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Do you get your best ideas and inspiration in the shower? Do you lose those great ideas before you can get out and write them down?

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My next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that the tools we use to think with – our “intellectual technologies” – not only shape our habits of thought but exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. I look at the Internet, an extraordinarily powerful intellectual technology, in this context, examining what the scientific and historical evidence tells about the effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even emotions – and how different the effects are from those exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the printed…

Cool Tools: Perplexus is a cool 3-dimensional maze that is easy to get started and hard to finish. You need to steer a small metal ball along an ingenious obstacle course by rotating the clear plastic globe. There are 100 stations along the way, including some difficult topsy-turvy turns. All ages can get into it. We’ve found the puzzle to be extremely addictive to anyone who gets started. Because it’s like a 3D video game without the electronics, the very physical nature of playing — turning it this way and that — is very satisfying. In addition, the maze is like a sculpture, the design of the route is geekily brilliant, and the elegance of the eternal return of the steel ball within the sphere is a stroke of genius. Perplexus has the glow of a work of art. It makes me happy just to pick it up.

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The Gazette: Manuel Desrochers didn’t set out to design an award-winning piece of utilitarian sculpture.

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Jay Rosen points to another interesting, if not altogether surprising, tidbit about how the New York Times plans to construct its promised paywall. Essentially, it appears that if you come to a Times article via a link, either on the Web or in an email, you will get to read the whole article, and the article won’t count against your monthly limit of articles. This news comes from a Q&A in which Times CEO Janet Robinson and digital chief Martin Nisenholtz answered readers’ questions about the subscription plan. Here’s what they said: Q: … will I still be able to…

Luxist: If you are going to spend the money to travel well, why not have a truly unique experience. Wines Travel takes a few guests on experiences that combine luxury with education of a rather unique sort. For example, a six-day trip scheduled for June offers total immersion in one of the most sought after areas of France and a decent wine education. The trip includes a full official WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) course pack and certification and a proprietary Chne Bleu practical diploma as well as tuition and gourmet food for 5,700 euros a person.

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The soon-to-be-disappeared Sun Microsystems had a knack for prescient slogans. “The network is the computer” has come true. And then there was “write once, run anywhere,” which heralded the age of universal software applications. Rather than tailoring their programs to run on a particular type of computer – an IBM mainframe, say, or a Windows PC – programmers would use a language like Sun’s Java that was adaptable to any computer. It was a liberating idea: Software developers and users would no longer be locked into one operating system, and beholden to the owner of that system. And it came…

Jeff Jarvis, the popular media blogger, has long ridiculed newspapers for trying to find innovative ways to charge for the stories they publish online. True to form, he had a kneejerk reaction to the New York Times’s plan to require frequent readers of its digital content to buy a subscription. Jarvis argues that in seeking to charge its “best customers,” the Times is guilty of “cockeyed economics”: So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me. So do the economics. But it’s Jarvis, not the Times, whose economics, and logic,…