Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
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'Write What You Want — But Be Prepared for the Consequences'
I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an […]
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'We Are Made of Star Stuff'
From New York magazine and The Cut, an essay from Sasha Sagan about the lessons that her father, astronomer and author Carl Sagan, taught her. Here, Sasha recalls what her parents told her when she went through what she describes as a “mini existential crisis”: “You are alive right this second. That is an amazing […]
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When Instruments Are Replaced by Computer Software
At Oxford American, writer and musician Ginger Dellenbaugh looks at how the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there may be so few people mastering it today: Recently, I met a friend at his studio in East Nashville to listen to some of his new demos. The second track featured a […]
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The $30 Million Clinkle Mystery
Clinkle’s growth team proved effective at signing up more than 100,000 would-be users — this, despite being a little hazy about precisely what they were selling. Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.” The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, […]
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Spiraling Debt, Mortgages and the Two-Income Family
Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at […]
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Why Soda First Became Popular: It Wasn't Just the Cocaine
“Recipes I’ve seen suggest it was about 0.01 grams of cocaine used in fountain sodas. That’s about a tenth of a line of coke,” he says. “It’s hard to be sure, but I don’t think it would’ve given people a massive high. It would definitely be enough to have some kind of effect, probably stronger […]
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'It Will Change the Way We Think About Society and the Way We Do Economics'
Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]
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The Difficulties with Dirty Words
There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough…. Thin in […]
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Netscape, 20 Years Later
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]