Automattic

It was midday on a bleak and hard highway when bullets cut the air — cool, thin, Wyoming air. The first came through the windshield, into his left eye, stopping millimeters from his brain. If there was pain, he doesn’t remember. It’s the sensation of a falling red curtain he talks about. He slumped right, […]

Two of Wall Street’s savviest value investors, Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn, pride themselves on their rigorous analysis. Now they’re locked in a scorched-earth dispute over the value of some Florida real estate. How could they look at the same facts and reach such wildly different conclusions, and what does that say about the “value” […]

“I’ve got a brother,” she finally says. “He’s a disabled vet from Vietnam. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so I think he might be deceased. I’m a realist.” Bina48’s eyes whir downward. “He was doing great for the first ten years after Vietnam. His wife got pregnant, and she had a baby, […]

Neither Cuban nor his executives vet story ideas or scripts. Cuban just writes the checks and watches Rather’s show when it airs. This independence comes at a price, however. During his 44 years with CBS News, Rather became perhaps the nation’s best-known newsman, reaching 18 million viewers a night at his peak. HDNet is only […]

There’s a problem: THE TIFFIN BOX’s menu will “lean heavily towards vegetarian.” The judges are disgusted with this naked display of idealism. One of them asks, What percentage of Americans are vegetarian? “About 15%.” Then the judges make some weird calculations, like since only 15% Americans are vegetarian, only 15% of Americans would ever eat […]

Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy […]

I have consulted four therapists in my life, and all four have fallen asleep on me. The ritual—forms, waiting rooms, Kleenex—starts up again, only each time with my own special twist: I pay someone to explore my unconscious mind and instead they sink into theirs. So consistently did I lose wakeful contact with my shrinks […]

I try to remind myself of who we are now and why it’s best that we are over. I think about the day he asked me for a divorce. Aug. 4, 2009. Just two days earlier, I had left for Warsaw, Poland, on a two-month research trip for a book I was writing. It was […]

There are health nuts, and then there is David Murdock: health paragon, patron and proselytizer, with a biography as colorful as that mural, a determination to write a few more chapters of it still and a paradox of sorts at the center of it all. What set him on this quest was a loss that […]

While expertise in counterterrorism training may be in short supply, money for it is not. Each year the federal government directs billions of dollars (no one knows exactly how much) in terrorism-related training grants to state and local governments. These funds cascade down into myriad training programs like the one at Broward College, where instructors […]