Automattic

Mubarak has suggested that he will never willingly step down. In 2006, he told Egypt’s Parliament that he would continue to serve “as long as there is in my chest a heart that beats and I draw breath.” … One part of the system that has sustained Mubarak in power is Egypt’s Emergency Law, which […]

The Dogtown kids started applying their surfing techniques to concrete, riding low to the ground with their arms outstretched for balance, skating with such intensity that they often destroyed their homemade boards in a single session. “We were just trying to emulate our favorite Australian surfers,” Tony Alva says, explaining the genesis of their new […]

For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more.

He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.

In February 2003, after the explosion of the shuttle two American astronauts aboard the International Space Station suddenly found themselves with no ride home. And things got worse from there.

In his controlling hands, technology became both the engine and the emblem of transcendence. But as the iPhone slips from his grasp, Jobs is making his final bid for immortality. “Steve Jobs has become Steve Jobs by doing what nobody else has done before—by treating computers not just as tools but as mirrors, by making […]

Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. Vieira introduces the scene: “We were allowed to accompany patrols in Zambia after we agreed not to identify those involved, should a shooting occur. On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.” A […]

Keith Olbermann’s success, like Bill O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” MSNBC’s Phil Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places […]

You will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind […]

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have […]