Editor’s Pick

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 […]

“We’ve done studies that prove that the mouse is faster than traditional ways of moving through data or applications. Someday we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price. As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can […]

“Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet—basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to […]

Four years after disappearing from public view, Axl Rose is back on the scene, looking like a wax figure of himself, absorbing the crushing blows of Tommy Hilfiger, biting the legs of security guards, and gyrating, shrieking, and storming off stages across the land. John Jeremiah Sullivan grapples with the ghosts of the greatest—or weirdest—frontman […]

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then […]

The real laughs always come from something very small and surprising—although another one they didn’t get in “The Jerk” is when I’m hitchhiking to St. Louis. My character’s name is Navin Johnson. A guy pulls over in his car and asks, “St. Louis?” and I go, “Uh, no, Navin Johnson.” I told the line to […]

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside […]

There’s an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer’s bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson’s ”Borges: A Life,” will be admirers of the writer’s work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional […]