The Santa Clara Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today’s Silicon Valley. This was simply the result of bad planning and layers of leadership failure — nobody thinks farms literally needed to be destroyed to create the…

Take the only tree that’s left, Stuff it up the hole in your culture. —Leonard Cohen Retreat to the desert, and fight. —D. H. Lawrence THE HANDLE, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the…

AUGUST 3, 2012 This review, by Gore Vidal , of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself , was originally published in The Nation on January 2, 1960. Thanks to Jon Wiener for suggesting it and to Katrina vanden Heuvel for permission to reprint. ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF. By Norman Mailer. G.P.…

Broderick As happens from time to time, the suggestion has been made that Microsoft cancel Windows Phone, and instead fork Android . It's not the first time this suggestion has been made . It's probably not the last, either. It's a poor idea. Google has worked to make Android functionally…

stevesilberman: If you missed it: Very thoughtful essay on Orson Scott Card, the empathetic author who became a bigot. http://t.co/Z6CiziqAbR

jessmisener: And now, a thing I wrote about myself on the Internet called: Why I Stopped Writing About Myself On The Internet http://t.co/yd9Aw0HZlS

Click on image for full illustration. Illustration: Jean Julien for the Guardian O ne morning this summer, I got up at first light – I'd left the blinds open the night before – then drank a strong cup of coffee, sat near-naked by an open window for an hour, worked all morning, then had a martini…

The credo of Thiel’s venture-capital firm: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Credit Photograph by Robert Maxwell Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the…

I moved to San Francisco 9 months ago from the East Coast bastion of Boston. Despite having experience living in a major US city, I found quite a few surprises coming here. Some have been great, while others not so much. If you’re planning the move here, I hope this will help you know better what to…

For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five…

Look, you're not ready to have a baby. Hey-O ! Yup. You're probably in your late twenties or early thirties, and you've gotten some shit figured out, and now you're pretty sure you're "almost ready" to have a baby. But a baby is the ultimate, cosmic limit-tester of all ultimate cosmic limits, and no…