Automattic

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my […]

The AFL’s story is a quintessentially American tale of a group of outmanned, outcast insurgents working on the margins, forced to break with the old way of doing things and in the process creating a brasher, more exciting version of the mainstream—a mainstream that then remade itself in the insurgents’ image. And Sid Gillman, Sonny […]

After several years in the wilderness, Harvey Weinstein has come roaring back (if a bit less loudly) into the moviemaking sweet spot, winning raves for The King’s Speech, The Fighter, and Blue Valentine. But his bitter war with Disney over Miramax, the crushing blow of losing the company (named after his parents) a second time, […]

When you talk with people like Hertzberg about Carter, it’s clear that they think of him as a flawed leader, but such an intelligent, determined, decent and compelling person that they want him to have been a great president. Only 44 men have been president. What was Carter missing that Lincoln and FDR possessed? At […]

First Iceland. Then Greece. Now Ireland, which headed for bankruptcy with its own mysterious logic. In 2000, suddenly among the richest people in Europe, the Irish decided to buy their country—from one another. After which their banks and government really screwed them. So where’s the rage?

This is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children of missing serious abuse. In one study, […]

Twenty-six years ago, Sweetness, Samurai, Iron Mike, the Fridge, and a comic book’s worth of superheroes roared out of Chicago, taking the NFL by storm. By the time the season was over, they had shuffled their way to the Super Bowl. Andrew Santella retraces their glorious season—and finds out why they never built a dynasty.

Some might think the answer comes down to two phrases: “idiot kicker” and “liquored up.” These four words were famously uttered in one sentence at the Pro Bowl in 2003 by Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. You remember: Vanderjagt had gone on Canadian TV and said he was down on his Colts team because Manning and […]

Mohan Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, and there’s no way I […]

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.” Virginia Woolf wrote those words about the entire realm of literary creation, not about that special subset of it called “quotations”—the minting of concise snippets so eloquent or insightful […]