Features Tortoise Rhythm Methods When the five members of avant-rock collective Tortoise arrive in Canada this month for the Eastern swing of Exclaim!'s 12th Anniversary Con... Features Profane Peaches She's a man-eater (and a woman-eater too), a high voltage electro-rock nympho on record and a…

So long, Delicious. It's been fun, but in the end the combination of Yahoo's indifference and the attempts by your new owners Avos to turn you away from being something like the plumbing for the net, and into a sort-of news windows, haven't worked out for us. The upshot is that we're moving from…

Associated Press There is a belief among some -- perhaps out of fear, or prudence -- that children today should study Mandarin Chinese as their second language. If China is going to rule the world in a few decades, at least my kid will be able to communicate. That's an interesting idea, but the…

Albany Berkeley Girls Softball League team. Front Row (left to right): Grace Rusin, Maeve Gallagher, Quinn Lewis, Derby Gill, Griffin Campbell, Kaili Meier, Amanda Galbraith Back row (left to right): Coach Katie Vickers, Briahna Jackson, Adi Saaf, Coach David Wampler, Lila Simpson, Robyn Wampler,…

It’s time to iterate on the product formerly known as the RSS reader. Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are going in a direction that emphasizes usability and ephemerality over durable value and utility. I want someone to do to the RSS reader what Apple has done to the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone —…

This article was originally published on swombat.com in December 2011. Today, right now, what is the best path out of the corporate world and into startups? What would I advise myself to do, 5 years a

British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Thursday at the age of 62. Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.…

News Desk December 15, 2011 We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was…

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by…

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: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 499 pp., $30.00 In 1955, when Daniel Kahneman was twenty-one years…

December 14, 2011 | by | Lifestyle and Culture Mashing up bike trip data from the City of Vancouver along with weather statistics from Environment Canada , The Dependent examines the fickle relationship between Vancouver cyclists and our West Coast climate. Data is from the Burrard Street Bridge…

Hey, Memphis: Are you happy? Are you sure? Because Men's Health magazine isn't so certain. Last week, in a list of the "saddest U.S. cities," Men's Health ranked Memphis, with its subtropical climate

News and Interviews Posted by Goodreads on December 5, 2011 Jon Ronson is not afraid to put himself on the line for a great story, especially when he gets to venture to the fringes of society. In his first book, Them, he follows extremists of various stripes in a quest to find out why so many of…

Tyson Balcomb, a college student in Oregon, stopped using Facebook, saying its effects were maybe “a little unhealthy.”Credit...Steve Dykes for The New York Times Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet…

A few months ago, we released a completely new and different Common Craft. This is the story of the big ideas that drove the change and getting the website designed and built. App or Not? In 2010, we

Op-Ed Contributor Credit...Rumors Camden, Me. I FIRST heard of Amazon’s new “promotion” from my bookseller daughter, Emily, in an e-mail with the subject line “Can You Hear Me Screaming in Brooklyn?” According to a link Emily supplied, Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar…

By far one of the most challenging obstacles to building a meaningful dialogue about privilege is the extreme ease with which we’re able to take it for granted. Quick: when was the last time you thought about proprioception? Unless you’re a neurologist, or read a lot of Oliver Sacks, the answer…

A lot of you will look at the deal to buy Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) by Bell and Rogers as simply a sports deal. You may be questioning what this means for the future of your favorite sports franchise, be it the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Raptors, TFC (the soccer team), maybe…

This morning, Coco Krumme and Mark Armstrong — newly of Read It Later and always of @Longreads — released a study of Read It Later data examining stories that were saved by Read It Later’s 4 million-and-counting users over a six-month period (from May 1 to October 31, 2011). Together, David Carr put…

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board. The following article originally ran in December 2011, months after AF447’s black-box recordings surfaced and spurred new revelations. We’re looking back at the mysterious tragedy and republishing the…

Is he Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? Stephen Harper has taken on both roles with great proficiency as Prime Minister, writes Chantal Hebert. ( Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS ) Prime Minister Stephen Harper, perhaps as Dr. Jekyll, with U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday, Dec. 7 in Washington. (…

|7 min read IN NOVEMBER 2010 “Call of Duty: Black Ops” was released. Fans in many countries queued round the block to get their hands on a coveted early copy. A lucky few had won tickets to invitation-only release parties which were broadcast live to viewers across the internet. The event had been…

I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn't know. This is how I arrived at knowing. Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news…

In 1948, the legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher declared that "nice guys finish last." Although Durocher would later deny the quote, his pithy line summarizes a popular and pessimistic take on hu

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Car2Go in Vancouver by Richard Eriksson This short article will help you register and start using Vancouver’s Car2Go car-sharing program and hopefully explain all the questions you have about this new

In the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, there is a scene in which Ayn Rand’s libertarian heroes defy all odds, deploy some untold amount of private funding, and launch the fastest high-speed train in history over rails of experimental metal. “The run of the John Galt Line is thrilling,”wrote the…