Automattic

There’s no question that there is something very wrong with how the FDNY adds new employees. For nearly 40 years, various courts have issued injunctions to correct the miserable record of non-white hiring. New York’s fire department may, in fact, be the whitest large institution run by a major city in the United States. Your […]

Zuckerberg has often — possibly always — been described as remote and socially awkward, but that’s not quite right. True: holding a conversation with him can be challenging. He approaches conversation as a way of exchanging data as rapidly and efficiently as possible, rather than as a recreational activity undertaken for its own sake. He […]

A guilty verdict for Brian David Mitchell is in. But the questions the case raised about polygamy, prophecy, and insanity remain murky. “We knew Brian David Mitchell as a temple moth and thought he was crazy but harmless. This is why we didn’t suspect him, even when he walked around downtown with Elizabeth in tow, […]

Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. “In no arena is dancehall—and Jamaican society overall—more troubled than in grappling with sexual orientation. Blaring on most street corners and from car […]

From 2009: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. “…Holbrooke couldn’t stop invoking the war of his youth. From Kabul, he called the journalist Stanley Karnow, an old friend, and put him on the phone with General McChrystal to discuss the lessons of Vietnam. He mentioned Vietnam in staff meetings in […]

On female sci-fi heroines. “So it’s a mercy we have Ripley. David Foster Wallace may not have agreed with his date that The Terminator was one long story about the evils of abortioning—but I do! Girl, call me!—but I find it not at all unreasonable to suggest that the entire Alien franchise is about people […]

When immigration officials greeted him at Pan American Hospital, he said he was a 13-year-old orphan from Colombia who sneaked into the Arca Airline plane’s wheel well. Name? “Guillermo Rosales.” That was the first lie. Now he has matured into one of the world’s notorious jewelry thieves, who has escaped prison and dizzied detectives in […]

Jamin Brophy-Warren, who publishes a video-game arts and culture magazine called Kill Screen, told me that there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario’s jumps—just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance—that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, deeply satisfying. He also cited the archetypal quality of […]

Van Veen’s question for his deputies: “How do we translate network effects to original programming?” Reich thinks for a moment, then says, “What if we did a show called ‘Ransom,’ where each week you hold the next episode for ransom until the previous episode hits a certain number of viewers?” Van Veen likes this. “It’s […]

I feel equally certain in saying that what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly or yearly or whatever. For many people, this would be […]