Are you smart or are you dumb? You already know there's a bell curve of IQ points. Meaning, most of us have average intelligence. And those people on the curve's extremes are either brilliant or dumb. What you probably don't know is that as long as you're near average, having a higher IQ doesn't…
Published in Prototypr · 12 min read · Aug 26, 2017 -- Enabling design & development teams to use spacing deliberately for improved readability and consistency in product Cheatsheet summarizing my app
A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most i
Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in October 2012 while I lived in New York and juggled three jobs. Along with working at a restaurant and a news agency on nights and weekends, I spent my weekdays commuting from Brooklyn to a media company in Manhattan. When the hurricane made landfall, it crippled…
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. If power were a pre
Sporting
Alex Honnold woke up in his Dodge van last Saturday morning, drove into Yosemite Valley ahead of the soul-destroying traffic and walked up to the sheer, smooth and stupendously massive 3,000-foot golden escarpment known as El Capitan, the most important cliff on earth for rock climbers.…
Photo: Sal Pellingra/EyeEm/Getty Images In 1995, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a revealing study , which centered on a story about a dying child. A team led by the Univers
Image by Rob Kall, via Flickr Commons Timothy Snyder , Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of total
Analyzing the news of the past 24 hours 8 min read · Jan 30, 2017 -- The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the fiel
A Pew study last year confirmed that U.S. political partisanship has risen sharply. In the face of that trend, is it possible for Democrats and Republicans to get along? Wharton professor Philip Tetlo
Published in Dear Design Student · 9 min read · Dec 1, 2016 -- Q: I am freaking the fuck out that America just elected a fascist. I’m bouncing between wanting to fight and hiding under my bed. I’m jus
Buffy vs. Twitter Our pop culture mostly presents telepathy as a curse: The power arrives, the cascade of thoughts overwhelms the telepath, temple-grabbing and visual effects ensue. In our narratives,
My wife and I had 12 children over the course of 15 1/2 years. Today, our oldest is 37 and our youngest is 22. I have always had a very prosperous job and enough money to give my kids almost anything.
The Frontier in Open Source 6 min read · Dec 22, 2016 -- The narrative fallacy is that past events prefigure the future. It is especially common in biographies, where the subject’s early life is reduc
Their public conference had been interrupted by a demonstration march and a bomb threat, so the white nationalists decided to meet secretly instead. They slipped past police officers and protesters in
A meme is currently circulating on Twitter in which people post two contrasting photos: one is “me at the beginning of 2016”; the other is “me at the end of 2016.” Popular entries have included a duck
In his new memoir, Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen reflects on how home, roots and family helped shape him and his music. Will Russell/Getty Images I think I created my particular stage persona out of
Our Mission Building a House United Americans on opposite sides of the political spectrum don’t only disagree on issues — they increasingly dislike one another. This growing partisan animosity is the
May 19, 2013 The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like – seems to be riven into two camps. On one side stand those who believe that…
I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job. —John Wayne (b. 1907) on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 I hope he fails. —Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) on the election of Barack Obama in 2008 I n recent decades, we Americans have become highly practiced in the skills…
TL;DR CSS doesn’t allow us (yet) to scope our styles to a particular component in an HTML document (unless we use iframe s…). We can try to circumvent this limitation by respecting the global CSS name
So all we need to do is take that thing, and put it in the markup of the logged-out homepage. Easy stuff, right? In 2015’s Khan Academy tech stack this entails: Finding the handlebars template that re
Or How to Improve Your Sleep by Dropping the Cascade Published in Medium Engineering · 6 min read · Sep 28, 2016 -- What happens when you drop the “C” from CSS? At Medium, we’ve been experimenting wit
I have it pretty good, in America. I’m White, male, young. Grew up with books. With enough food on the table during critical phases of brain development. In a neighborhood composed of people who looke
What are some stupid things that smart people do? originally appeared on Quora -- the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights . Answer by Lee S
The lawyer gave Donald Trump a note, written in Trump’s own handwriting. He asked Trump to read it aloud. Trump may not have realized it yet, but he had walked into a trap. “Peter, you’re a real loser
« Argos avait donc lancé synabrain, un implant jetable qui pouvait indexer l’intégralité de votre cerveau ou tout au moins une grande partie, car c’était devenu un âpre combat technologique en ce qui
The original intention was for this post to be long and detailed. The more I wrote, the more it felt like design pedantry. Prescriptive, pretentious, and wrong. Fuck that. So here’s the unfinished article. Have a great time exploring and learning about how to use colour. Experiment every single day.…
A piece about perspective 6 min read · Aug 8, 2016 -- The evolution of My Computer Remember back in the day when Windows had a My Computer icon? It was a glorious little icon that represented all the
I. In 1787, 81-year old Benjamin Franklin was the most famous American on earth. Admired for his expertise in both natural and political science, he enjoyed the intellectual status to tell others how best to govern. Franklin harbored many concerns about the proposed Constitution and had argued…
6 min read · Jul 15, 2016 -- This week, a group of funders got together in Philadelphia, for the first time, to discuss software infrastructure. We had a range of funders in the room, from philanthrop
Living In
WHEN asked what they like best about living in South Orange, residents almost invariably cite three attributes: the rich and varied architecture, the demographic diversity, and the easy commute into Manhattan. The latter two have a lot to do with the fact that New York City is the point of…
At the tail-end of a recent organizational re- organization , and reflecting on how messy it is—frustrating, disenchanting, seemingly unending. Remembering yet again how a change that only takes a mom
5 min read · Jun 21, 2016 -- When many products are essentially the same app with different color schemes and copy, why are we still coding? The files in your computer can be represented in multiple w
Phoenix, Abderdeen Bestiary, 12th Century. I have always regretted that standard practice is to go on book tour only after you have published a book. There is a great deal that one learns by lecturing
Two months ago, across an assembly-room table in a factory in Jacksonville, Fla., President Barack Obama was talking to me about the problem of political capital. His efforts to rebuild the U.S. economy from the 2008 financial crisis were being hit from left, right and center. And yet, by his own…