A startup keeps searching for its winning formula: While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation. The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. […]
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There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world, but 78 percent of the world’s population only speaks the 85 largest languages. Thousands of languages are on the edge of disappearing. After dinner Nimasow disappeared for a moment and came back with a soiled white cotton cloth, which he unfolded by the flickering light of the […]
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A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple: A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me: ‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, […]
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[Fiction] A family prepares for their father’s business trip: Their Da was going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys had said nothing about it, but were awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, probably no underpants—some objection he had […]
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Avi Rubin, a 44-year-old computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, is obsessed with the math behind Texas Hold ‘em: When he began studying poker, Rubin frequently thought in terms of how a computer might model the game. Several disciplines were applicable—game theory, expert systems, machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a branch of mathematics concerned […]
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A look at the complicated afterlife of James Brown, and the battle over his estate among children he did, and did not, acknowledge: Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his ‘personal and household effects’—his linens and […]
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How Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina is using technology and advice from high-profile mentors to prepare for November: The day after Jim Messina quit his job as White House deputy chief of staff last January, he caught a plane to Los Angeles, paid a brief visit to his girlfriend, and then commenced what may be […]
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This summer marks the 45th anniversary of “the Summer of Love” in San Francisco. A look at the movers and shakers in Haight-Ashbury in 1967: Joplin’s creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz’s gave her acid for the first time—slipping it into her cold duck—and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. […]
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How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business: Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying […]
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How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman: Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to […]