Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Real Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman Harper, 401 pp., $27.99 Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics by…

So-called “acq-hires” (when a company will buy a startup solely/mostly for the talent rather than the product itself) recently came up in a discussion amongst friends and industry peers. In my consultancy practice I tend to work with larger corporate/enterprise technology clients who want me to help…

By Hannah Johnson The reading experience on a Kindle is like “reading through a tub full of dirty dishwater,” said book designer Carin Goldberg at an event entitled “The Next Chapter: The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book.” E-books, and the endless uniformity of their reflowable text, are…

The must-have app on the iPhone is not iMessage. It's not iTunes or Safari or even Find My iPhone. It's Instagram, the photo-sharing app that once described itself as "quirky." Cultish would be more a

On Baseball Dirk Hayhurst, who has written two books about his middling career, will pitch professionally in Italy.Credit...Eric Hancsak for The New York Times The best writer in a baseball uniform is leaving the country. He is doing it for many reasons, but partly because he wants to keep his love…

In a fascinating new book by Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, two different work styles are pit starkly against each other: on one side, we have the pro-collaboration camp, and on the other the more inward-looking solitude-is-good supporters. This debate…

The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast Mark Hendrickson 1:17 PM PST · January 22, 2012 Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post,…

Opinion LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s…

One night, nearly 25 years ago, I was talking with Christopher Hitchens at a cocktail party—that this statement could be construed as name-dropping is actually the subject of this column, so please re

Point, Texas (pop. 792) is not the easiest place for a single lesbian to raise her child. But neither her sexuality nor her unwed parenthood are enough to make Renee Johnson an American conservative’s worst nightmare. As she explained to me when I met her at Rains County Library, “I’d rather have a…

The pursuit of heterosexual sex has always relied on a bit of low-grade sexism. Gender roles influence the traits that men and women code as attractive; they guide them through the first date ritual;

Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China, but whose real…

Talk about setting a tone. There’s a new order on the south side of Chicago, and one of those taking charge, White Sox bench coach Mark Parent, wasted little time in establishing the team’s tenor this season. “You hit our guy, we’ll hit your guy,” he said in response to a fan’s question at the…

So, Yahoo messed up today. They've messed up other days, too, but this was an especially red-letter day amongst other red-letter days, and this is one that has me ticked off. For reasons I don't know, Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs…

Sandro Di Carlo Darsa / PhotoAlto / Getty Images Related Follow @TIMEIdeas Imagine a 2-year-old who greets you with a huge smile, offering a toy. Now here’s another child who regards you gravely and hides behind his parent’s leg. How do you feel about these two children? If you’re like most people,…

Edgar, a sparkly New York socialite, was known for the engrossing tales he’d spin for guests at fundraisers he seemed to host nightly. In reality, the man would spend much of the day ahead of each party jotting down anecdotes on index cards, a nervous habit he’d developed in college. Edgar the…

I was in a terrible hurry, running late for a business meeting in Philadelphia. I'd spent more than $100 for my train ticket from a vending machine at New York's Penn Station—but in my haste had grabb

"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," by Susan Cain Jeff Glor speaks with Susan Cain about "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book? Susan Cain: I was fuelled by the same mix of passion and…

Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “Quiet : The Power of Introverts” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the…

Riff Credit...Tom Gauld This kind of thing happens all the time now, but three or four years ago it still seemed momentous and thrilling: a sudden argument at a dinner party (something about Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds and iconic mustaches of the ’70s) was quickly put to rest when half the people…

The Bay Citizen Silicon Valley may be booming again, but times are still tough for the 200 out-of-work professionals who crowd into Sunnyvale’s City Hall every Thursday morning. Most of them hold advanced degrees in engineering and have more than a decade of experience in the technology sector. They…

SAN FRANCISCO — It started five years ago after a young engineer in San Francisco sketched out a quirky little Web tool for telling your friends what you were up to. It became a bullhorn for millions of people worldwide, especially vital in nations that tend to muzzle their own people. But this…

One day in early 2010, the internet message board I Love Music began discussing the Pazz and Jop poll, which the Village Voice had recently published on its website. The Voice has conducted Pazz and Jop annually since 1971. Hundreds of music critics submit lists ranking their favorite albums and…

The Financial Page January 22, 2012 Illustration by Christoph Niemann At this point, the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President. His fellow Republican candidates, of all people, have painted a vivid picture of private-equity…

With the launch of Kottke.org in 1998, Jason Kottke helped create a blogging style — a one or two line introduction followed by an excerpt, video, or interesting link — that’s shown remarkable staying power over the past fifteen years. (See Tim Carmody on Kottke “link, pull, response” approach).…

BY Pamela Fayerman Vancouver Sun For three years, a Canadian business leader tried to donate more than $3 million to But he was frustrated in his bid to give his money away because of a donation debacle. Don James, CEO of Deeley Harley-Davidson Canada, eventually took his multimillion-dollar pledge…