Automattic

As debate erupts on the Web over Obama’s visit with Chavez—was it an embrace or a blowoff?—Matthew Yglesias says that everyone’s missing the point.

My ill-starred tenure at New York magazine was, among other things, a crash course in the staggering unselfawareness of Manhattan class privilege. Sure, there was the magazine’s adoring, casual fascination with the “money culture”-a term deployed in editorial meetings without the faintest whiff of disapproval or critical distance. But more than that, there was the […]

HBO’s critically-acclaimed “The Wire” creator David Simon talks about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism.

Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror.

(Fiction) “Lanie’s at her brother’s. She wants me to go to anger management.”

Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions — and the end of reading alone

Shai Agassi stood in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tel Aviv one afternoon last month and watched his battery-swapping robot go to work. He was conducting a demonstration of the curious machine that is central to his two-year-old clean-energy company, which is called Better Place.

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.