Læs @Unge_MikL's kronik om vores generations brug af ironisk distance - det er spot on http://t.co/e3p5erT1Y4

Åbner modeugen med interview med @AsgerJuelLarsen. Om hård rock, hård skole, hårde uniformer og blød strik #cphfw http://t.co/ixx37QV8TG

This is some very good ice. (I hope.) http://t.co/infFMwdLGZ

Fascinating: A dramatic re-enacment of the final minutes before Nixon’s resignation speech, 40 years ago today: http://t.co/4GkiSW4ubl

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple may well be the only tech company on the planet that would dare compare itself to Picasso. In a class at the company’s internal training program, the so-called Apple University, the instructor likened the 11 lithographs that make up Picasso’s “The Bull” to the way Apple…

Last week, HBO premiered its new summer series The Leftovers, which is based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name. Ratings for the hour-long drama were fairly good: 1.8 million viewers tuned in to see how the small-town village of Mapleton would deal with the mass disappearance of 2 percent of…

Last night, HBO premiered its new summer series The Leftovers, which is based on a novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta. The series takes as its premise the mass disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population. In popular culture, this kind of disappearance is known by its Christian name: the…

I perpetually find myself in the process of understanding what The Leftovers is trying to do but unsure as to why the story it is telling matters. This was one of the reasons last week’s story, centering on the baby Jesus-Macguffin, frustrated me so much. The symbolism is all clear—essentially laid…

Well, tonight’s episode of The Leftovers takes the idea of subtlety and tosses it out the window—along with a baby (and the bathwater, if we want to keep our idioms intact). It is not inherently a bad episode, but girl, it is very heavy-handed. I found myself cringing through a lot of it, even…

I liked “Two Boats And A Helicopter,” with the exception of the coda at the end. And I didn’t even really mind the coda, but its conclusion seemed at odds with the rest of the episode, which is an unexpected deep dive into the personal life of the Reverend Matthew Jamison, whose hamartia appears to…

It’s beginning to make more sense why the pilot of The Leftovers looked the way it did: “Penguin One, Us Zero” is a perplexingly titled hour, but it’s more satisfying than the show’s first episode. In part that’s because it’s taking the scattered, meandering threads of the pilot and pulling them…

It’s going to be difficult to watch The Leftovers week-to-week. There are a lot of strong elements to this pilot, but there’s so much uncertainty and not-knowing at its center that watching it doesn’t feel like it solves or explains anything at all. The biggest reveal is one that I accidentally…

I wrote 420 words about 420

Little Lies the Internet Told Me - great essay on search ranking, promotional fees, and fake reviews by @superwuster

Seriously, this is what I've been building up to for months. (Minor update to add note on autonomous federations.)

It is a sunny spring Sunday and – joy! – I am off to Paris to go for a walk. Not any old walk, but a walk with a man who really knows about walking: Frédéric Gros, a professor of walking. A philosopher of walking. Strictly speaking, he’s actually a professor of philosophy who writes about walking,…

“She often wandered around barefoot… and climbed up on tables when she was excited about a project… Muriel was clearly in her element, making trouble,” recounted MIT Press editors Larry Cohen and Roger Conover. Muriel Cooper , who was best known for articulating the graphic language of MIT for more…

I’m sorry if I am a grump about artificial intelligence. It just happens to be a subject on which our media frequently appears both insufficiently educated and unwilling to learn. My frustration stems from a basic category error, which can be boiled down to this: My cellphone is much better than my…

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they…

BY CHRIS OSTERNDORF This Friday, a movie called Transcendence will arrive in theaters. Directed by Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, and penned by first-time screenwriter Jack Paglen (whose script appeared on the infamous Black List), Transcendence is being sold as…

For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you…

Source: Stumptown Coffee Among coffee aficionados, the AeroPress is a revelation. A small, $30 plastic device that resembles a plunger makes what many consider to be the best cup of coffee in the world. Proponents of the device claim that drinks made with the AeroPress are more delicious than those…

View this image › Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed It was the last thing Steve Marquess and Stephen Henson wanted to hear. In 2006, three years into a struggle to get a key component of OpenSSL validated as secure by the U.S. government, and they’d received bad news: Their code needed more work. OpenSSL…

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed young men with nothing to lose. Amid the renewed optimism of this teenage uprising are fears it could push a troubled nation closer to civil war. GQ reports exclusively from a region ripped…

This is an extract from Danish Dynamite: The Story of Football’s Greatest Cult Team by Lars Eriksen, Mike Gibbons and Rob Smyth Idraettens Hus. Even the name sounds cold, bleak and forbidding. It had all the warmth and humanity of a prison. After years staying at the delightful Hotel Marina, with…

For three years, Apple and Samsung have clashed on a scale almost unprecedented in business history, their legal war costing more than a billion dollars and spanning four continents. Beginning with the super-secret project that created the iPhone and the late Steve Jobs’s fury when Samsung—an Apple…

25 years ago, Steve Wynn was busily creating a new kind of resort. This is the tale of the alchemy–and the crazy risk–that changed the Strip forever. One night in May 1985, the architect Joel Bergman was on his way from Atlantic City to Las Vegas to work on the expansion of the Golden Nugget’s South…

This is the fourth in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop’s recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. Read the second one here, the third one here, and the fourth one here. There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me…

This is the raw text of the keynote I gave at Improving Reality on Thursday.  Thanks again to Honor and her crew for being so wonderful, and for so kindly inviting me. HOW TO SEE THE FUTURE Warren Ellis The concept of calling an event Improving Reality is one of those great science fiction ideas.…

by Kristofer Layon July 31, 2012 Published in Business, Project Management, Web Strategy, User Research ∙ Whether we prototype, write, design, develop, or test as part of building the web, we’re creating something hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people will use. But how do we know…

By Nitasha Tiku 7/25/12 8:45am (Illustration: David Saracino) The situation on Alyssa Vance’s couch would have been best described as a cuddle puddle—a tangle of hair-petting and belly-stroking and neck-nuzzling, seven people deep. It was Friday night in late June in the living room of her…

IF NORTH KOREA were not so tragic and dangerous, the scenes broadcast to the world after the funeral of Kim Jong Il would have been comic. Waves of mourners outdid each other in grief. Men, women and children tore at their clothes in homage to a man who for 17 years kept his people in a state of…

Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a…

Image credit: Mark Ostow Case No. 218 How’s this for the good life? You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself. You’re well into your 80s, and have spent hardly a day in the hospital. Your wife had a cancer scare, but she’s recovered and by your side, just as she’s been for more than 60 years.…

tayler_jacques_4 Danielle Leder, co-founder and owner of Jacques Magazine, adjusts the makeup on a model at a video shoot. (Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink)   The speck bothered Danielle Leder. It had to go. It was nothing more than a small piece of dead skin, or perhaps a stray bit of dust, but…

By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2010, at 11:28 AM ET Over the last few weeks, this modest little column of mine has been acquiring an almost eerie prescience and potency. I called for the death sentence on Tariq Aziz to be commuted, and it was only a matter of days before the…

By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Monday, July 19, 2010, at 11:03 AM ET Every time Mel Gibson unburdens himself of a tirade against Jews or "n______s" or uncooperative females, there are commentators on hand to create a mystery where none exists. When he produced The Passion of the Christ, which…

Article Archives [ 2013 ] [ 2012 ] [ 2011 ] [ 2010 ] [ 2009 ] [ 2008 ] [ 2007 ] [ 2006 ] [ 2005 ] [ 2004 ] [ 2003 ] [ 2002 ] [ 2000 ] [ 2001 ] [ 1999 ] [ 1998 ]     2013 King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson) Playboy, January 2012 On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in…

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism…

big-russian-life-anna-chapman-ex-spy It has been nearly a year and a half since the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Anna Chapman , the Russian spy who had been working undercover in Manhattan real estate. Her arrest along with nine other Russians broke up the largest foreign intelligence…