For your holiday reading, some of 2015’s best essays

up with a working model for how the brain works and laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence.

“The Zero-Armed Bandit,” published in Damn Interesting by Alan Bellows, opens with an amazing problem. In 1980, a security guard finds an ingenious bomb with 28 mysterious toggles in a Lake Tahoe casino. An accompanying note says that any attempt to tilt the bomb or take it apart will set it off. The bomb will apparently wreak destruction within a 1,200-foot radius, including the Harrah’s hotel across the street.

The essay tells two stories — of the father and sons who built the bomb and engineered an equally complex ransom drop-off scheme, and the local officials who had to figure out how to defuse the thing.

If you want a glimpse of technology’s next face, I’d hold up Connie Chan’s post, “When One App Rules Them All: The Case ofWeChat and Mobile in China,” on the Andreessan Horowitz site. In America we use different apps for different functions. But China has overleapt us. The Chinese app WeChat basically does everything from texting to dating to banking to accessing city services. It is an app that contains millions of apps within it. As Chan says, it shows what happens when an entire country skips the PC and goes straight to mobile. It suggests a completely unified technological life. As Tyler Cowen noted on his Marginal Revolution blog, this is one of China’s first major innovations in the tech era.

Let us have two looks at campus culture. The first is the much-discussed “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. This was the most important article this year on student hypersensitivity, the way some students seek safe spaces in case they are assaulted by microaggressions. The authors invent the apt term “vindictive protectiveness” to capture this mindset and describe how this mental state leads to depression and leaves students unprepared for the real world.

Students may by offended by the slightest infringement in identity, but as Michael J. Lewis points out in “How Art Became Irrelevant” in Commentary, many are utterly unmoved by art. Lewis writes, “Placing things in context is what contemporary students do best. What they do not do is judge. Instead there was the same frozen polite reserve one observes in the faces of those attending an unfamiliar religious service — the expression that says, I have no say in this.”

Hyperjudgmentalism about self sits side by side with widespread nonjudgmentalism about art, philosophy and even literature. This is a weird set of affairs.

This has been a great year for long-form journalism.