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A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations: “On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 […]

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 […]

On the next Justin Bieber, 16-year-old Austin Mahone, and how pop stars are made: Austin is already, in many senses, a rising star. At press time, more than 650,000 people were following him on Twitter. (By the time you read this, that number may well be a million.) And yet in Nashville, he was getting […]

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 […]

The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves: “‘I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and […]

An explainer on Google’s challenges with privacy, its competition with Facebook and Twitter, and two big questions: Is search no longer central to its mission? And are Google’s recent moves “evil” by its early company standards? “It’s hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there’s a remarkably simple […]

Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby programming community who mysteriously disappeared: “Hackety Hack solved the ‘Little Coder’s Predicament’: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the […]

Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars: “Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers […]

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase: “The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack […]

One person’s mission to get Americans to embrace science again. A profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History: “Although he is a card-carrying astrophysicist with a long list of scientific papers in publications like Astrophysical Journal, Tyson has turned […]