Longreads

FORTUNE -- In February of this year, a group of investors visited Apple as part of a "bus tour" led by a research analyst for Citibank. The session started with a 45-minute presentation by Peter…

Excerpt from Robert Hughes’ cultural history of Rome, where he reminisces about his first visit to the city in 1959:

“First, the color, which was not like the color of other cities I had been in. Not concrete color, not cold glass color, not the color of overburned brick or harshly pigmented paint. Rather, the worn organic colors of the ancient earth and stone of which the city is composed, the colors of limestone, the ruddy gray of tufa, the warm discoloration of once-white marble and the speckled, rich surface of the marble known as pavonazzo, dappled with white spots and inclusions like the fat in a slice of mortadella. For an eye used to the more commonplace, uniform surfaces of 20th-century building, all this looks wonderfully, seductively rich.”

Pico Iyer on the dicotomies and ambiguity of Kyoto, juxtaposing elements of the West on a city firmly planted in the East. With accompanying slideshow.

"If you turn to any guidebook, you will see that Kyoto, which is surrounded on three sides by hills, became Japan’s capital in 794. It remained so until the Meiji government shifted the capital to Tokyo in 1868. For more than a millennium, therefore, almost everything we associate with classical Japanese culture—kimonos, tea ceremonies, Zen temples and, yes, geisha—came to its fullest flowering and refinement in Kyoto. It’s as if the historical attractions of Colonial Williamsburg, Boston and Washington, D.C. were combined in a single city; this is where scores of emperors, as well as courtesans, samurai and haiku-writing priests, made their homes."

"After 22 years of living here, I’m still known as a gaijin (outsider or foreigner) and generally feel as if I’m stumbling through the city’s exquisite surfaces like a bull in an Imari china shop. But as I walk down the narrow, lanterned lanes today, the city has an even richer and more intimate power than when I first wandered them as a dazzled sightseer."

James Erwin, 37, works for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals. He’s been doing that for a couple of years, and he enjoys it. It’s a pretty low-stress…

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…

Somewhere in Russia a signal of mysterious beeps and buzzes has broadcast since the high-water days of the Cold War. But why?Photo: Sergey Kozmin From a lonely rusted tower in a…

Friedman was soon pitching to Peter Thiel, a staunch libertarian himself, the big, weird idea. It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They'd be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time.

The point for now is: I had no conception of such a show and no desire to work with Siskel. The three stages of my early career (writing and editing a newspaper, becoming a film critic, beginning a television show) were initiated by others. Between college and 2006, my life continued more or less on that track. I was a movie critic and I had a TV show. It could all have been lost through alcoholism (I believe I came closer than many people realized), but in 1979 I stopped drinking and the later chapters became possible.

Mr. PARKER: So let's make it look like it was "Family Guy" and not us. So then that gave us the whole idea for the show, that we would put "Family Guy" in the show and only have Muhammad appear in the "Family Guy" part. So if they ever saw a still of it on the Internet, or they ever saw anything, they'd know it was "Family Guy" and not us. And then they would get bombed and not us.