http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.xml

The hook:

“Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew.

Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species – at any stage of its development – could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world – you are born, and then you die.”

At one time my queue was like yours, absolutely overflowing and out of control. I ‘declared bankruptcy’ one day by buzzing through it and deleting everything out of it.

From now on, no new articles go into it unless they are 1. long-form and 2. time-resistant (I sometimes fall weeks behind) and 3. I’ve read the first several paragraphs first and feel a really strong desire to keep on reading. If it looks interesting, but I can’t be bothered to read 3 or 4 paragraphs right then, I figure I’m not really ‘feeling’ it and move on.

I also never let my collection go beyond the first page, which is twenty articles, and I usually start trimming when it gets to 10 or 12. Remember: those articles are still out there on the web…you can always go back and get them again if you change your mind, I never do because there’s always too much new stuff being written.

Nowadays when I open Instapaper and skim my to-be-read list I feel really drawn to the material there, not overwhelmed. I look forward to yanking out my Nexus 7 or downloading a few to my Kindle to get caught up.

Current in my queue:

The Grandmaster Experiment by Carlin Flora
The Hunt For “Geronimo” by By Mark Bowden
The Boy They Couldn’t Kill by THOMAS LAKE
Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works By Brendan I. Koerner