Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the […]
The New Yorker
Posted inUncategorized
Photographs from the nineteen-sixties, when Muammar Qaddafi was a uniformed officer in his twenties, show a slim young man with a proud, erect carriage. (His nickname then was Al Jamil—the handsome one. By the time of his death, it had changed to Abu Shafshufa, or Old Frizzhead.) “King of Kings.” — Jon Lee Anderson, The […]
Posted inUncategorized
[Fiction] The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it […]
Posted inUncategorized
From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career […]
Posted inUncategorized
This June, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., announced the appointment of Abramson and of Dean Baquet, who is black, as the new managing editor. Many who gathered in the newsroom that day were thinking of this history. Not a few women cried. Susan Chira, an assistant managing editor, says that she kept thinking that […]
Posted inUncategorized
[Fiction] When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she […]
Posted inUncategorized
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from London Review of Books, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Orion Magazine, and a guest pick from arts journalist Suzi Steffen.
Posted inUncategorized
“There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.” “Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers […]