Why do startups struggle after being acquired by giant companies like Yahoo? They’re forced to focus on integration instead of innovation: When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning […]
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A Palestinian-American writer flies to Israel on her way to visit her sister. Despite having an American passport, she doesn’t make it far: An hour later, the bearded young man who had originally questioned me at the immigration hall became my guard. When I tried to go to the bathroom, he said I was not […]
How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing: Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? […]
From Clay Christensen’s forthcoming book How Will You Measure Your Life?, an examination of how businesses and individuals fail to understand the challenges posed by smaller competitors with less to lose: Case studies such as this one helped me resolve a paradox that has appeared repeatedly in my attempts to help established companies that are […]
[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines: Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for […]
A startup founder struggles with what’s next after a period of slow growth: It was late on a gloomy Saturday afternoon in Mountain View, and we were doing a walk’n’talk ‘office hours’ session with Paul Graham – ‘PG’ – on the street outside the Y Combinator office. ‘What do you have to show for the […]
A writer investigates what it would be like if he never got married, had kids, or settled into a stable job. He decides to search for his carefree doppelgänger—a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field: ‘What time can I come by?’ I asked. ‘Oh, anytime. I’ll just be kicking it around the house.’ Kicking it. This […]
The many ways to dismantle a law: How the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has been attacked and weakened since its passage in 2010: The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government’s inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially […]
[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends: Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading […]
A look back at James Watson’s book The Double Helix and the controversy it stirred in the science community. In telling the story, he produced a great work of literary nonfiction. Watson expanded the boundaries of science writing to include not only the formal, public face of Nobel-winning discoveries but also the day-to-day life of […]
A writer adopts the Choose Your Own Adventure book format to write a story about a disastrous love affair: “The answer, of course, is that you should dump Anne before it’s too late. But the absurd options the book gives ‘you’— later ‘choices’ include dueling with an Ant-Warrior, or attacking the Evil Power Master—simply highlight […]
The political battle over the disappearance of the menhaden, a silvery, six-inch fish that’s food for larger fish and farmed for omega-3 oils and fertilizer: Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, […]
The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day: A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed […]
With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer: Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of […]
Profile of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and the promise and missed opportunities that have come with his leadership: At the time, negotiations had been frozen for more than a year. Yet Fayyad boldly predicted that his program would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state by August 2011. ‘By then, if in fact […]
Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company: A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of […]
A woman watched her husband’s behavior change dramatically—so much so she even considered divorce. He was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare and frequently misdiagnosed brain disease that affects personality and language skills: Looking back, Mrs. French, who is 66 and lives in Manhattan, recalled episodes of odd behavior over the years and realized […]
The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency: It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters […]
Meet the researchers who are developing new methods for countering global warming using geoengineering. Some solutions come with great risks: While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower […]
The evolution of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous character—and the woman who helped shape it. On actress-director Mabel Normand and her effect on Chaplin’s work: When Chaplin became the Tramp on Normand’s watch, he also learned to be a movie actor. As Sennett put it, Normand, ‘the greatest motion-picture comedienne of any day, was as deft […]
[Not single-page] Facebook staffers once told Mark Zuckerberg he needed to take “CEO lessons.” How Zuckerberg responded, and what it means for Facebook leading up to its IPO: ‘Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,’ a former Facebook employee explains. ‘You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, […]
A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks: Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to […]
American Airlines once sold a lifetime pass for unlimited first-class travel. They soon regretted it: In September 2007, a pricing analyst reviewing international routes focused the airline’s attention on how much the AAirpass program was costing, company emails show. ‘We pay the taxes,’ a revenue management executive wrote in a subsequent email. ‘We award AAdvantage […]
[Fiction] A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories: When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates […]
Edward Conard is Mitt Romney’s former partner at Bain, and he’s not afraid to have an honest conversation about wealth: A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if […]
[Not single-page] Reliving the “Carrington Event,” a solar storm that disrupted the U.S. telegraph system and lit up the sky in late August 1859: The night of Carrington’s discovery, the electrical hurricane that had swept the globe peaked. The Great Auroral Storm had actually begun several days earlier with a similar incident on August 28, […]
The rapper from Odd Future, whose disappearance became a pop music mystery, speaks out on where he went: Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia: As Odd Future became more popular, though, his absence was harder to ignore. While Ms. Harris remained largely silent, […]
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