Longreads

How Mexican food became more American than apple pie:

"There is nothing remotely Mexican about Potato Olés—not even the quasi-Spanish name, which has a distinctly Castilian accent. The burrito was more insulting to me and my heritage than casting Charlton Heston as the swarthy Mexican hero in Touch of Evil. But it was intriguing enough to take back to my hotel room for a taste. There, as I experienced all of the concoction’s gooey, filling glory while chilly rain fell outside, it struck me: Mexican food has become a better culinary metaphor for America than the melting pot."

"That you have a nation (and increasingly a planet—you can find Mexican restaurants from Ulan Bator to Sydney to Prague) lusting after tequila, guacamole, and tres leches cake isn’t an exercise in culinary neocolonialism but something closer to the opposite. By allowing itself to be endlessly adaptable to local tastes, Mexican food has become a primary vehicle for exporting the culture of a long-ridiculed country to the far corners of the globe. Forget Mexico’s imaginary Reconquista of the American Southwest; the real conquest of North America is a peaceful and consensual affair, taking place one tortilla at a time."

Deee-Lite's Groove is in the Heart 'updated disco's gluttonous ultra-bright hedonism'. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns Towards the end of Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, Matt…

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet…

It was a little more than 25 years ago that I first walked the streets of Gion, the centuries-old geisha district of Kyoto. I was jet-lagged—just off the plane from California on my way to…

By James Bandler with Doris Burke FORTUNE -- A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of get-to-know-you meetings with…

In February 2009, with the threat of Facebook's growing popularity looming over their company, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the co-founders of Myspace, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. DeWolfe explained that Myspace was more than a social network; it was a portal where people discovered new friends and music and movies—it was practically where young people lived. "We have the largest music catalog in the world," DeWolfe said. Anderson predicted that by 2015, Myspace would have up to 400 million users. DeWolfe said the site's worth was "in the billions." Rose mentioned how Murdoch had bought Myspace's parent company, Intermix, for $580 million. "Are you happy you made the deal?" asked Rose. "Um …," said DeWolfe.