Automattic

Zhou Chengliang is about 27 years old (he doesn’t know for sure), goes by the name Huang Jie, and is an entrepreneur based in the western Chinese city of Lanzhou. He suffers from memories of a lost past: he was one of countless young Chinese children kidnapped and sold to strangers to be raised as […]

Twelve-year-old Mexican bullfighter Michelito Lagravere set himself the goal of becoming, at 14, the youngest person ever to achieve the status of professional matador—and to do so undeterred by all the animal-rights activists and child-welfare advocates who see him as a paramount example of primitive brutality and parental neglect.

Darrell did not cry when the mortgage crisis killed new home construction, putting him out of work. Instead, he packed up his bags and joined his girlfriend in South Florida, where he found a new job as an in-home salesman, pushing expensive vacuum cleaners and air purifiers to snowbirds and other crazy Floridians. While Darrell […]

From 2005: Dealing with North Korea could make Iraq look like child’s play—and the longer we wait, the harder it will get. That’s the message of a Pentagon-style war game involving some of this country’s most prominent foreign-policy strategists

For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, […]

Survivors of the Ted Stevens plane crash in Alaska wondered if help would reach them in time. The plane, full mostly of men and boys, fathers and sons, poker buddies on a fishing trip into the exotic and remote wilderness, had crashed without hint of warning, everything ripped from its rightful place and hurled forward […]

Profile of Julie Taymor and the $70 million “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Much has transpired in the eight and a half years since Tony Adams, the original producer, having struck what some insiders say was a crippling deal with Marvel for the stage rights for Spider-Man, approached Bono and the Edge, of the rock […]

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a […]

A months-long CBC investigation into the February 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri. “Relying on interviews with multiple sources from inside the UN inquiry and some of the commission’s own records, [the CBC] found examples of timidity, bureaucratic inertia and incompetence bordering on gross negligence.”

They tell stories about girlfriends, wives, drinking and sex. They wrestle and play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. They share music on iPods and check football scores on BlackBerrys. They debate evolution and chase chickens. They argue over comic-book heroes and then tell more stories about sex. During a six-day mission in Afghanistan with Delta […]