It slices, it dices …  

The idea came from Patty Stonesifer, formerly a Microsoft vice president—Slate's boss!—and now co-head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At lunch one day, she said, "What you need is a shopping cart like Amazon, so I can go through Slate saving articles I want to read."

We thought, "What a dumb idea." (Thought it but didn't say it.) After all, every Slate article is permanently available on the home page or in the archive. It's not like a shopping site, where you accumulate items to buy. But then we thought some more and decided, "What a brilliant idea." (Decided this even though Patty was no longer our boss.) After all, this is how many people read traditional paper magazines: glancing through them when they first arrive, choosing articles to come back to later. Or actually tearing out articles and adding them to the reading pile.

Meanwhile, readers have been demanding, since we began publishing four years ago, a convenient way to print out individual Slate articles or groups of articles. Slate on Paper, our weekly Word document containing everything published in Slate that week, has gotten humongous—70 or 80 pages—and we've been forced to consider the possibility that even our most loyal readers might not want the whole thing.

Putting these elements together, and adding some extra whiz-bangery, Slate's crack software development team has come up with what we believe is the coolest set of personal options of any content site on the Web.

So, suppose you're reading an article in Slate. This shouldn't be hard, since you actually are reading an article in Slate. At the top, you'll find the following icons:

As a typically insightful Slate reader, you can probably handle these opportunities without too much handholding. But here's a little anyway.

• Listen creates and plays back an audio file using text-to-speech technology. It's not great, frankly, but it's fun. And you do get used to it. (Go ahead, try it on this very article.) You need Windows Media Player to use this feature. Download it free here.

• Save places an all-text version of the article in an online folder at a site called Driveway.com, from which you can access it with any Web-connected computer. Details and registration appear the first time you use this feature.

• E-mail sends you an e-mail reminder every five minutes until we receive a notarized letter from you swearing that you've read the article. No, actually it's what you think: It allows you to send the article by e-mail to yourself or anyone else.

• Print prints out an all-text version of the article, formatted for standard-size paper.