Automattic

Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? “The program, Fernandopulle told me, is still discovering new tricks. His team just recently figured out, for instance, that one reason some patients call 911 for problems the clinic would handle better is that they don’t have the clinic’s twenty-four-hour call number at […]

If you Google hard enough, you can locate a thread deep within the Internet that was posted to the alt.sports.hockey.nhl.phila-flyers Usenet newsgroup on March 22, 2000. “Where oh where is Katie Baker??” reads the subject line. “What the hell happened to her?” says the post. The responses are mercifully cryptic. “Detention,” wrote one man. “Isn’t […]

The Bay Area’s smartest diners, chefs, and purveyors now know (and care) where every cut of grass-fed beef and stalk of pesticide-free produce comes from. Yet nearly all look the other way when fish is on the plate. “I had so many people walk up to the fish market and say, ‘What do you mean, […]

In the 1.0 era, which ran from 1996 to 2001, Page and Brin incubated the company at Stanford University and in a Menlo Park (Calif.) garage. In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Schmidt, a tech industry grown-up who’d been CEO of Novell. Now comes the third phase, led by Page […]

When Ken Bradshaw caught the largest wave ever surfed, in 1998, he was riding on pure, single-minded passion. But that same quality—plus a deep antipathy to hype—has put him at odds with the increasingly crowded, commercialized world of big-wave surfing. On Oahu’s famed North Shore, the author learns about the 58-year-old maverick’s record-breaking encounter with […]

Criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if […]

When the reverend Ted Haggard was outed four years ago, it was in a ball of biblical hellfire—crystal meth! Gay sex! Unholy massages! Banished from the church he founded, he was forced to wander the Arizona desert selling insurance. Now Pastor Ted returns with his wife by his side, a new church, and a more […]

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children. But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations […]

In 2004, 244 corpses supposedly destined for cremation at a Philadelphia funeral home were hacked apart, their organs and tissue sold for transplantation. It’s a gruesome story of betrayal, for both the grieving families and the unwitting recipients of diseased body parts.

We venture to the very heart of the hell that is Scandinavian socialism—and find out that it’s not so bad. Pricey, yes, but a good place to start and run a company. What exactly does that suggest about the link between taxes and entrepreneurship? “Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for […]