The war of the hoverboards began in earnest in mid-February, in New York City, in the rainbow-colored halls of the 2015 Toy Fair. That much we know. Beyond that — where exactly in the Javits Center the first skirmish occurred, who the aggressor was, whether there were injured parties on the ground —…

So let's talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of…

Silk is usually made from the cocoons spun by silkworms - but there is another, much rarer, cloth known as sea silk or byssus, which comes from a clam. Chiara Vigo is thought to be the only person left who can harvest it, spin it and make it shine like gold. Villagers stare as I knock on the door of…

Jeffrey Fisher The history of science is studded with stories of simultaneous discovery, in which two imaginative souls (or more!) turn out to have been digging tunnels to the same unspoiled destination. The most fabled example is calculus, developed independently in two different countries by Isaac…

By Brooke Jarvis An adolescent Laysan albatross is a ridiculous-looking creature. On most of its body, the dark fluffy down that it grew as a chick has been replaced by sleek white and gray flight feathers. But the fluff clings to its head, stubbornly and comically, giving it the look of an ’80s…

Chronic procrastination is an emotional strategy for dealing with stress, researchers say, and it can lead to difficulties in relationships, jobs, finances and health. Illustration: Yao Xiao Putting off a work or school assignment in order to play videogames or water the plants might seem like…

Dear Polly, When I was little — and even through the years most marked by insecurity, like middle and high school — I was entirely sure of myself. I was weird and witty, and I liked that about myself, and I seemed to be popular in the broad and non-damaging sense. I had a few close friends but…

odd Wilson didn’t know these guys. But he didn’t usually handle the setups for the drug deals; it was an associate who typically made the connections — someone who had dated an Italian girl with an older sister who was tapped into Boston’s druggy Euro scene. Wilson and his partner, Larry Jenkins,…

Although the alienated, impoverished immigrant communities outside Paris are increasingly prone to anti-Semitism, the profiles of French jihadists don’t track closely with class. Many of them have come from bourgeois families. Credit Photograph by Arnau Bach For The New Yorker Fouad Ben Ahmed never…

Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark public schools provided a canvas to examine a failing school district. Stephen Lam/Reuters The national debate over how to best educate our children is usually undertaken at a high level of abstraction. Constructive dialogue is often hampered by intense…

WELLFLEET, Mass. — In flight from the bottles-and-models excesses of the Hamptons, the drag-queen hucksters of Provincetown and the hedge-funder mosh pit that Nantucket Island has become, a flock of creative types has steadily traced a route to an alternative getaway. Refugees from the hectic pace…

Yesterday, the New York office of the largest online male escort service, Rentboy, was raided by the NYPD and Department of Homeland security. Its CEO, Jeffrey Hurant, and six other employees were arrested. They are accused of facilitating prostitution, among other charges . After the raid, a…

Here, in its original layout, is Joan Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.​ Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was…

Nick Corcodilos started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979 and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade. In this special Making Sense edition of Ask The Headhunter, Nick shares insider advice and contrarian methods about winning and keeping…

In the November 18, 2014 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter , we take a look at what managers need to ask themselves, before they ask job candidates anything: You’re a hiring manager Your human resources department just handed you a list of questions to use when interviewing job candidates. Put it aside.…

October 5, 2012 Last week our startup, MarkedUp , hit the first important milestone for an early stage technology: we shipped the first version of our analytics product and put it into the hands of actual end-users. For those of you who don’t read my blog regularly (pretty much everybody, I…

“An ever-more popular lifestyle brand” ... Joan Didion.Photograph: Julian Wasser/Time Life/Getty Image M aybe every writer is doomed to have their tritest sentence become their most-tweeted, but in Joan Didion’s case, it feels particularly unfair that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” has…

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William F. Buckley, Jr. (left), and Gore Vidal during one of their 1968 clashes on ABC. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES VIA GETTY It’s no spoiler to describe the crucial moment in “Best of Enemies,” Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary about the debates between William F. Buckley,…

K EN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS that he’s playing softball again. He’ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he’s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares,…

Ken Layne I am the editor and publisher of the Desert Oracle http://DesertOracle.com and this is my “most recent” book from several years ago: http://amzn.to/oRlkBM The Awl Be less stupid.

Not Another Code of Conduct Bl0g! Ugh, conferences am I right? This blog was not blogged using Adobe PageMaker 7.0 I have spoken at a lot of web developer conferences and fuck do I have opinions about them. For example, if you are giving a talk and your room and travel are not being paid for, the…

Colin Atrophy Hagendorf explained his pizza philosophy over a few slices at Tony's Pizza, one of his old haunts in Williamsburg. “The thing about pizza is, if I take a bite of a slice and my first reaction is, 'Oh, that's a really good sauce,' it's not a great slice of pizza because it's a perfectly…

IN THE 1950s, the average New York City apartment rented for $60 a month — around $530 in today’s money. With the US median wage at $5,000 a year, New Yorkers spent 1/10 of their salaries on rent. After World War II, apartments were so cheap and available that Manhattanites would regularly move…

“I gave birth to two premature kids,” said California’s Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor last week, during the debate over cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood . Boxer sounded impatient, irritated. “I just don’t like lectures by men about what it’s like.” Her comment came in response to the…

In Silicon Valley, government is considered slow, staffed by mediocrities, and ridden with obsolete rules and inefficiencies. Credit Illustration by Istvan Banyai In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech…

When I was about 30, I was hired to be an editor at The Wall Street Journal . There was no good reason for this. I was a pretty good writer, and I knew the rules of grammar and was in general interested in a lot of stuff. But nothing on my résumé would have pointed in the direction of a coveted job…

Davide Luciano for The New York Times. Food stylist: Claudia Ficca. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker. ‘‘The hard-shell is the king of the clams,’’ a clam merchant named Archie M. Clock told the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell in 1939. They were sitting on Clock’s battered old sloop, the Jennie Tucker, out…

Joseph Mitchell thought that Gould’s Oral History didn’t exist. He was wrong. One woman sent Mitchell a notebook of Gould’s from 1923. “I have trunks full!” she wrote. Credit Photograph by William Mebane; From Left to Right: Courtesy Fales Library, N.Y.U.; Philippe Halsman / Magnum; Courtesy Joseph…

John Herrman Co-editor, The @Awl The Awl Be less stupid.

What a leader looks like When you think of a “leader” — who do you see? Many people think of a tall white man in a suit. Long ago, I decided that I wanted to do my part in changing that image. As I’ve grown in my career and taken on leadership positions, I resisted the idea that a powerful leader…

Shares Only Nick Denton could seize a media calamity like the one currently roiling his Gawker Media empire and turn it into a public relations triumph. Denton’s flagship site earned widespread condemnation 10 days ago for its feature about a media executive’s attempt to procure an escort for some…

Bill McCullough for The New York Times The first time Mike the Hog-a-Nator noticed the ants, they were piled outside his cardiologist’s office. This was two summers ago, in Pearland, a suburb of Houston. There was a forbidding, fibrous heap of dead ants on either side of the building’s double doors,…

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

The Handpulled Noodle An Rong Xu for The New York Times Ding ding noodles do not look like noodles. A better description may be nubs, knots, lumps: on a spectrum with spaetzle and frascatelli, but rougher, more unpredictable in shape and fantastically chewy. They come from Xinjiang, in China’s far…

52,000 Knots One Man’s Journey Into the Craft of Tatted Lace At six miles up It’s fitting that the only time — and this is over three or four years now — that my hobby is ever recognized is on an airplane. Sometimes it will be a flight attendant (always female and of an accomplished age) who will…

Innocent smoothies: the company started the overly-familiar-packaging trend. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian "K eep me in the fridge" is now the standard instruction on bagged salads and juice bottles. You barely register it; who doesn't keep salad in the crisper? Bananas are labelled "Eat…

Doom explains his mask as an effort to “control the story.” Credit Illustration by Jaime Hernandez I first heard the rapper Daniel Dumile (pronounced DOOM -ee-lay) when I was fourteen and hip-hop was just beginning to bloom. The music was not so much “CNN for black people,” as Chuck D would later…

Hey Polly, About two years ago I fell pretty damn hard for a guy, and we were sleeping together for a few months. To make a long story short, at the end of those few months he got back together with his ex unbeknownst to me, and cheated on her with me. (He was also sleeping with other women during…