From Mental Floss, an article on the secrets behind your favorite toys; and a look at the surprisingly cool history of ice. What girls want: Caitlin Flanagan on a series of vampire novels that illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire. From New Internationalist, here are the nominees for Most Artful Tax Dodger (and the winner). Heil Comrade: Baader-Meinhof is flashy and violent, but the glamour hides Germany's odd history of leftist anti-semitism. From Prospect, exactly 50 years ago Michael Young published his famous dystopia The Rise of the Meritocracy; his son Toby argues that we never got the meritocratic educational elite predicted by his father, instead we got the celebrity class; and Britain has more upward social mobility than is often assumed — on some measures more than

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