On February 14, there's already a surfeit of buildup, so let's get right to the features about love, sex, and chocolate. A.J. Jacobs investigated whether he loves his spouse. "One married man, a machine that can read his mind, and a head-to-head matchup between his wife... and Angelina Jolie," his editor wrote. "Sounds like no good can come of this. Unless, of course, he discovers the meaning of love."

Wesley Yang offered a critical but highly sympathetic reading of New Yorkers' sexual habits. "Over the course of the Sex Diaries’ 132-week run, we have seen the city through the eyes of cuckolds and cheaters, sluts and prudes, victimizers and victims, starry-eyed lovers and detached pleasure seekers. We have followed aging women on dismal Craigslist dates, lonely gay men in pursuit of ostensibly curious straight guys, happily polyamorous couples, and co-dependent serial monogamists. We’ve watched some Diarists terrified of succumbing to their feelings and others unable to feel much of anything at all. We’ve watched a black man fly to meet a white couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s in the Midwest and have sex with the wife as the husband watched," he writes. "The Diaries can be arousing, a little. But in aggregate, they wound up doing something more interesting: They cracked open a window into the changing structure, rhythm, and rhetoric of sex in New York. The Diarists are a self-selecting group, of course: bizarrely oversharing New Yorkers motivated by the impulse to brag or, as often, the urge to fling their terrible abjection in the face of the world. But as we watched them struggle with the peculiar hazards of mating in New York today (failing spectacularly, or succeeding all too well), we saw that their hassles were everyone’s writ large, and their stories posed a question: Are the digital tools that make it easier to find sex compounding the confusion that accompanies it?"

Bill Buford searched for the perfect bean for making dark chocolate. "The cacao content is a chocolate bar’s most important datum and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent," he writes.

Sean Flynn offers an unlikely love story. "Falling in love across enemy lines: It sounds like something out of a fairy tale. But nothing in war is simple," he writes. "As this American soldier and his Iraqi wife found out, love in a war zone is difficult, it’s dangerous, and it really pisses off the brass."

And Mark Twain recounted his recurring dreams of a young woman in his essay 'My Platonic Sweetheart.' Although his cherished muse possesses differing features and names, she is thought to represent a real-life sweetheart, Laura Wright, who he met, in 1858, when the steamboats they were traveling on down the Mississippi were docked in New Orleans. He wrote the essay 40 years later, but it was only published posthumously, in Harper’s magazine, December 1912, two and a half years after his death."