In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived. I first met Mark Zuckerberg in March 2006. At th
How do you survive in space? Turns out that mental models are really useful. In his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth , Chris Hadfield gives an in-depth look into the learning and knowledge required for a successful space mission. Hadfield was, among other roles with NASA, the first…
INCIDENTAL COMICS Words and Pictures by Grant Snider Tuesday, February 11, 2020 I have two new books out soon! I WILL JUDGE YOU BY YOUR BOOKSHELF is a collection of all my comics on reading and writin
In April 2012, Robin Sloan launched Fish in the App Store. The App is a “tap essay” about the transient nature of Internet content. The essay was broken into full-screen slides, and tapping on the scr
Jan 30th 2020 “W HEN I DIE and they’re going to interview me outside of heaven to decide whether...to let me in,” Clayton Christensen once told an Economist conference, “I’m going to start by saying ‘
Feb 1st 2020 BERLIN O NE HUNDRED years ago, on January 13th 1920, thousands took to the streets of Berlin, waving red flags and chanting slogans demanding more power for workers as lawmakers in the Re
Peter Mayle, Who Wrote of ‘A Year in Provence,’ Is Dead at 78 Peter Mayle in an undated photo. “The chapters more or less wrote themselves,” he said of his best-selling book. Credit... Jennie Mayle, v
Feb 6th 2020 T HE RUSH to board the 17.46 from London Euston to Crewe begins the moment the platform is announced. Passengers, many of them commuting the 33 minutes to Milton Keynes, run past the gate
Feb 6th 2020 T HE BRITISH plug is a marvel of design. Its insulated prongs make electric shocks nigh on impossible, even if it is hanging out of the socket. Shutters cover the live holes on the socket
This article is about a character in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables . For the French restaurant in England, see Le Gavroche . Gavroche ( French pronunciation: [ɡavʁɔʃ] ) is a fictional character
A major ocean current in the Arctic could reverse amid warming temperatures, a change which would bring significantly colder weather to western Europe, scientists at Nasa have warned. The circular cur
Feb 1st 2020 A BUTTERFLY’S WINGS can have many jobs besides keeping the insect aloft. They may be called on to attract mates, to warn potential predators to stay away, to mimic other animals or even t
Feb 8th 2020 R ESIDENTS OF THE northern hemisphere might think that their moods are worst in January. Christmas is over, the nights are long and summer is a distant prospect. Newspapers often claim th
Feb 8th 2020 TOMSK E NTER AN ELEGANT two-storey Art Nouveau house in Tomsk, a Siberian university town, walk up a solid wooden staircase and step into the measured world of an early 20th-century unive
In Product Engineering, one of the major charters is to evolve the product by building new features. It’s often the hope that a new feature will change usage patterns to unlock step function growth .
You’re born with talent. You earn a skill. I don’t think there are many places where talent is the key driver of success. The biggest exception might be that a drive to acquire skill could be a talent
A year and a half ago, I converted my office at USV from a classic office with a desk to a small conference room with a couch, a chair, and a display for videoconferencing. I call it my “zoom room.” I
A good story is more than good structure, grammar and spelling. Does it keep your reader interested? Do they feel compelled to continue to the end? It’s difficult for us to judge ourselves. We’re too close to it. I come from a background in copywriting. The goal of the copywriter is to sell. To do…
Jan 30th 2020 A S THEY CLEARED their heads after Burns Night on January 25th, having celebrated their national poet with whisky and haggis, another hangover loomed for Scots in less than a week’s time
Jan 18th 2020 P ETE MOORE was 43 when he woke up one autumn morning with back pain so excruciating that he struggled to dress himself. His doctor in Romford, an English town, referred him to hospital
Sundance is such a fantastic event. We see 3-4 movies a day. Some will hit the big screen, others might just hit the airplane watch but being able to see the first run of most of these films, hear the
Nov 14th 2019 I n the summer of 1922 two men called George took part in the first attempted ascent of Mount Everest. George Mallory was an establishment man. A Cambridge graduate and son of a Church o
Jan 23rd 2020 A T THE BEGINNING of the 20th century Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish neuroscientist, became known for his exquisite drawings of the branching, treelike cells of the brain and spinal c
Jan 23rd 2020 H OW BIG should a business team be? It is an enormously important issue for companies. Teams that are too small may lack the skills required to get the job done; teams that are too big m
David Hieatt recently drafted a few internal principles he uses to create a culture of “Deep Work” at his company, Hiut Denim . The idea of Deep Work was famously coined by Cal Newport . Number one on
Take a deep breath. Feel the wave of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide press against the bounds of your ribcage and swell your lungs. Exhale. Repeat. Before consciously inhaling, you probably weren’
Jan 25th 2020 W HO WOULD dream of starting a travelling circus at the dawn of the 21st century? Who would brave mud, late-night pull-downs, rats in the straw-bales, leaky caravans, temperamental anima
Dec 18th 2019 GULANGYU AND GUANGZHOU O NE LOVE story began in the 1930s, on a road of magnificent Western-style villas on the tiny Chinese island of Gulangyu. Cai Pijie, a lad in his 20s, walked daily
We are more aware than ever before. More aware of victims of violence, or a natural disaster. More aware of insane wealth or grinding poverty. It gets beamed to us, regularly. We’re even more often ex
Jan 11th 2020 Editor’s note (January 9th 2020): After this article was published, American media reported intelligence assessments that Ukrainian International Airlines’ Boeing passenger jet which cra
When I joined Postlight as an engineer last year, my first task was a big one: Rewrite the Readability Parser API. For those unfamiliar with the Readability Parser, it was the API that powered the pop
Jan 13th 2020 IN THE 1950s Havana glowed with colour. Its hotels and bars, casinos and cabarets—many of them owned by American mobsters—catered to the world’s rich and famous. More than 140 cinemas bo
The secret to achieving excellence is disarmingly simple. You might not like it, though. Asked about how to help creative types excel, Entertainment executive Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, recent
Confession time: my first ever blog was on Blogger and I still write on it. It’s private with only four souls ever being given access over its ~14 year history. No one has access currently and the 653
Jan 16th 2020 A House in the Mountains. By Caroline Moorehead. Harper; 415 pages; $29.99. Chatto & Windus; £20. T HEY CAME , Caroline Moorehead writes, in red sweaters and red scarves. Some were old,
The Prophet was written in 1923 by Lebanese-American poet/artist Khalil Gibran. Proving that there is no connection between cost and value, it’s currently only $0.99 on Amazon and it’s not hard to fin
Aditya B