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 from around the web to read and reflect on. (You can find last week's must reads here.)
Ten years ago, 90 million people watching Super Bowl XXXVIII saw Janet Jackson's breast for nine-sixteenths of a second. Our culture would never be the same.
Our skies are filled with thousands of potential catastrophes, and there aren't hundreds of people monitoring for space rocks around the clock. Our fate lies in the hands of amateur observers and small research teams, who are figuring out new ways to identify near-Earth objects (NEOs) before it's too late. But too often, politics get in the way.
The confessions of an ex-TSA agent and his rather pained relationship with government security: "Most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds." It's a fascinating look inside the agency's racial profiling, its strict sets of insanely detailed rules, and a guide to what TSA agents are really saying when you go through airport security.
The ban on e-cigarettes in New York can't keep away vaping enthusiasts. Rather, it's created a niche subculture of vapers who hack and rebuild their devices to produce stronger flavors and — more importantly — create more impressive vapor clouds.

Image: Mashable
Single-letter Twitter handles are highly coveted and come with bragging rights; they say, Hey, I was a really early adopter. This story of a lack of security explains how a hacker used Paypal and GoDaddy to steal the Twitter account @N. A cautionary tale about using your own email domain for account logins.
This op-ed makes a pretty powerful argument against smartphone contracts: The wireless industry is a fractured, uncompetitive mess that has hooked customers on subsidized phones. So can we (reasonably) remedy that by refusing to sign any more wireless contracts?

Image: Ben Margot/Associated Press
A profile of Darius Kazemi, everyone's favorite Twitter toymaker, whose little creations are funny, poignant, popular — and a sly commentary on how the web is organizing our lives.
Designing your own narcotics online isn’t just easy — it can be legal, too. This sort of real-life Breaking Bad experiment shows how our legal system has no way of coping with the constant evolution of research chemicals: "We can ban drugs. But we can’t ban chemistry, and we can’t ban medical research."
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.