Multimedia Rise of Broadband Speeds It's incredible how quickly speeds have increased over the last 20 years! Changing Media Diets The latest Nielsen report shows that millennial audiences are changing how they watch TV. The Expanding Consolidation of the Consumer Internet The more websites we have,…

9:01AM BST 18 Sep 2013 In a busy bar it can often be a struggle to get served a drink as customers compete for the attention of the bartender. Now scientists have identified the key elements of body language that can increase your chances of being served before everyone else. They examined the…

Had the writers had their way, Nicholas Brody ( Damian Lewis ) would not have survived Homeland' s second season. During a TV Academy panel at 20th Century Fox’s Zanuck Theater, the CIA drama’s writers confessed that it was Showtime who urged them to reconsider, just as the network had during the…

I tweeted these forever ago, but the internet just noticed and I figure I should probably at least put them on my blog. I’m glad people are finding them useful. Here they are, a mix of things learned from directors & coworkers at Pixar, listening to writers & directors talk about their craft, and…

Before Daniel Radcliffe became the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater. He was also disarmingly sweet. In the screen test he took at age 10, in 2000, for the first Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s…

Ryan Chapman LONDON — OUR neighbors Lauren and Matt and their kids moved out of London to Cambridge the other week. Bibi, Andy and their two left for Bristol in June. Another of my 8-year-old’s classmates and her family are heading out after Christmas. In my book this is a trend. The moves are not…

A British newspaper wants to take its aggressive investigations global, but money is running out.

London's demography RECENTLY, the Guardian has been running an interesting series of videos on its website, looking at gentrification in the poorer parts of London. One, presented by the novelist Alex Wheatle, looks at Brixton , a part of south London which was once best known for being the site of…

I am literally traveling in circles, I conclude to myself as I come across the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi statue for the fourth time. As beautiful as it is, this was my starting point thirty minutes ago. After enjoying a lovely traditional Roman dinner of spaghetti a cacio e pepe , I casually…

First off, I have to ask because I have a hard time believing it: is is true that there is no live action footage in The Blue Umbrella ? Yeah. The Blue Umbrella was all animated. There is no bit of live action anywhere in the film. What was the path that led you to make the movie? I started in 2008…

[Not single-page] The Comedy Central star on his TV character's clash with reality, the pain of losing his father and brothers at a young age, and his fear of bears: "PLAYBOY: How did bears become a recurring motif on the show? Was it just to have something to talk about that wasn’t…

Zach Sanders/Flickr Turns out there is such a thing as a free ride. When Jean-Francois Mayet became mayor of Châteauroux in 2001, the town’s transit system was descending into irrelevance. Each of Châteauroux’s 49,000 inhabitants took the bus, on average, 21 times per year, well below the 38 per…

IT is a favorite pastime of older people to lament the defects of the young. Every generation seems to be convinced that in its day, standards were higher, schools were tougher and kids were smarter. But if I.Q. scores are any measure, and even their critics agree they measure something, people are…

Meet the career con man who made a fortune selling illegal pharmaceuticals online—and pulled off a federal sting that forced Google to pay $500 million. On February 25, 2009, a then 34-year-old career con man named David Anthony Whitaker left the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode…

Outside of Kisumu, 2007. The Risk Not Taken For the first three years of Bonobos , I lived with $3,000 in the bank, a $3,000 apartment, and $150,000 of debt. During that time — 2007 to 2010 — I was only a month away from being out of cash. I was paying myself, initially, $70,000. This is plenty of…

Wire: Vocals were always central to your sound,but they have become even more important on this album than theywere on your first LP. Burial: I was brought up on old jungle tunes and garage tuneshad lots of vocals in but me and my brothers loved intense, darkertunes too, I found something I could…

Douglas Groat thought he understood the risks of his job—until he took on his own employer

Text May 29, 2013 1,056 notes Oh my god, don’t make things for “Everyone.” From the New York Times, on the end of Karen Berger’s 30-year run at Vertigo Comics . Mr. DiDio [co-publisher of DC Comics, which owns Vertigo] said it would be “myopic” to believe “that servicing a very small slice of our…

WHEN the social scientist James R. Flynn started analyzing more than 50 years’ worth of I.Q. scores, he noticed something peculiar. On tests that assessed vocabulary used in everyday life, adults showed enormous gains — nearly 18 points. That made sense. Many more people attend college and work in…

I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird. The last thing I remembered was being in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wrapping up a four-hour Google I/O keynote liveblogging session . My last recollection was of Google CEO Larry Page taking questions from the audience and promoting…

This is not a rendering. It is a launching pad in the New Mexico desert for rocket planes that will send you into space for $200,000. It opens later this year.

I recently talked to two managers of Black Duck, the first company formed to help organizations deal with the licensing issues involved in adopting open source software. With Tim Yeaton, President and CEO, and Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, I discussed…

As web publishers we're obsessed with analytics. Any strategy that moves the needle gets our attention. So you can imagine my surprise when a new way of writing articles blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic. Before I go on—looking at analytics is tricky. Because we have imperfect…

AN OCTOBER MORNING IN PARIS. JAMES KING, HER HAIR PULLED back into a ponytail, bounds from an elevator into the lobby of the Hotel de la Tremoille, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, where she has been staying for the past week. "How do I look -- what do you think?" she asks the 20-year-old Julia…

Ad By Carbon Ads Just How Did Apple “Journalism” Get This Bad? | Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013 I swore that I wouldn’t write stuff like this. “No, Ian”, I said, “skewering the stupid is pointless. You only end up bitter and twisted by maintaining the necessary level of vitriol required.” But sometimes……

In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company’s revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture…

Just as dogs preceded humans in making the first risky voyages into space, a new generation of canines has now made an equally path-breaking trip -- from life to death and back again. In a series of experiments, doctors at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh…

Roger Ebert was always a great friend of Salon's. We're deeply saddened by reports of his death , and are re-printing this essay, from his book "Life Itself: A Memoir," which we think fans will take particular comfort in reading now. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there…

Twenty years ago, I developed a powerful approach to negotiating that goes beyond “win-win.” It involves starting by offering the most and asking for the least. It works extremely well, but I was unable to explain why until I read Wharton professor Adam Grant’s excellent new book Give and Take .…

April 30, 2013 What a stupid idea For some cruel reason, I keep finding myself in the position of being introduced to things in their infancy (often before they are even launched), dismissing them as stupid, and then watching them become unbelievably popular. This has happened to me at least four…