Want to show off to your tech bigwig friends? Tell them about the bizarre way you use your time! (Try this: "I sleep in two-hour increments and only eat bananas.")

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the bewildering fall of J.C. Penney, a $17-jean store named after a small denomination of legal tender that tried to rebrand itself as a fancy boutique by refusing to put items "on sale."

Time-traveling Slate essayist Katie Roiphe is back from 2005 with another crazy article about "the information superhighway." This one—a real scorcher!—is about how she will never get off the internet, ever, no matter how many of her friends beg her.

A new study of Norwegian business productivity practices has found that, well, some Norwegian bosses are nuts. Like the guy who made his female employees wear red bracelets during their periods "to justify more frequent trips" to the bathroom.

As oil continues to gush seep from a hole deep under water, publishers are scrambling to get books written about the catastrophe. Six or more are currently in the works. One is coming out in September. It'll be a cliffhanger!

Timothy Ferriss—remember, the bestselling gimmick-book author who "gets most of his news by asking waiters"— has become a guru to tech geeks by preaching the counterintuitive gospel of abstention from electronic gadgets and email as a route to a shorter workweek. Now he's dishing blogstyle about how to save time in…

Finally. As people keep noticing, now people who don't really need personal assistants can act like they do, thanks to South Asia. New offshore personal-assistant services in Bangalore are available to cater to your rinky-dink small-business needs, the Times reiterates today.

So the cover article in this week's Sunday Styles section was about this guy Timothy Ferriss, who has become a guru to the rich nerds of Silicon Valley by advocating an "information diet"—"his methods include practicing 'selective ignorance'—tuning out pointless communiqués, random Twitters, and even world affairs…