Editor’s Pick

The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called “wickets” at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the […]

The carbon dioxide we pump into the air is seeping into the oceans and slowly acidifying them. One hundred years from now, will oysters, mussels, and coral reefs survive? “In 2008 a group of more than 150 leading researchers issued a declaration stating that they were ‘deeply concerned by recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry,’ […]

Civil wars are generally more savage, and bear more lasting consequences, than wars between countries. Many more people died in the American Civil War—at a time when the population was a tenth of what it is today—than in any other American conflict, and its long-term effects probably surpass those of the others. Major bloodlettings of […]

“he touches Dan Colen’s painting with his fingers, moving his fingers over the birdshit lumps, and looks unimpressed. he asks me if i’ve heard of Dan Colen and i say ‘yeah because i read a lot about Dash Snow after he died.’ as we’re standing next to the bird shit painting, i tell Julian Schnabel […]

It’s 1975 and two college dropouts are racing to create software for a new line of “hobbyist” computers. The result? A company called “Micro-Soft”—now the fifth-most-valuable corporation on earth. In an adaptation from his memoir, Paul Allen tells the story of his partnership with high-school classmate Bill Gates, until its dramatic ending in 1983.

Cliff Asness’s Applied Quantitative Research—which makes its fortune, like other “quants,” by using high-speed computers and financial models of extraordinary complexity—has made a stupendous recovery in the past two years. At the end of 2010, AQR had $33 billion in assets under management. Its funds’ performance was up nearly 20 percent last year, after being […]

The medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance […]

Tom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. “There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times […]

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was […]

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For […]