T programs will grow up to be gifted.)
• "Is Education Associated With Improvements in General Cognitive Ability, or in Specific Skills?", Ritchie et al 2015
• "Understanding the Improvement in Disability Free Life Expectancy In the U.S. Elderly Population", Chernew et al 2016 (Adult disability-free life expectancy continues to increase, due in large part to eye surgery improvements; vision is probably, like falling, the proximate cause of a lot of health issues.)
• "Nicotine Contents in Some Commonly Used Toothpastes and Toothpowders: A Present Scenario", Agrawal & Ray 2012 (/not sure if harmful or helpful)

• vision:

  • Orthostatic hypotension: when you stand up and feel like you are about to faint & your vision becomes totally obscured by silver mist
  • Visual snow: when you see the world slightly fuzzy and noisily, like very gentle translucent static on a TV screen
  • Closed-eye hallucination with phospenes: when you close your eyes and see a colored background with blobs and lights, especially in a pitch-black room or at night

Technology:

• "Preparing for the Worst: The Space Insurance Market's Realistic Disaster Scenarios", Robin et al 2016
• "37 Million Compilations: Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes in Large-Scale Student Data", Altadmri & Brown 2015 (commentary)
• "Climb Mount Improbable" (JS reimplementation of Dawkin's evolutionary computation)
• Edward Teller's "Atom Alphabet" (1946)
• XKCD's "Missing 11th of the Month" (The treachery of Google Ngrams)

Economics:

• "The Future of Agriculture"
• "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody" (Clay Shirky; A decade on... Twitch streaming, Minecraft, Snapchat... Not so much wikis or blogs anymore. Still tons of TV, though, especially the poor.)
• Feeder of lice

Philosophy:

• Oceanus's speech from Hyperion by John Keats

Fiction:

• "Is the Great Attractor a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?", Tomotani 2016
• The Neu Jorker (I particularly liked the profile of a woman's courageous journey towards equestrianism, an investigation into some knotty issues, and a retrospective of the role of capes in NYC's crime reduction over the past 3 decades.)