Credit Photograph by Alex Majoli/Magnum. If Twitter is a place in which a user may be rewarded for exposing his most stupid self, Ira Glass put the medium to good use this week, when, after watching John Lithgow appear as King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he tweeted his response:…

I’ve finally settled on a pre-talk regimen that enables me to avoid the weeks of anticipatory misery that the approach of a public-speaking engagement would otherwise produce. Let’s say you’re sitting in an audience and I’m at the lectern. Here’s what I’ve likely done to prepare. Four hours or so…

You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us smarter and more creative.…

I wanted to take moment to reply to Kevin Williamson's Case Against Reparations . I wanted to do that, primarily, because his piece covers many of the most common objections to my piece, but also because I've always been an admirer of Williamson's writing, if not his ideas. Among those ideas is a…

Search Newsletter Magazine Politics Environment Media Crime and Justice Food Guns Dark Money Photos Investigations Podcasts Kevin Drum About Subscribe Donate Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies' Dirty Work Journalist Ken Silverstein…

This post, originally published on April 27, was updated on May 18. This past February, I retired from finance. Although I intend to continue to study the markets and write about them, I have no intention of ever working in the securities industry again. This makes it easy for me to talk to you…

On May 7 th , Robert Krulwich gave the commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011. That’s Robert Krulwich, who hosts the singular radio show Radiolab , one of the most accomplished pieces of science broadcasting in any nation. Robert Krulwich, who won a Peabody Award for…

⋆ Rec Recommend this Post 67 The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his "other phone," to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way into town. We're sitting in a popular restaurant near campus almost a…

John Aldridge on the deck of the Anna Mary. Daniel Shea for The New York Times Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He…

I live in Beacon, New York, where three men are known by their first names. One is a paranoid schizophrenic who lurks around the coffee shops, one is a member of our town council who owns a local bar, and the third was Pete Seeger. In my seven years in town, I had maybe four encounters with Seeger.…

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America ( public library ) by journalist Jon Mooallem isn’t the typical story designed to make us better by making us feel bad, to scare us into behaving, into environmental empathy; Mooallem’s…

Send better email. Email marketing campaigns are a breeze thanks to MailChimp’s awesome features and top-notch support. Sign up for free and find out why over 4 million people already use—and love—MailChimp, including us! Interview Describe the path to what you’re doing now. God, I really hate…

Credit Illustration by Istvan Banyai W henever a friend asks me if I have any interesting tales involving text-messaging, I think of Jeremy. Jeremy, a man I am no longer in touch with, was someone I once considered a friend. It started out very simply: one day I received a text message from a phone…

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at a press conference at City Hall in response to possible provincial funding cuts to the city. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford leaves after making an appearance at the raising of the Rainbow flag to kick off Pride Week festivities on the Podium roof at City Hall. Toronto Mayor Rob…

Arm’s length: 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner A i Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first…

At our first official interview earlier in the day, Ocean spent the first five minutes staring down at his phone. He didn’t so much as look up at me, as I made small talk with his managers and awaited his attention. Eventually he said, “Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most…

The magical halo that surrounds Apple hasn’t gone — just yet, anyway. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why chief executives of luxury brands leave their lush and (somewhat) glamorous lives to come work for Apple. First it was Yves Saint Laurent CEO Paul Deneve who left the fashion house to…

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a…

Long before he brought people into his laboratory at Columbia University to smoke crack cocaine, Carl Hart saw its effects firsthand. Growing up in poverty, he watched relatives become crack addicts, living in squalor and stealing from their mothers. Childhood friends ended up in prisons and…

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From Scott Carrier I met Najibullah Niazi in November of 2001 in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. He told me he was 19 but really he was only 17 years old, and he was my interpreter and guide for the three weeks I was there, until my money ran out. The story of those three weeks begins my new book,…

The most successful sitcom star of all time, nominated for his online series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," lets loose about his former network ("Who is the head of NBC now? Anybody?"), late-night TV ("a sad feeling"), and Oscar hosting ("that door has kind of closed behind me"). This story…

When Circuit City went kaput in January, I didn't waste my time on the chain's so-called going-out-of-business sale. First of all, Circuit City never had anything good in stock, even before it decided to go out of business. A year ago, I looked at the retailer's entire selection of laptops, and all…

In the last three years, perhaps the boldest thing Chef David Chang has done with food is let it rot. In his tiny Momofuku research and development lab in New York’s East Village, Chang and his head of R&D Dan Felder have obsessed over the many delicious things that happen when molds and fungi are…

By PETER MAASS This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one…

Quijada’s invented language has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise. Credit Photograph by Dan Winters / Typography By AJ Frackattack There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look,…

To the employees of The Washington Post: You’ll have heard the news , and many of you will greet it with a degree of apprehension. When a single family owns a company for many decades, and when that family acts for all those decades in good faith, in a principled manner, in good times and in rough…

'I don't have a great voice for radio' ... Ira Glass, host of This American Life. Photograph: Jacqui Bellamy I ra Glass is looking for a story. The host of This American Life, the phenomenally successful US public radio show, has flown into Sheffield for one night. He has come to the city's…

Ed. Note (January 10, 2013): Congratulations to Benh Zeitlin and the cast and crew of Beasts of the Southern Wild for their four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Zeitlin. From This Story The 2012 American Ingenuity Award winner describes what it takes to tell a great…

A few days ago I had a moment of sheer panic because I couldn't find a pen. I went through the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of penlessness (Denial: Maybe I don't need a pen? I don't need a pen! Anger: Where is my goddamned pen?! Bargaining: If you give me your pen, O nice, accommodating waiter, I'll…

I spent weeks trying to reach the founder and former head of a mysterious corporate-backed environmental group. Here's what happened when I finally got him on the phone. David Barron, ICCF founder ICCFoundation Mother Jones insisted that before my investigation of congressional conservation junkets…

Stanley Kubrick was missing. The office he was using at MGM’s West 55th Street world headquarters in New York to supervise the national release of 2001: A Space Odyssey was empty, and nobody knew where the usually punctual film director was that morning, including me, his summer intern. Stanley…

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell ( Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil ). The Obama campaign's technologists were tense…

Daniel Shea for TIME "The cave" at President Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and…