Longreads

In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his…

Billboard: Artist Of The Year Billboard Inside Tracks, December 1986 Whitney Houston The Long Road To Overnight Stardom - By Bud Scoppa Once in a blue moon

Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Key figures: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly after they and their Bell Labs colleagues invented Unix. They say that when one door closes…

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Steve Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One parc scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, parc’s prized personal computer.