Who's the most influential skater of all time? http://t.co/0x34qYew

From The World of Birds , Roger Tory Peterson, 1977 by Thomas R. Dunlap Even people with no interest in field guides know about them; they lie on friends’ shelves and windowsills (the one near the bird feeder, usually), and people stand in the park, binoculars around their neck, thumbing frantically…

(Edit 2012 July 30: Here we are six weeks later, and Mr. Lehrer has admitted to fabricating quotes and lying to a journalist about parts of his latest book . Obviously there is no defending this kind of behavior. This post was meant to illustrate some of the problems in neuroscientific thinking…

Ok, I have a confession to make. I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years–  caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me. I can’t take it anymore. It’s stupid, and it’s not good for my well being. It has made me a…

TRIGGER WARNING THIS IS ABOUT RRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEE The whole internet outrage about Tosh and rape thing (ughhhhhh) may make this little tid bit look like diddly BUT there was something pretty insidious on Newsroom last night about the rape and the women. The show is…

Photo illustration by Clang. Set design: Cindy Sandmann. It’s been said ( by Steve Jobs, no less ) that good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels . The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network,…

Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal , by William J. Craddock. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday. Reprinted in 2011 by Transreal Books. Available for Kindle and NOOK from publisher Rudy Rucker, $6, or in paperback from Amazon, $16. Reviewed by Steve Silberman A Place You'll Never See In…

Image: Twitter. Twitter dropped a bombshell on third-party application developers last Friday — the social network built on the backs of third-party developers and clever, innovative clients has decided it no longer needs them. Twitter’s blog post is short on specific details, but the gist of it is…

The size of your family helps determine how the world of the future will look. Credit Illustration by Jim Stoten In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: “Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a…

Last night I spoke at an event put on by a site called IdeaMensch . They're doing a road trip, where the team is traveling city by city, holding events by and for entrepreneurs. I talked about why I started PandoDaily and some of my struggles along the way so far. But far more interesting was the…

News & Culture Amber Waves of Green Guess what, compatriots? The gap between the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder,…

Credit Illustration by Maximilian Bode. Nothing is so debilitating to a copy editor as having to lavish care on illiterate tweets laced with obscenities. Last spring, The New Yorker ran Kelefa Sanneh’s piece on Earl Sweatshirt, the young rapper whose mother sent him to reform school in Samoa because…

When you’re charged with the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, there isn’t much time for fussing with the type. Contributed by Nick Sherman on Jul 5th, 2012. Artwork published in 1776 . Like 3 Add to Set The Declaration of Independence in its popular calligraphic form, with…

Aaron Sorkin characters do not exist in themselves. Their function is to serve as occasions for snappy lines of dialogue. In the last analysis, it does not matter which character delivers which line. All are equally quick-witted, and all speak in two and only two cadences — either sardonic…

[Originally published June 4, 2012.] - - - Objective My objective is the Truth with a capital T, mentally composed in Bodoni or, on the weekends, Garamond. I believe dishonest design is the scourge of humanity. What do I mean by that? Simply step outside. Fraudulence is everywhere. From the rat-tail…

Most of what we think we know about people with a lot of money comes from television, movies and beach novels — and a lot of it is inaccurate, says Robert Kenny, EdD. In an effort to remedy that, Kenny, a developmental psychologist and senior advisor at the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at…

Photo Credit The first time Jolene Rudell fainted, she assumed that the stress of being in medical school had gotten to her. Then, two weeks later, she lost consciousness again. Blood tests showed Ms. Rudell’s red blood cell count and iron level were dangerously low. But she is a hearty eater (and a…

Twitter sent some shock waves through the technology community with a blog post on Friday that talked about its plans for the future, and suggested that those plans don’t necessarily involve third-party services and apps . Although the company phrased its statement as a move designed to standardize…

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways. If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “ So busy.” “ Crazy busy.” It is,…

Here's a joke I made up just now: How do you make it appealing for a man on Halloween to leave the house dressed as a racist, sexist, homophobic, alcoholic liar with a history of sexually assaulting women? Give up? Call it a Don Draper costume. If the guy's older, you can call it a Roger Sterling…

A photo from BuzzFeed's "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity." Photograph by Michelle Gantner/www.maladjustedmedia.com Last Wednesday, BuzzFeed’s Jack Shepherd published an irresistible piece called, “ 21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity .” The post is exactly as…

Jeff Daniels as the TV cable news anchor in Aaron Sorkin's new series for HBO, The Newsroom. Photograph: HBO How is it that people who make the media know so little about the media business? True, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of HBO's new series The Newsroom , is in the entertainment business and not…

Photo: Art Streiber Conversations with Jack Dorsey frequently veer into obscure subject matter. Job interviews pivot into 30-minute disquisitions on the New York Yankees. Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square—which…

IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate. “I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’ I sat silent for a moment. “Yes. But…

CHRIS WATTIE / Reuters Prince George, Princess Charlotte adorably attend garden party for military families share Courtesy of Joe and Serese Marot One boy’s death is a reminder of how dangerous flu can be share Crystal Eldridge/Facebook With help from Facebook, mom finds favorite blanket for son…

Expand Photographed by Raymond Meier AUTHOR’S NOTE Jacob Weisberg on Twitter’s New Censorship Policy In late January, soon after this story went to press, Twitter announced a new censorship policy that establishes procedures for removing posts that violate national law in countries around the world.…

This is our second excerpt from Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall, a close collaborator with Jobs for over a decade. To read the first, on how the iMac was almost called the MacMan, go here . Apple encourages big thinking but small everything else. That is, if…

Addiction is a terrible thing. Drug addiction, alcohol addiction, whatever type of addiction it is...it destroys relationships, jobs, lives. Anyone who's ever loved an addict has faced the reality at some dark point of how much it's not, really, a choice, as much as we still hope and wish that it is…

WISE GUY Life in a Mafia Family. By Nicholas Pileggi. 256 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $17.95. IN 1955 an 11-year-old of Irish-Sicilian parentage walked across the street from where he lived in Brooklyn into a dingy, mob-run cab company looking for after-school work. His energy, intelligence and…

Introducing Betty Draper's new chin. A few weeks ago, I attended a “Mad Men” viewing party hosted by my good friend, the brilliant Time Out New York film critic Keith Uhlich. Keith quoted a writer who summarized “Mad Men” as “'Roots' for white people,” which prompted me, a black man, to ask everyone…

Jesse Jarnow's book on Yo La Tengo is out now | Matthew Salacuse Right in the middle of Jesse Jarnow ’s superb new chronicle of the little Hoboken band that could—and did, and will likely continue to do until one or all of them fall over, which Gotham published this week—is a story that exemplifies…

Editors’ Note: The introductory paragraphs of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal. We regret the duplication of material. Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar…

Steve Schmidt, the senior adviser to the 2008 campaign of Senator John S. McCain, in Incline Village, Nev., now his home. Max Whittaker for The New York Times INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. A BASEBALL cap perched on his head, his eyes sheathed in sunglasses, Steve Schmidt sipped a Diet Coke and gazed across…