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From Kid Celebrity to Consummate Con Artist When immigration officials greeted him at Pan American Hospital, he said he was a 13-year-old orphan from Colombia who sneaked into the Arca Airline plane’s wheel well. Name? “Guillermo Rosales.” That was the first lie. Now he has matured into one of the world’s notorious jewelry thieves, who […]

Master of Play: Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s Man Behind Mario Jamin Brophy-Warren, who publishes a video-game arts and culture magazine called Kill Screen, told me that there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario’s jumps—just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance—that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, […]

Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV? Van Veen’s question for his deputies: “How do we translate network effects to original programming?” Reich thinks for a moment, then says, “What if we did a show called ‘Ransom,’ where each week you hold the next episode for ransom until the […]

Let Us Pay: On the Future of the Newspaper Industry I feel equally certain in saying that what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly […]

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be the Taliban: Tourism in Afghanistan Tactically, our vacation had begun to feel similar to a military raid—rush in and rush out—and it was both exhilarating and unsatisfying. You were trying to be a tourist in a place that didn’t allow for it. You could strike up a conversation with […]

The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague At this point, it’s a losing battle. Bats with noses dusted by the Geomyces destructans fungus that causes WNS were seen for the first time in early 2006, in upstate New York. One year later, biologists realized that WNS could kill bats in large numbers. By 2008, mortality […]