Five Boys: The Story Of A Picture

What story did this particular picture tell? Its minimal presentation left all interpretation to the reader, but as the News Chronicle was a left-leaning newspaper—fiercely anti-Franco, for example, in the Spanish civil war—the implication was clear enough: the picture exemplified the scandalous gulf between Britain’s rich and poor.

Author: Ian Jack
Published: Jun 21, 2010
Length: 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Apple vs. Google

How the battle between Silicon Valley’s superstars will shape the future of mobile computing

Published: Jan 14, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,574 words)

The Last Days of the Polymath

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.”

Published: Jan 10, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,569 words)