Automattic

Everest deals with trespassers harshly: the dead vanish beneath the snows. While the living struggle to explain what happened. And why. A survivor of the mountain’s worst disaster examines the business of Mount Everest and the steep price of ambition.

How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds. “James Gallien had driven five miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaskan dawn. A rifle protruded from the young man’s pack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with […]

I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves […]

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he’ll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. “Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production […]

Sure, you could focus on the corrupt, quasi-fascistic side of Silvio Berlusconi’s long reign over Italy. But as his adoring supporters will tell you, that’s not the point of “Silvio!” What sustains a nation is the man’s dyed hair and shameless libido. Devin Friedman goes in search of the self-appointed dictator of macho hedonistic unprosecutable […]

PLAYBOY: Is your company motto really “Don’t be evil”? GOOGLE GUYS: Yes, it’s real. PLAYBOY: Is it a written code? GOOGLE GUYS: Yes. We have other rules, too. PAGE: We allow dogs, for example. PLAYBOY: Who ultimately decides what is evil? Eric Schmidt, your CEO, once said, “Evil is whatever Sergey decides is evil.” GOOGLE […]

There’s a determined man chasing Lance Armstrong, and he has a harpoon: Jeff Novitzky, a brilliant and relentless federal agent who’s out to prove that bike racing’s greatest champion cheated and lied.

A lot of what we’re seeing online today is actually a return, full circle, to the way things were when American newspapers began; a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism. There is a long and distinguished history of such newspapers—from the papers that were fiercely loyal to Jefferson or Hamilton, to the abolitionist broadsheets, […]

Anyone naive enough to wonder aloud why such a righteously rebellious, nonmaterialistic culture hero would own the same kind of car Michael Manley drives will be treated to a taste of fine Rasta logic: BMW stands for “Bob Marley and the Wailers.” And why does he submit to so many photo sessions? “I tell you […]

She is dogged by questions: Was she a gold digger who, in the 1980s, chose the rich and famous of Manhattan as her lode? In the 1990s, was she a Pompadour who used her wiles to maneuver her then-husband into a political career that advanced her own ambitions? Is she now a political chameleon whose […]