Published in Better Everyday · 4 min read · Feb 1, 2016 -- We’re off to a fresh start here at the beginning of 2016. Looking back at 2015, the standout theme in the VC/startup ecosystem was unicorn hu
5 min read · Feb 2, 2016 -- Weather is boring. Apps are boring, Therefore Weather Apps must be the most boring. We agree. Weather needs a wake up. What does weather mean? 73 Degrees? Wind speed 15mph?
T he governments of Egypt and Turkey are brazenly leading a multi-pronged assault on writers, artists and intellectuals. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month denounced his critics among T
Maturing markets = higher stakes, closing doors Interesting piece by Jessica Lessin in The Information today: The End of Tech Startups : Big tech companies are getting better at fending off competitio
And why simple manners can transform your relationships 9 min read · Aug 13, 2014 -- The Good Boy, 1837 M ost people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big
Astronomers at Caltech believe they’ve found an ice giant out beyond Neptune. Illustration by Aleks Sennwald Very briefly some years ago, Mike Brown discovered the tenth planet in the solar system. Th
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing Published in The Message · 23 min read · Nov 5, 2014 -- Networks Without Networks 1/10 Emulation Fever Over the last few days I’ve been crazy for emulation—
A mosque in Kangbashi (all photos courtesy Raphael Olivier) The district of Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia, China, is famous for its emptiness. Widely labelled a ghost town, it stands as a cautionary tal
Op-Ed Contributor An Assassination’s Long Shadow San Francisco TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination o
After two years of a dedicated experiment, we’ve decided to stop making new investments via our FG Angels Syndicate. We’ve learned a lot, achieved some of our goals, but ultimately have decided that t
Dear Sammy, One day, you’re going to wonder about your family’s story, and my hope is this letter will help you understand one of the most important parts of any family’s story: their health. A few weeks ago, after a long run, I opened up the New York Times and found a full-page story on your dad’s…
Chinese President Xi Jinping rounded off 2015 by posting his first message on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, in the form of a new year’s greeting to the People’s Liberation Army. His post received
Anne Libby Jan 1, 2016 Happy New Year! Thank you, Fred, and everyone else at the bar. (Shout out to William and Shana, too.) awaldstein Jan 1, 2016 And back at ya Anne! fredwilson Jan 1, 2016 the mode
Imitation is considered the sincerest form of flattery, but when it comes to parody, that’s a bit more hit-or-miss. This is particularly evident within the parody-film genre, which has been watered do
Before it even launched in early 2013, more than 1 million people signed up to try Mailbox. A month later, at the height of the app’s popularity, Dropbox bought it for a reported $100 million . At the
Justin Trudeau Credit... Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times Feature Trudeau’s Canada, Again With support from President Obama and the legacy of his father on his side, Justin Trudeau sets out to r
Lanny Davis, the longtime D.C. fixer, lawyer, lobbyist, crisis-manager, influence-peddler, and professional friend-of-the-Clintons, would like to present to you his dear friend Timothy Harris, the pri
William Mougayar Nov 30, 2015 It’s part of the continuous organizational tune-up for growth. On average, the bottom 10% of your employees are not very productive and letting them go may be a good thin
Donald Trump said this to supporters at an Alabama rally: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of peo
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Boris shternberg was a believer. As the Soviet Union formed, he held a series of official positions, including administrator of Moscow’s reservoir. But the system in which he had placed his faith ulti
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In coun
At Amherst, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts, student activists began a sit-in last Thursday at the campus library, intending “to stand in solidarity with the students in Mizzou, Yale,
What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The
Tech Is Eating Media. Now What? is a good question. I spend a lot of time on it myself. John Herrman, co-editor of the Awl, has been on this story for years, and also “in” it because the Awl is a vent
John, one key source of anxiety for the current transition should be the role of the advertiser. One reason advertisers are abandoning traditional media is that that relationship never really worked f
Worrying about Facebook is a staple of media apocalypse pornography, but the focus on Facebook subsuming media audiences is, if you can believe it, too optimistic. If you are a media organization or p
6 min read · Nov 9, 2015 -- John Herrman , thank you — one thoughtful post — you lay out the complexity in the hall of mirrors which we sit today. Here are some of my thoughts, written swiftly as a re
Instapaper 7 packs in a variety of subtle improvements, such as a navigation menu that slides over the article list, rather than underneath it. There was a time not so long ago when reading web-based
An Antidote for the Lack of Diversity in Tech… and other results from the Quire + Mattermark 2015 Startup Investing Survey Background L aws nearly eight decades old bar roughly 97% of American households from investing in private companies, such as startups and small businesses. That’s a lot of…
“I asked, if bike lanes make a street safer, why are there no bike lanes on Queens Boulevard?” Rahman told Reclaim . She devoted herself to a campaign for a bike lane on the dangerous corridor, long k
The Rise and Fall of .Ly Priceonomics Azaz, Syria, 2012 ( Christiaan Triebert ) In 2012, the US imposed sanctions on Syria , for, among other things, their occupation of Lebanon, their apparent suppor
What fascinates me about Wikipedia is not that it exists, per se, even though it is obviously extraordinary that it does. Nor is it the ever-roiling “talk” pages, with their meta-tail-wagging discussi
2 min read · Jun 2, 2015 -- Thanks to its extensibility and the power and flexibility of messaging as a UI system, Slack is more than just a chat room. Anyone who has signed up and spent some time in
July 21, 2014 The Notification is the Interface We have seen quite a few experiments geared towards using notifications and the notification centre as the main interface. Yo , Wut , Text are probably
As software eats the world and takes control over the jobs and services we care about, it also generates an awful lot of notifications: 3 new emails. 4 new interactions on Twitter. 30 minutes until yo