One of my favorite recently freed NYer pieces: http://t.co/lkvGeq4Ay0 And why I find it so interesting: http://t.co/FTl9AbdKGI

Playing video games with LeBron James is so annoying. “When we were growing up we used to play this fighting game on the Sega Genesis called Shaq Fu,” says Brandon Weems, James’ lifelong friend. “LeBron was the only one who had memorized all the moves and so he’d win every time. We all thought he…

European court finds @CIA operated 'black site' jail in Polish forest where terror suspects subjected to torture: http://t.co/V1frF7EgCt

Germany begins spying on UK & US for the first time since 1945: http://t.co/PiqD10D58S

Glenn Fleishman on the tricky new user-tracking method that sees through privacy controls. The canvas HTML element, designed to provide a space on a web page in which JavaScript may draw graphics and paint type, has been hijacked to track visits to web sites, according to a newly released draft of…

Seven years after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Caroline Siede looks back on the book series that defined a generation. I can remember with startling accuracy what I was doing exactly seven years ago. That speaks not to my remarkable memory, but to the fact that Harry Potter…

Here’s a crucial piece of social infrastructure that almost no one considers: the restaurant reservation. That is, until a service like ReservationHop comes along. ReservationHop was a small project to book tables under bogus names and then sell them. When the service came to the attention of San…

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people. Children…

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 Let’s don’t be alarmist. The most important week in American financial history since the Great Depression began at 8 A.M. on a Friday in the middle of September last year. I have pieced together this account of it from scores of interviews with participants and observers. Many…

“This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said. “It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.” The…

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is…

Samantha was sitting on a lawn chair in her parents’ garage, smoking a joint, when she decided to run away. She had just graduated from high school, where she had few friends, and felt invisible. She went to class stoned and wrote suicidal poems about the shame of being molested by a family friend:…

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house.…

What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? I believe that most of us have false beliefs about our own nature, and our identity over time, and that, when we see the truth, we ought to change some of our beliefs about…

In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who…

For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a…

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward,…

1 At around three in the afternoon on March 3, 2009, in the fifth week of the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova—a thirty-five-year-old physician accused of murdering her husband—the judge turned to Borukhova’s attorney, Stephen Scaring, and asked a pro-forma question. “Do you have anything else, Mr.…

On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Rachel Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. A recent graduate of Florida State, she was dressed to blend into a crowd—bluejeans,…

Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o’clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless…

On a Saturday evening a few months ago, a fund-raiser was held in a downtown Manhattan yoga studio to benefit the bonobo, a species of African ape that is very similar to—but, some say, far nicer than—the chimpanzee. A flyer for the event depicted a bonobo sitting in the crook of a tree, a…

The town of El Valle de Antón, in central Panama, sits in the middle of a volcanic crater formed about a million years ago. The crater is almost four miles across, but when the weather is clear you can see the jagged hills that surround the town, like the walls of a ruined tower. El Valle has one…

On October 5, 2007, two days after being released from New Hampshire Hospital, in Concord, Linda Bishop discarded all her belongings except for mascara, tweezers, and a pen. For nearly a year, she had complained about the restrictions of the psychiatric unit, but her only plan for her release was to…

My favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade off roles: one of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, “I’ve been searching these pyramids for so many years. When will I ever find the tomb of…

According to Plutarch, Cato the Younger was determined to die. Aghast at having to live under his old enemy Julius Caesar, he tried to stab himself. His injured hand proved too weak for the job, and he fell to the floor, severely but not mortally wounded. His servants and physician rushed to him, at…

A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so busy with side jobs that I was…

Sergei Yurevich Filin, a man of early middle age and improbable beauty, sat behind the wheel of his car on a winter night driving toward home. It was 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the center of Moscow, a light snow in the air, snow on the rooftops, snow piled up in the lanes. Traffic was thick but brisk.…

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were…

We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be…

The other day, Hannah Edgar, a recent high-school graduate from Walnut Creek, California, wrote to me asking whether I had learned anything new about Strauss and the G.I.s. She was referring to a strangely pregnant musical-historical moment that I describe in my book “The Rest Is Noise”: on April…

On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of…

By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid…

For just $53, you can purchase a guaranteed front-of-the-bus seat on the TMZ NYC Tour. After stepping on the bus in the middle of Times Square, a TMZ-trained tour guide — handsome, blond, amiable Australian — will ask you and the rest of the bus if you’re a huge fan of the show. You’ll clap; the…

Last summer a trim guy with wavy brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad smile could be found making Whoppers, working the drive-through window, and scrubbing bathrooms at a Burger King in Miami. His name was Daniel Schwartz. He learned to make a Whopper in less than 35 seconds and blended in well…

Creator of Nike Swoosh Remembers its Conception http://t.co/7kvaxUlKpu by @allanbrettman @Oregonian

Patent troll for podcasting screams "don't hit me" as Carolla refuses to back down http://t.co/8MGcg9ALfW

Software-Americans are vilified as other immigrant groups once were (?) http://t.co/KAT3p6ErF2

HELLO! Today, for Medium, I wrote about how YouTube showed us THE AMERICAN ROOM. https://t.co/JUxehJW3l0 http://t.co/OCthdNXYiw

Er vi ved at nå Peak Drone™ ? Kontekst: http://t.co/ZqgBTutvct

Blue Bottle makes the best iced coffee in America. But are artisan businesses doomed to fail when they go mainstream? http://t.co/Vg7V9QLD7H