Illustration by David Plunkert Listen to an audio version of this article. I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass nameplate, as if walking…

‘Anovelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash. But really, as Pinfold goes on to say,…

In school, you might have heard that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Scientific Revolution, when Newton uncovered the mechanical laws underlying motion and Galileo learned the true shape of the cosmos. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the scientific method, the inventors of the…

The author Daniel Oppenheimer and his wife, Jess, rewatching a recording of their Zoom sessions with the couples therapist and best-selling author Terry Real.Credit...David Hilliard for The New York Times It took a superstar couples therapist to help me see beyond my anger. The author Daniel…

In 2025, there are no shortage of tools sold to product managers. But you know what? It’s about time. I can still remember an era when product managers spent all their time: Creating roadmaps in sheets Creating opportunity solution trees in Miro And preparing for product reviews in slides… It was a…

Welcome to the 2,212 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since 2024! If you haven’t subscribed, join 238,830 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by 2025 Presenting Sponsor… Rox Rox is on a mission to empower every business owner to secure and grow…

Edited to add: The main takeaway of this post is meant to be: Labour-replacing AI will shift the relative importance of human v non-human factors of production, which reduces the incentives for society to care about humans while making existing powers more effective and entrenched. Many people are…

This series of articles explores organisation-external communications, how to engage the world out there to impact how your peers think and act, how this process shapes our identity and what we might become. It forms part of research into my next book on organisational and human sensemaking.…

In his preface​ to the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota…

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. Hearing Things by Feven Merid Dylan Green, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Ryan Dombal, Andy Cush, and Jill Mapes. (Photo: Victor Jeffreys II) At the start of this year, Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork would merge with GQ, and in the process laid…

Open Questions Often, it’s our most obviously necessary tasks that feel the most impossible. December 31, 2024 Illustration by Josie Norton You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be…

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance,…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023.…

Almost no one learns how to speak a foreign language very well in school. By the numbers, it’s tempting to declare, “Learning a foreign language is impossible.” But that’s plainly false. Going from zero to fluency is ultra-rare, but I’ve seen it happen. How does fluency happen? First and foremost,…

Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra. Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to…

NOtes on the culture The best compliment a man — gay or straight, old or … not so old — can receive is to enter the pantheon of daddies. To accompany this essay, the queer New York-based artist Billy

I AM NOT SAYING that I conjured a new Sally Rooney novel, but last year, I posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “I know she just published a book, but like . . . when is Sal Roones coming back. I need her,” and a few months later, it was announced that she would be returning with her fourth…

A MAN WITH a Xanax problem, a recovered incel, a divorcée, a giggly undergrad with an active OnlyFans, and a slender university professor are playing a game. Multiple, actually—sexual brinkmanship, financial foreplay, literal chess, political pissing matches, linguistic swordplay. Death drives whir…

Critic’s Notebook The HBO show—the most thrilling offering currently on TV—zeroes in on the domineering masculine impulse that drives the world of finance. September 29, 2024 Illustration by Katherine Lam The third season of the HBO financial drama “Industry” opens on a luxury yacht, off the coast…

Who’s afraid of psychoanalysis? Yorgos Lanthimos. Or, at least, that’s the prevailing impression from Poor Things. Lanthimos’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel is a certified hit, nominated for illustrious awards and pitched as a feminist black comedy, with Emma Stone winning the Best…

It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my…

Open Questions A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most. August 27, 2024 Illustration by Josie Norton I read “Middlemarch” for the first time during my sophomore year of college. I didn’t get it. Why would Dorothea, a young and intelligent woman,…

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Access through your institution This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access…

It’s hard to know what to make of the newest effort by László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace. The novella concerns an aging librarian at the New York Public Library named herman melvill. He is overtaken by an obsessive interest in three artists who also lived and worked in Manhattan: the…

“What I really want is to work on…is strategy,” I’ve heard from colleagues on every team I’ve been on. And it’s no surprise — big strategy projects can sometimes seem like the most exciting and high-profile projects in a tech company. They call to mind visionaries who change the world by thinking…

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a…

One of the simplest tasks I perform every morning is turning on the lights. I flip the switch, the lights go on. In reality, turning on the lights is actually a complicated process, probably involving solar panels, power grids, neighborhood transformers, circuit breakers, and more. But all I know is…

Poster created by my wonderful former colleague Leonardo De La Rocha Early in my career, I remember asking the most senior engineer I worked with to join an urgent meeting that week. They agreed. But when I sent the invite, they responded with, “Actually, I have that morning blocked off to do work,…

How many times have you seen a senior industry leader who's done amazing things in their past roles come into a new company or team and...struggle? Whether it's by coming in hot and trying to change things too fast, or feeling like an impostor and not speaking up, it's hard to be a new leader. Put…

No figure in the whole of English literature is as reviled as the critic. He seems to have been invented to provoke scorn and skepticism. Among the first men to borrow from the Latin criticus (“one who judges”) to create the English word critike was John Bridges, Bishop of Oxford, who, in a 1587…

Henri Matisse, "...Dors, dormeuse aux longs cils..." 1944 Like many clinicians, I am conflicted and ambivalent about the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). There is a never-ending, exhausting debate around it. There are several strands of controversy around BPD, pertaining to:…

Each boy had an alcove and a curtain to pull in front of it, but the other boys did not regard what was within the boundaries of that cloth-and-plywood square as your personal space. These days, other people, like my fellow third formers, can wander in and out of my on-line personal space almost at…

Prelude: Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University who many have described as one of the most revolutionary biologists of our age. His work has been featured everywhere from Scientific American to the Lex Fridman podcast and The New Yorker. I spent the past month reading a bunch of his papers…

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Fall 1996. A young Chris Fralic is selling software for Oracle. He’s not sure what he wants to do next, but he’s always been curious about venture capital. And then some unusual magic happens — a friend offers to introduce him to Kevin…

Six years ago I celebrated my 68th birthday by gifting my children 68 bits of advice I wished I had gotten when I was their age. Every birthday after that I added more bits of advice for them until I had a whole book of bits. That book was published a year ago as Excellent Advice for Living, which…

Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis Norton, 388 pp., $35.00 The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited and with an introduction by Alex Andriesse New York Review…

In the Spring Books issue, on the occasion of Cathy Curtis’s new biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Merve Emre writes about the restless critic who cofounded the New York Review and contributed more than one hundred incisive essays before her death in 2007. Emre does Hardwick the honor of an…