Ars longa, vita brevis, said Hippocrates—more or less: time’s a-wastin’. The worst corollary of this aphorism, to my mind, is that we are not going to have time to read everything. In fact, we’re going to be able to read only the tiniest little bit. Some thousands of books—that is it. A difficult…

2011: Holly Petraeus (left) holding a bible as David Petraeus is sworn in as CIA director by Vice President Joe Biden. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP (updated below [Sun.]) A prime rule of US political culture is that nothing rivets, animates or delights the political media like a sex…

HTML5 Does Have A Mobile Future: Mozilla's Chris Heilmann Goes Mythbusting by @Dan_Rowinski http://t.co/iLlPjnkg via @RWW

P.S. @quartznews did an awesome interview with @fivethirtyeight before he was infamous. http://t.co/VY7P0JDn

WHATEVER happens on Election Day, Americans will keep asking the same question: When will this economy get better? In many ways, the answer won’t depend on who wins on Tuesday. Anyone who says otherwise is overstating the power of the American president. But if the president doesn’t have the power…

I really don’t understand why Amazon doesn’t have to make a profit. http://t.co/QnaNDDS4

Is it possible in the year of our Lord 2012 that leadership still isn’t well understood? In 2012, despite business journalism’s fetishization of Steve Jobs, the most successful leader ever, whose apotheosis was Walter Isaacson’s doorstop, Steve Jobs , a biography of the half-Syrian, bearded man who…

Hellooooooooooooooo! Be still, there’s no assey .gif pile ahead. This post concerns the following adorable drone map I made for the election issue. If I had more room I’d have a key showing precisely how many deaths corresponded to each circle diameter, but as-is I think it adds a nice illustrative…

On a Tuesday in February, Matt Stopera, a 24-year-old senior editor at a website called BuzzFeed, saw something hilarious on Twitter. It was an image from the archives of Sports Illustrated , circa 1991, of the diminutive TV nerd Urkel playing hoops with actor Will Smith and Indiana Pacer Reggie…

“goatee-framed sphincter-mouth” woof this is a pretty good Guy Fieri piece http://t.co/LeNErK1r

"Do you know the moment I knew it was over?" Jonah Peretti says, with a half-nostaligic, half-Stockholm-Syndrome smile, looking across the table at Ken Lerer. Lerer doesn't know. "That last Christmas party we had as an independent company," Peretti says. "I don't remember it," says Lerer. The group…

Clay Christensen on the news industry: “We didn’t quite understand…how quickly things fall off the cliff” http://t.co/fA7wtbfy

Whose fault is it? Thoughtful piece in @pandodaily about the New York taxi commission and @uber . http://t.co/qi0HW6rT

SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with…

Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School developed the theory of disruptive innovation. John Soares Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation provides a framework to understand how businesses grow, become successful, and falter as nimble…

Here's a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked…

My kids are geeks and their future health depends on it http://t.co/9pK7s1Fn

Tyler Brûlé on digital companies office design and their infantilization [FT]: http://t.co/JXLYY6Kn

All Web articles should be single-page Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Slate ’s editorial guidelines call for articles to be split into multiple pages once they hit the 1,000-word mark, so I have to keep this brief: Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should…

Very perceptive column by my NYT colleague @mattbai -- Obama's Enthusiasm Gap http://t.co/P7rAS4vB

What BuzzFeed’s evolution says about the future of longform journalism - very smart piece http://t.co/LcsaHWzy

I love my Kindle, I hate my Kindle. A list of complaints. http://t.co/U9AwTnSi

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger , who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died early Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86. His death, after a long…

Lately, we like reading long things that are not books. A lot , it seems. There are apps for reading them: Instapaper , Read It Later , Readability . Platforms for publishing them: Kindle Singles, The Atavist. And sites dedicated entirely to discovering and sharing these two or three or ten thousand…

Eric J. Hobsbawm, whose three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism established him as Britain’s pre-eminent Marxist historian, died on Monday in London. He was 95. The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Julia Hobsbawm. Mr. Hobsbawm, the leading light in a group of…

'We are living in the Age of Food' … stalls at Borough Market, London. Photograph: Alamy O n a crisp autumn evening in a north London street, a rôtisserie trailer is parked outside a garden flat, green fairy lights blinking on and off, warm chickens perfuming the air. A thirtyish hipster wanders out…

A curious design history of "Gorilla Glass," the material that covers your smartphone http://t.co/uQjVhS16

Kristian Hammerstad IT wasn’t funny, really, but everybody laughed at the scene in the 1979 film “Starting Over” when Burt Reynolds’s character had a panic attack in the furniture department of Bloomingdale’s (something to do with terror at the prospect of buying a couch). “Does anyone have a…

Nirvana's "Nevermind" is 21 years old. Here's @RollingStone's 1994 interview with Kurt Cobain: http://t.co/RVwyVTlI

Fast Company's profile of Bill Nguyen and Color is a pretty stunning indictment of our industry right now: http://t.co/isQ4wqa3

Is Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes? http://t.co/JJGWvRqu

Michael Hastings' 'The Operators' provides a troubling, first-person narrative of the U.S. military's fight in Afghanistan. (Peguin Group ) Author Janet Malcolm once acidly wrote that any reporter who didn't agree that journalism was a "morally indefensible" act of betrayal was "too stupid or too…

Whoa, slow down. Let’s work our way up to that one. I’ll tell you whether to buy the stock at the end of the interview, ok? Yes! The world has never seen a company like this. A few reasons. The first is historical. When the world shifted from portals to search, Google was the big winner. Now the…

Incredible post. On ditching beats for obsessions: http://t.co/6I0VfVms Great work @glichfield @zseward @quartznews