Longreads

Investigations with impact Maps & apps Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home

Andy Warhol is an art-world colossus whose work accounts for one-sixth of contemporary-art sales. How did that happen, and is he really worth it? Bryan Appleyard canvasses the experts ... From…

Illustration: Martin Venezky In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he…

From left: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Photos courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images (Jo

Credit: Katie…

Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like “university”? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.

Nov 29 2011 Earlier this year, I stumbled into an idea without a name. I wanted a word or phrase that includes journalism, social media, search engines, libraries, Wikipedia, and parts of…