On a chilly spring morning in 2017, Boris Heifets took the podium to talk about MDMA in an Oakland, California, hotel ballroom packed with scientists, therapists, patients, and activists. If he noticed the occasional whiffs of incense and patchouli oil coming from the halls of the Psychedelic…

by Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” And so our resident genius, our Dr. Jekyll, explosively completed his transformation into Mr. Hyde. He declared this in front…

Feature The Economics of Migration by Jonathan Portes | June 10, 2019 | Spring 2019 The essence of the economic case for migration is very simple: it is the same as the case for markets in general. If people make decisions on the basis of their own economic self-interest, this will maximize…

The most important things in life are internal not external. “The big question about how people behave,” says Warren Buffett , “is whether they’ve got an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an inner scorecard.” To make his point, Buffett often asks a simple…

Featured Stories Startup founders must set a new tone instead of burning through their employees James Stanier Mar 20 · 7 min read Photo: Alexmia/Getty Images Psst... there’s an audio version of this story. Upgrade to listen H ow does the Slack message below make you feel? It’s from the CEO of…

Daniel Jeffries I am an author, futurist, systems architect, public speaker and pro blogger. September 27th 2019 “Am I dead? Am I still alive?” “Those aren’t the questions you should be asking.” (Care of Adult Swim ) At the heart of “Rick and Morty” is a choice : Will you crumple in despair knowing…

Perhaps you’re familiar with this experience: After a long week of work, the weekend finally arrives. It’s time to wind down, relax, and do nothing. However, before 9 a.m. Saturday morning you’ve organized three social appointments, ordered a new IKEA closet, and set in motion four other plans that…

Nicky Loh / Reuters I n his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his…

The Last Questionby Isaac Asimov © 1956 The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way: Alexander Adell and Bertram…

How Cincinnati tried, and failed, to build one of America’s first subways I t’s early June in Cincinnati and the city is steamy after a recent rain. Elderly women fan themselves at bus stops. Tattooed tweakers panhandle in Fountain Square. Men in sweat-stained oxford shirts line up for lunch at…

Silicon Valley distrusts marketing, demeans it, and devalues the people who practice it. On any given day in tech, you might: Hear a well-respected startup investor deride marketing as “what you do when your product or service sucks.” Watch another leading investor advise their portfolio companies…

[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before , and that other people have addressed much more eloquently . My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN’T SUNK IN. Pitching this as “market” vs. “government” is overly simplistic,…

Charles Styles | Five Books | 2nd August 2018 Conversation with Graham Oppy, atheist and philosopher of religion, about books by Bertrand Russell, David Hume and others. “It’s hard to suppose that, when people are persuaded by arguments, that it’s the virtues of the arguments that are doing all the…

Restaurant Review Señor Frog’s 9 Photos View Slide Show › Daniel Krieger for The New York Times Señor Frog’s Fair Closed More Information I was having my second Frogasm of the night when dinner got weird. Not that this or any other night at Señor Frog’s in Times Square was ever fully conventional.…

“There is no love of life without despair of life.” “Those who prefer their principles over their happiness,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) wrote in his notebook toward the end of his life, “they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their…

Image via Nuno Cru z Tiago Forte Nov 16, 2015 · 15 min read By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs At the end of 2014 I received an email informing me that I had read over a million words in the ‘read it later’ app Pocket over the course of the year. This number by itself isn’t impressive, considering our…

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite…

Christmas is the busiest time of year for both Santa and the United States Postal Service. But while Santa has magic on his side, the USPS must rely on technology to make its deliveries. The service expects to distribute about 15.5 billion pieces of mail during the 2015 holiday season, which is more…

In real life, Jonathan Sun is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT in the Department of Urban Studies + Planning. On Twitter, he's an alien who struggles with spelling and is baffled by human culture. Courtesy of Jonathan Sun Jonathan Sun is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. He's a playwright, an artist, an architect,…

Jean-Louis Gassée Follow Feb 1, 2015 · 6 min read by Jean-Louis Gassée While Microsoft Office for mobile is a satisfying success, the company can’t seem to create — or even buy — a mobile operating system that can compete with iOS and Android. Perhaps they’ve been looking in the wrong direction and…

At counter-service restaurants, where a tip jar often sits by the register, DipJar offers a way to tip when customers don’t have cash. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The flat white coffee drink was $4. A suggested tip was $3. The cashier at Café Grumpy, a New York City coffeehouse,…

by Corina Zappia I moved to Seattle five years ago, after being laid off from my job in New York at one of those startups where employees rally around the VC-fueled dream until they’re dumped via email and locked out of the office. A job at a larger, more established company like Amazon sounded…

"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day." - Charles Dickens July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're ona different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost themmore. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the…

Playing cards are taken for granted. They have been ubiquitous objects in households for centuries, but they are hardly ever given the credit they deserve for what they can tell us about culture, history, and design. In my role as a curator, I work with a rich and wide-ranging collection of playing…

As the millions of men who saw combat during World War II reach their golden years, those who missed the horrors and heroics of battle are resigned to wonder what would have been. Story by Rebecca White · Photo courtesy Wilson Quarterly · 1.12.15 Story by Rebecca White Photo courtesy Wilson…

Is Batman gay? According to my seventh grade schoolmates, Batman is “Sooooo Gay,” and so was I. It’s certainly a popular opinion among those with a basic understanding of psychology, one shared by noted anti-comic book doctor and Hater Hall-of-Famer Dr. Frederic Wertham. In Seduction of the Innocent…

Voyages 1 / 5 Lynn Douglas, left, lives in a German Baptist community in Ohio. Steve King (in green shirt) is a train buff who has written books about train history. Matthew Carr (in front of King) is a military veteran returning home to Tucson. Mark, far right, was also traveling to Tucson to, as…

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making... something . A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive,…

Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer,…

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, with a foreword by Marc Benioff Penelope Umbrico/Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles A detail of Penelope Umbrico’s Sunset Portraits from 11,827,282 Flickr Sunsets on 1/7/13 , 2013. For the project, Umbrico…

Press play on this extended video of Guaraldi’s classic, and we dare you not to feel all kinds of good, holiday, dancey vibes In early 1964 , a short piece in the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned that local jazz composer and pianist Vince Guaraldi would write the music for a TV film about Charles…

“Nothing any good isn’t hard.” What is the secret of great writing? For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun . For Henry Miller, about discovery . Susan Sontag saw it as self-exploration . Many literary greats anchored it to their daily routines . And yet, the answer remains elusive and…

When the email arrived, Jordan Walker wasn’t ready for it. The message was from Ryan Hoover, founder and CEO of Product Hunt , a site that surfaces cool new projects. It was a heads-up about the next episode of his podcast. “I chatted briefly about Kindly,” Hoover said in the email. “That might be a…

James Bond is headed back to the big screen next year, and the new film finally has a name: Spectre . Bond superfans are giddy about this title. Here’s why. Luckily, Spectre is easier to decipher than some, more difficult past Bond titles like Quantum of Solace . Spectre, or rather SPECTRE, stands…

Francis Cugat/Wikimedia In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to rank 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate? The winner wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t wealth. Number one was "kind and…

Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into the sky. These conditions are hardly new. Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the…

She hates mint. Don’t even get her started on mint. She is 5-foot-2, drives a Honda CR-V, and has very detailed opinions on printer cartridges, tax preparation software, and five flavors of Burt’s Bees lip balm. She suffers from dry eyes, a blister on her fourth toe that just won’t go away, and…

IDEAS Zachary Crockett is one of the authors of the new book Hipster Business Models, the latest book from Priceonomics. Everyone loves to hate the hipster. A mere mention of the word hipster seems to conjure some primal, collective anger—anger directed at skinny jeans, fake reading glasses, unkempt…

(Photo: Anna Omelchenko/Shutterstock) Disillusioned? Has your initial idealism been ground into cynicism? Dismayed by discovering how things really work? There’s a term for what you’re suffering: Weltschmerz . Literally “world pain” in German, Weltschmerz describes the pain idealists feel upon…

A WORK OF FICTION The Sixth Borough Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won't read about it in any of the history books, because there's nothing -- save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park -- to prove that it was there at all. Which makes its existence very easy to…