Content warning: this essay contains vivid language about suicide and suicidal thoughts. I wish there was a nicer way to say this, but I don’t always want to be alive. Right now, I don’t actively want

Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I

When Frederick Law Olmsted passed through Texas, in 1853, he became besotted with the majesty of the Texas legislature. “I have seen several similar bodies at the North; the Federal Congress; and the Parliament of Great Britain, in both its branches, on occasions of great moment; but none of them…

By 2010, Bill Haynes had spent almost four decades under attack from the inside of his skull. He was fifty-seven years old, and he suffered from severe migraines that felt as if a drill were working behind his eyes, across his forehead, and down the back of his head and neck. They left him…

The post-election life of @HillaryClinton, through the lens of @rtraister. Superb work. https://t.co/KjXYefxLmw

Pete Souza/White House A beer commercial icon became an unlikely pal to the president of the United States. It stayed interesting. By JONATHAN GOLDSMITH Jonathan Goldsmith is an actor with more than 5

F riday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obam

Growing Up in a Bad Neighborhood Does More Harm Than We Thought https://t.co/uOKDhtyHXz https://t.co/HpNcwLn57t

Embarrassment of Riches: Attending Westlake High meant never having to apologize for being wealthy or successful.https://t.co/O5XHywAyok

The Death of Reddit Best thing I've read on reddit. (I've read a lot)

One hot morning in May, Kiana Hernandez came to class early. She stood still outside the door, intensely scanning each face in the morning rush of shoulders, hats, and backpacks. She felt anxious. For

Never marry again in slavery. — Margaret Garner, 1858 Wherever the law is, crime can be found. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973 I. “lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.” By his own

Such a brutal take down: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace http://t.co/fq2lx4ntZQ

Judge Posner dissects the SCOTUS gay marriage dissents. http://t.co/Y8BVvxuC4d http://t.co/dXoJwcWx5o

In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else—has described himself as both “deeply, deeply…

What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Eric Jackson was sitting

The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

You don’t have to go to a fancy coffeeshop for good coffee. You can pour-over at home. Photo by Brendan McDermid/Reuters Mocking people who care about coffee is a proud American tradition dating back

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…

How Apple’s under-the-radar design genius, Jonathan Ive, has found the way to our hearts. I first catch sight of Jony Ive across the Apple campus, in a plain Dodger-blue T-shirt and white painter’s pa

Here's my new column on THIS LITTLE SOCCER TOURNAMENT CALLED THE WORLD CUP. http://t.co/YOYjLkzfHs

As the children formed a circle, Wade asked the 5-year-olds to think about “anything happening at home, or at school, that’s a problem, that you want to share.” He repeated his invitation twice, in a lulling voice, until a small, round-faced boy in a white shirt and blue cardigan raised his hand.…

Vanessa Brewer Bill McCullough for The New York Times For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a…

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change. Credit Illustration by Harry Campbell Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and…

A whole new app The other day, Flickr published an update to its official iPhone app and I must say it’s a remarkable improvement over version 1.x., to the point that it really feels like a whole diff

Jessica Chastain's character in the new film Zero Dark Thirty is based on the CIA analyst known as 'Jen'. Photograph: Snap Stills/Rex Features (updated below) I've now seen "Zero Dark Thirty". Before getting to that: the controversy triggered this week by my commentary on the debate over that film…

Most annoying words of 2012. http:// http://t.co/grseuqJX

Jerry Seinfeld began his commute after dinner, in no particular hurry. Around quarter to 8 on a drizzly Tuesday, he left his Manhattan home — a palatial duplex apartment with picture windows and a broad terrace overlooking Central Park — and made for a nearby garage. Due to tell jokes at a comedy…

The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy…

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Photo illustration from photographs by Arif Ali/AFP, via Newscom (left) and Douglas County sheriff’s office (right). The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of…

Richard Nixon; drawing by David Levine References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS , Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the…

This post originally ran in December of 2012. Today, Google Reader, the eight-year-old RSS reader that became an industry standard, has been given a funeral date : July 1st, 2013. “We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite…

In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling…

Rowling says, “There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher.” Credit Illustration by Stanley Chow The conifer hedges in front of J. K. Rowling’s seventeenth-century house, in Edinburgh, are about twenty feet tall. They reach higher than…

The new film from the siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski, co-directed with Tom Tykwer, is an adaptation of the novel “Cloud Atlas.” Their model was “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a movie they first saw as children. Credit Photograph by Dan Winters On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup,…

Obama’s Way http://t.co/Tui4HORj - Read this #longreads last night as the dog kept me awake. Michael Lewis profiles Barack Obama. Must read.

The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here is the storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight , the previous instalment of Chris­topher Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail in Gotham…

As Election Day approaches, President Obama is sharing a few important things about himself. He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks “a really mean chili.” He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience. He is “a surprisingly good pool player,” he informed an…