During the week, we consume words in snackable, tweetable bites. But on the weekends, we have the time to take a dive into the murkier, lengthier depths of the Internet and expand our attention spans beyond 140 characters. We can brew a cup of coffee and lie back with our iPads, laptops, smartphones and Kindles.
Since you're bound to miss a few things during the daily grind, we present to you, in our weekly installation of Mashable Must Reads, a curated list of can't-miss stories to read and reflect on. (You can find last week's must reads here.)
Kiwi Gardner, a slender high school sophomore from East Oakland, Calif., was just tiny point guard on his high school basketball team. But that all changed when one day, a cameraman in the stands recorded some MVP-worthy footage of Kiwi and uploaded it to YouTube. The video shot Kiwi to Internet stardom. After bouncing between colleges and jobs, suspended between YouTube fame and the harsh reality of big-business basketball, he declared for the 2013 NBA Draft. The odds weren't in his favor. There was no cameraman to make him look good — just Kiwi.
Yahoo has made several high-profile hires over the past few weeks, plucked primarily from the realm of traditional journalism. Arguably the most notable one was Katie Couric, who left her contract at ABC for the glitzy but vague new position of global news anchor. The move raises questions on both sides of the table, as the track record for cross-media successes is generally poor because of a generally older audience for TV news talent.
At dinner tables across the world, parents scold their teens: "Put your phones away!" In Japan, the Ministry of Education is mandating unplugged time at Internet fasting camps. The ministry plans to open the camps in the coming fiscal year as a way to help students — some 518,000 of them at middle and high schools across Japan — learn to live away from their laptops and cellphones.
Several big name tech companies and startups are ramping up their same-day delivery operations in cities across the country ahead of the holiday shopping rush in efforts to boost rates of consumer adoption. But doing so poses just as many challenges as it does opportunities for some of these newcomers.
Police squads across the U.S. respond to more than 30,000 bomb-related incidents every year. Though many turn out to be hoaxes or false alarms, the immediacy of these situations highlights a need for small, deployable robots that can navigate all types of terrain and dismantle explosives. But the androids don't come cheap, and every bomb squad commander Mashable spoke with said they could use more.
Don't have time to read them all now? In our Readlist below, export this week's must reads to your tablet to save for a time you have no distractions. Simply click the "read later" button alongside each story or or click "export" to send the entire list of articles to your preferred device.

Image: Josh Christopher/Fakework Sports