Paulo Pereira
by Molly Osberg One of the most obscene things I learned as a barista was how eager people are to be liked. NYU sophomores, the ones with Jansport backpacks in full makeup at 9 a.m., stuttered their orders and shyly complimented me on my nose ring. I semi-patiently listened to innumerable…
Credit...Photo illustration by Delcan & Company. Balloons by Jenue & Laura Ortega. Feature Yes, it’s driven by greed — but the mania for cryptocurrency could wind up building something much more important than wealth. Credit...Photo illustration by Delcan & Company. Balloons by Jenue & Laura Ortega.…
The Important Thing Trolling Comcast The One About Fiber In our 89th episode, we talk about the wires that bring us the bits. And then Derrick the editor time travels. Enjoy it now, or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes. # No Comments on The One About Fiber…
What the McRib says about us as a society is worse than any conspiracy theory by Willy Staley One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions,…
In September, I met with a prominent entrepreneur looking for positive press on his new project. Meetings like these are a common, usually formulaic, part of my job—except in this one, the conversation drifted to the tech industry’s year of bad headlines. As we discussed the latest sexual harassment…
Justin Metz for BuzzFeed News This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility.…
The invention of the chilled packaged sandwich, an accessory of modern British life which is so influential, so multifarious and so close to hand that you are probably eating one right now, took place exactly 37 years ago. Like many things to do with the sandwich, this might seem, at first glance,…
Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list…
Credit...Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times. Stylist: Kathryn Typaldos. Feature In her directorial debut, the writer and actress has created a character rarely seen onscreen: a young girl who loves herself. Credit...Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times. Stylist: Kathryn Typaldos. By Nov.…
21 min read· Nov 6, 2017 -- I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to…
Reflections November 21, 2004 Out of nowhere I developed this lump. I think it was a cyst or a boil, one of those words you associate with trolls, and it was right on my tailbone, like a peach pit. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I was afraid to look. At first it was just this insignificant knot,…
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure…
One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We…
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie…
The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and…
44 min read· Jun 30, 2017 -- This is the transcript of a keynote talk I gave at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis. An adapted version appears in my book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I’d like to start off by saying that this talk is grounded in a particular location, and that is the…
At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how…
At 36, he might be playing the best tennis of his life. Roger Federer Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times Wonder Year Near the end of a conversation with Roger Federer earlier this month, in a small dining room that had been set aside for us off the lobby of the Mount Stephen Hotel in Montreal,…
In the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. “Not cool” was her reaction. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all possible diets. She was a “gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw…
When it came time to design their first restaurant, Media Noche, San Francisco entrepreneurs Madelyn Markoe and Jessie Barker found themselves lacking inspiration. Their designer had asked them for ideas and they felt like “deer in headlights.” Ultimately, Markoe says, they came up with a single…
Last year I fell in love with a toaster. It looks like most others. A brushed, stainless-steel housing. Four slots, to accommodate the whole family’s bread-provisioning needs. It is alluring but modest, perched atop the counter on proud haunches. But at a time when industry promises disruptive…
Fast food was a huge part of my upbringing, because my father worked for McDonald’s for about 17 years. My family has this very typical American Dream story. My parents immigrated here from the Philippines and settled in the Bay Area, at first in South San Francisco, where a lot of Filipinos…
Search Shouts & Murmurs June 19, 2017 Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Before the Internet, you would just sit in an armchair with a book open on your lap, staring into space or staring at a decorative broom on the wall—kind of shifting back and forth between those two modes of being. Before the…
Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching,…
Leaders | Regulating the internet giants The data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now…
I came to the United States as a six year old kid from Eastern Europe. One of my earliest memories of that time was the Safeway supermarket, an astonishing display of American abundance. It was hard to understand how there could be so much wealth in the world. There was an entire aisle devoted to…
For today’s designers, any object, symbol or pool of information is just another problem awaiting a new solution. Is that a good thing? Makeover Mania Wheel by Pink Sparrow, based on a concept by Pablo Delcan. Photograph by Henry Leutwyler for The New York Times. 1. The Problem In theory, the…
At the turn of the year, my friend Frank unveiled a lovely responsive redesign of his already-lovely website. Frank’s an inspiring chap, not least because he can turn a phrase, and just so . In fact, there’s one line from his new site that, since I read it, has rattled around my skull quite a bit.…
It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV. And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious…
Search American Chronicles What began as an attempt at a simpler life quickly became a life-style brand. April 17, 2017 Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive.Photograph by Jeff Minton for The New Yorker Emily King and Corey Smith had been dating for five…
Photo by Sanwal Deen Hey there, tech designer person. Have you noticed the increasing number of vague specializations we’ve invented for ourselves? Here are a few I grabbed from a job board 10 minutes ago. UX Designer UX/UI Designer UI Designer Graphic Designer (UX & UI focus) Visual Designer…
Jia Tolentino March 22, 2017 Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur,” recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.”COURTESY FIVERR Last September, a very twenty-first-century type of story appeared on the company blog…
I hate minimalism. I hate it as the incredibly tedious piece of personal performance art it has come to be in our society, but I also hate it as an aesthetic: your white-on-white-on-white life and meticulously crafted wardrobe of only the most wispy products Everlane and Aritzia have to offer are,…
Plainness and Sweetness March 27, 2017 It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather than the direction they are pointed. But reflecting on the other side of the issue is also…
Magical thinking drives the startup economy — but we need a strong dose of reality. Published inZebras Unite · 7 min read· Mar 8, 2017 -- July 13, 2017 update: For the latest, please read “Zebras: Let’s Get In Formation.” A year ago we wrote “Sex & Startups.” The premise was this: The current…
The Report of the 2020 Group January 2017 This report, by a team of seven Times journalists, outlines the newsroom’s strategy and aspirations. For additional details, see this memo from Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and Joe Kahn, the managing editor. Journalists across the organization…
The walls of the bar are covered in old art, photographs of Ireland, and yellowing posters in frames. A pair of hurleys, the flat ash stick of the Gaelic game, are tacked above the door frame. The bar’s otherwise full of dust-coated bottles of bygone whiskeys and stouts, musical instruments, and…
This, but with ketchup Bernd Juergens/Shutterstock One week to the day after he won the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump slipped away from his handlers — as well as the journalists assigned to cover him — for an off-the-books dinner at 21 Club in New York, where he ordered a steak, cooked…
I know this about you: you love chicken tenders. You love them. You might not ever eat them—you might be a vegetarian or a vegan, or not consume birds for whatever reason, or not want to deal with the carbs, or not think it’s okay for adult humans with serious opinions about fracking to dip a toe…
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