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I married a man more than twice my size. He terrified me. Making love felt like getting run over. I was pancaked like in cartoons. Image from Flickr via Steve Wilson Just before the world got bad, I…

9. The Semplica-Girl Diaries George Saunders | The New Yorker | October 8, 2012 | 35 minutes (8,979 words) A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage…

Illustration by Jeanne Detallante.

Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction. A godfather himself of American film, Coppola is a director, producer, screenwriter, and the force behind legendary films such as The Godfather,…

A photo of the author with her son In 1998, while a student at Harvard Divinity School, I worked as a chaplain at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Speaker’s Bureau, also known as…

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Pete Wells on how Craig Claiborne invented modern restaurant criticism--and foodies:

"He prefaced his article with a short note: “The following is a listing of New York restaurants that are recommended on the basis of varying merits. Such a listing will be published every Friday in The New York Times. And that is just what happened, first in what were called the women’s pages (“Food Fashions Family Furnishings”), and then, after 1976, in the Weekend section; by that time, the column was not a listing but a review of one or two restaurants. In 1997, with the invention of the Dining In/Dining Out section, it jumped to Wednesdays, where it still lives."

"The column’s most easily recognized field mark, the starred ranking, made its debut on May 24, 1963, with a three-star scale. A fourth star, still the newspaper’s top grade, was placed on the top of the tree a year later. The arguments about what it all means have been going on ever since."

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…