Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple: Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for […]
Tag: longreads
The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass: To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and […]
The story of Dan Marlowe, a pulp writer who suffered from amnesia, befriended an ex-con, and later inspired writers like Stephen King: Physicians thought the amnesia was psychosomatic, brought on by stress and money troubles, but there were hints of physical problems too. Before his brain emptied out, Marlowe had been laid low by crushing […]
How officers in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were “juking the stats” to improve crime statistics in their area. The NYPD called it an isolated incident, but critics point to a culture of data-obsession that leads police to ignore, discard or downgrade complaints from victims: These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery […]
The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age: When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The […]
[Not single-page] Sara Blakely went from auditioning to play Goofy at Disney World to founding an undergarment empire: Spanx. She still owns 100% equity in the company, making her the youngest female billionaire at age 41: Like many startups, Spanx began life as an answer to an irritating problem. The panty hose Blakely was forced […]
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek treks through “the hunger zone” in northern Kenya with a nomadic goat herder to get a better understanding of a region persistently devastated by famine. While describing his experience, Salopek also takes us through a history of hunger and foreign food aid: Mister Inas then showed us a few wild […]
[May 2005] How Steve Martin transitioned from comedy to writing, and how celebrity affected his day-to-day life: SM: You know, there’s a moment when you’re famous when it’s unbearable to go out because you’re too famous. And then there’s a moment when you’re famous just right. [Laughs] And then there’s kind of a respect or […]
A group of teenagers in a small town mysteriously fall ill, suffering from uncontrollable twitching. Was the cause environmental, or psychological? Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question […]
How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison: Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him […]
A moment-by-moment reconstruction of last year’s U.S. embassy attack in Kabul: In an image that remained strangely fixed in her mind afterward, Howell watched as he slowly peeled the skin off. As he was peeling off the very last bit, there came a heart-stopping screech and then the bang and shock of an impact. Something […]
[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square: Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard […]
Which would be worse: Iran developing a nuclear weapon, or waging a war to prevent it? An examination of both scenarios: Given the momentousness of such an endeavor and how much prominence the Iranian nuclear issue has been given, one might think that talk about exercising the military option would be backed up by extensive […]
David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation: By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor. When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through […]
Photojournalist Tyler Hicks on his last trip into Syria with New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, who later died: The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it […]
The true story of the case that helped change the legal landscape for gay rights in the U.S.: The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his […]
How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers: Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who […]
For years, doctors attempted to create artificial hearts that mimicked the real heart—using methods that recreate blood pumping. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier instead developed a continuous-flow device that has worked on calves and some humans, including patient Rahel Elmer Reger: The little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II’s computerized controller, […]
A New York Chinese restaurant loses a former member of its kitchen staff—who then opens his own, very similar restaurant. Inside the legal battle: In essence, the suit claimed, they’d tried to become Mr Chow—the Invasion of the Body Snatchers of haute Chinese cuisine. “They want to not just clone me, they want to take […]
[Fiction] A student juggles the present and the future: The future is messy. Scott’s senses feed him all possible futures at once. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead. That’s close, but it’s still not normal. This man, though, is a relief to his senses. He makes everything clean. Scott wonders for how […]
Has political parody in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke? Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens […]
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 […]
(Not single-page) A writer recalls the disappearance of her adopted cat, and links the event to other experiences of loss in her life. Six months after Gattino disappeared my husband and I were sitting in a restaurant having dinner with some people he had recently met, including an intellectual writer we both admired. The writer […]
A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43: Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a […]
Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose: This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, […]
Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.: Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted […]
Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks: In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went […]
William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]
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