Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal Agnes Martin an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, June 3–October 11, 2015; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, November 7, 2015–March 6, 2016; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 24–September 11, 2016; and the Guggenheim Museum, New…

Near the end of his interview with Bill Murray , Howard Stern turned an already somber discussion about missed career opportunities into an existential grilling. “Is there something that you question in your own life,” Mr. Stern asked, “like why haven’t I found that great love of my life?” Mr.…

T he other night, I pretended I didn’t know who Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian Hegelian Marxist and cultural critic, was. I’ve done this before, but never to such triumphant effect. This Marxist bro I was talking to made a reference to Žižek that he obviously assumed I would get, and my heart sank. He…

It’s lunchtime on a Tuesday, and I am in a black dress and black heels, at the host stand at the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan. The ceilings soar. The Champagne fizzes. The room pulses with status and money and power. I’m terrified. I am here to eat cotton candy with Julian Niccolini: owner,…

Photograph by Michael O'Neill. This month, as the Four Seasons restaurant celebrates its 40th birthday, it has just won the 1999 James Beard award as the outstanding restaurant in the country, and it also continues unchallenged to maintain its enduring status as absolute ground zero for power…

Riding the Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge Robin had done this dozens of times before. In the past, it took about 5 minutes to order the money wire transfer, but it always involved calling someone at the bank to make it happen. Thinking it would make her life easier, the bank set her up with…

The Inwood Library in northern Manhattan is quiet, air-conditioned and open every day. Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times Matthew Carter’s summer hideaway is not in the Hamptons, the Catskills or on the Jersey Shore. It does not require a car ride or a small fortune to keep up. Mr. Carter, 32,…

7 Problems Growing Design Teams Face Design is hard—that’s what I hear from design leaders at every company I visit. As the VP of Design Education at InVision , I study how design works and breaks in businesses. After nearly a decade of leading product teams I know first hand that design is indeed…

A noncompete clause he signed prevented the stylist Daniel McKinnon from working near his previous employer for a year. Katherine Taylor for The New York Times BOSTON — Colette Buser couldn’t understand why a summer camp withdrew its offer for her to work there this year. After all, the 19-year-old…

Credit Art by Maurizio Cattelan, “Untitled” (2001), Mixed Media / Marian Goodman Gallery The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week , working late on a special…

(Photo by Jonny Coleman) If you're driving through residential sections east of, say, Western Avenue or on the westside in Mar Vista or Venice, do you see these everywhere you go? You're not alone. These horizontal wooden slat fences are everywhere. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. There's not…

Hi Sam, thank you for accepting my invite to the interview. Emily Brick mentioned me your name, as one of the main contributors to Solid, the front-end framework used at BuzzFeed . And replying to my email you said me “We've gone back and forth about BEM usage at BuzzFeed, and I have a lot of…

A worker at an Amazon warehouse in Lebanon, Tenn. The company worries unions will burden its operations with red tape. Mark Humphrey/Associated Press SEATTLE — In early April, Kellen Wadach, the general manager at Amazon ’s warehouse in Middletown, Del., told hundreds of workers at the cavernous…

If Rivers’s act wasn’t explicitly feminist, it was radical in its own way. She was like a person trapped in a prison, shouting out escape routes from her cell. Credit Photograph by David Montgomery / Getty Six months before Joan Rivers died, last year, she went on the “Howard Stern Show”: two old…

S ince 2013, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage;…

The French pseudo-carbonara that has provoked outrage in Italy is merely one episode in a larger pasta revolution sweeping Europe and America. Credit Photograph by Simon Reddy / Alamy Last week, a French food Web site, having sold a piece of its soul to the Italian pasta manufacturer Barilla, put…

There’s a site, Brutalist Web Sites , that aggregates websites that look kind of raw—that show their seams. The citizens of Hacker News, where I (this is Paul) found the link this morning, immediately undertook to argue whether the sites shown are truly Brutalist or not—but of course, as Wikipedia…

L ike most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or…

Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is an unmerited privilege, a sign of that person’s socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and cosign a lease for a slick Brooklyn…

Chris Cox wants to mess with Facebook’s secret sauce. The most drastic change to Facebook in years was born a year ago during an off-site at the Four Seasons Silicon Valley, a 10-minute drive from headquarters. Chris Cox, the social network’s chief product officer, led the discussion, asking each of…

The Last Days of Target The untold tale of Target Canada’s difficult birth, tough life and brutal death Photographs by Johan Hallberg-Campbell The grand opening of Target Canada was set to begin in one month, and Tony Fisher needed to know whether the company was actually ready. In February 2013,…

Jony’s Patience I was told a story about Jonathan Ive a few months ago that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ever since. As the story goes, about 6 or 7 years ago a big company tried to recruit Jony Ive to run Design for them. Ive respectfully declined. In declining, he told them he had spent…

There's a surprising history behind this sticky classic. [Photograph: Vicky Wasik] Christmas is rapidly approaching, so it's time to say a word or two about ambrosia. You do know ambrosia, right? That big bowl filled with a sweet, gooey white mass that's studded with little orange slices, yellow…

When talking shop, there’s a natural tendency to avoid the drama of confrontation by relegating all disputes to Your Mileage May Vary. If we can declare all approaches and techniques to be of value only “under certain circumstances”, then we can avoid the hard work of finding the better alternative…

Against Chill In recent years, “chill” has become one of the most desirable qualities in a romantic prospect. But it is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species. By Alana Massey Illustration by Ana Benaroya The Great Chill Massacre of 2014 was not premeditated. When I woke up that morning, I…

Señor Frog’s Daniel Krieger for The New York Times 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. In point of fact, I had already danced in a conga line wearing a three-foot-high crown…

In the course of the last few weeks' gleeful public excoriation of Brooklyn chocolate company Mast Brothers, there have been many things said, many things accused, many things denied. Among it all, there are a few things of which we can be sure. First, that at some point early in their operations —…

The signature moment of Chris Christie’s presidential campaign to date came during the six and a half minutes he spoke of his mother’s lifelong battle with tobacco that preceded her death from lung cancer. On an October campaign stop at Shooter’s Tavern in Belmont, N.H., he also talked about an old…

Yiying Lu Imagine, for a moment, getting the chance to help build a new language. A language that’s used by millions of people around the world. A pictorial language with the power to transcend all other languages. If the opportunity presented itself, you’d take that shot, right? Jennifer 8. Lee…

Marie Kondo, still only thirty years old, is the author of a best-seller on tidying up, but her KonMari method has its detractors as well. Credit Diarmuid Greene / Web Summit / SPORTSFILE via Corbis “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” Marie Kondo’s mega-selling how-to of minimalism—a tidy blend…

Published on December 5, 2015 ROSEBURG, Ore. — She approached her daughter just as the doctors and psychologists had suggested: calmly, deliberately, stepping on the carpet so the floorboards didn’t squeak, picking her way around the wheelchair, the walker, the sagging balloons and wilted flowers.…

Mira* is an executive assistant at a major brokerage firm in Manhattan that you've certainly heard of. She makes good money and has a nice TriBeCa apartment, but her passion truly lies in the fine arts, which she studied as an undergrad at Barnard. While Mira graduated with honors and won a minor…

The year after my father died, I graduated from grad school, got a new job, and looked forward to saving for a down payment on my first home, a dream I had always had, but found lofty. I pulled up a blank spreadsheet and made a line item called “House Fund.” More From Our Partners The Post-Ownership…

Spot the difference….You can’t! To a sighted user it appears we have two identical button elements. A user interface control not only needs to look like a certain control, it must be described as that control too. Take for example a button, one of the simplest of controls. There are many ways you…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Photo by Lachlan Rogers ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/lachlanrogers/ ) A New Mother’s Identity Crisis Four months after I had my first baby, I sunk into a real low. I know what you’re thinking. Oh, that’s not so unusual . After all, there’s a lot of literature on this sort of thing. Plenty of new…

Writing Well-Formed User Stories Convention Over Configuration is one of core principles of the Rails approach to software development, and delivers enormous value. Convention Over Configuration – means that Rails makes assumptions about what you want to do and how you’re going to do it, rather than…