Automattic

Success stories like this in high-poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in the era of charter schools, but 223 is no charter. There is no clamoring of parents trying to game a spot for their kids in a lottery, no screening of applicants, no visits from educators hoping to learn the secret of the school’s […]

Beneath the well-chronicled narrative of garment industry decline I began to see another set of truths: that the garment industry is still New York City’s largest manufacturing sector by employment; that the production, service, and supply businesses that remain play a vital, if underappreciated, role in the larger fashion industry of New York; and that […]

All his life Wallace was praised and admired for being exceptional, but in order to accept treatment he had to first accept and then embrace the idea that he was a regular person who could be helped by “ordinary” means. Then he went to rehab and learned a ton of valuable things from “ordinary” people […]

Today, Rachel Beer would be diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown. But in 1903, the three doctors came to a radically different conclusion: the woman had clearly lost her mind. Her plight excited no interest, and within months it was as if she had never existed. Yet not only had Rachel been the very […]

Alexey Navalny’s latest project is the Web site RosPil. The site would not be possible without Medvedev’s initiative, two years ago, to post online all government requests for tender—the documents whereby government entities announce their need for goods or services to potential bidders. Almost immediately, reports of strange deals started surfacing in the press. One […]

Martin Woods was set apart by his modus operandi. His speciality, he explains, was his application of a “know your client”, or KYC, policing strategy to identifying dirty money. “KYC is a fundamental approach to anti-money laundering, going after tax evasion or counter-terrorist financing. Who are your clients? Is the documentation right? Good, responsible banking […]

The notion that people living on the Plains should cede their land to bison is rooted in a deliberately heretical 1987 article in the academic magazine Planning, titled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” Authored by professors Frank and Deborah Popper (he teaches at Princeton and Rutgers; she teaches at Princeton and the City […]

New York didn’t invent the apartment. Shopkeepers in ancient Rome lived above the store, Chinese clans crowded into multistory circular tulou, and sixteenth-century Yemenites lived in the mud-brick skyscrapers of Shibam. But New York re-invented the apartment many times over, developing the airborne slice of real estate into a symbol of exquisite urbanity. Sure, we […]

And yes, every time I talk to a Valley person about this they go on about how marketers want more data and they’ll pay for it, and they want to know everything about a person and oh man do you know how much advertisers would pay for this data? Well, yes, I do. But I […]

Though Ali Abdullah Saleh has proved deft at maintaining power, he has accomplished little else. Forty per cent of Yemeni adults are illiterate, and more than half the country’s children are malnourished. In addition to the bribes—one of Yemen’s largest expenditures—there is corruption. The government in Sanaa makes even the Karzai regime, in Afghanistan, seem […]