18: Fast Tracks: The History of Distance Running, Raymond Krisse and Bill Squires

Riddled with typos and inaccuracies and horrendously poorly written, it still made me want to run.

17: Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh

From the blog of the same name. Cute, funny, poignant, and insightful.

16: The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate Fate of the Universe, Paul Davies

Excellent popular account with actual (gasp) science! The discussion of false vacuum is particularly interesting, and made me dig up "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay" by Coleman and Deluccia (PhysRevD, 1981, 3314). The conclusion, partially quoted in The Last Three Minutes, is amusing:

The time required for the collapse of the interior universe is on the order of the time A discussed in Sec. I, microseconds or less. This is disheartening. The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate.Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe, ' in a new vacuum there are new constants of nature, ' after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

"This is disheartening"! "This possibility has now been eliminated"! This makes me happy.