Unlike many of my friends and acquaintances, I don’t feel particularly let down or cheated by Barack Obama. Back in 2008, I viewed him not as a transformative political figure but as a moderate, talented young Democrat, whose speaking skills and keen intelligence partly made up for his lack of…

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Venice, California, Dan Kougan spreads out three shot glasses in front of a curious audience. The champagne-colored liquid bubbling on the left is a homemade hops soda. The creamy, tan shot in the middle is a barley-chocolate malt topped with a tuft of steamed milk.…

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to…

Josh Cochran and Mike Perry EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial.…

When I was a kid, I had a picture of the original Macintosh team on my bedroom wall. It showed a hundred or so Apple employees standing in front of an office building . Some people on the left were holding a cloth banner with the "Picasso" Macintosh logo on it. A man sitting on the ground on the…

I’m waiting in line for a cappuccino. It’s gonna be a good one: short, intense, the foamed milk emulsified with the syrupy shot. I glance up from my phone and look around at the cafe. It is, for lack of a better adjective, a hipster joint. There are the artfully branded items for sale (T-shirts,…

Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the…

INNI , the new Sigur Rs concert film, preserves the myth levied at the esoteric Icelandic band: the immense seriousness of every single thing they do. The band members do attempt to have fun with their image—“We’re a very serious heavy metal band and we worship the devil,” is one of only, like,…

It is now possible to scan someone’s brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to…

Condolence notes at an Apple store in Hong Kong on Friday. Culture, not technology, inspired Steve Jobs's design, an expert said. Kin Cheung/Associated Press In the early 1990s Compaq Computer was the technology darling of the day, and PC sales were surging. Dell was promoting its build-on-demand…

Steve Jobs In April of 1995, Steve Jobs , then head of NeXT Computer, was interviewed by the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation, producers of the Computerworld Honors Awards Program , as part of an Oral History project. The wide-ranging interview was conducted by Daniel Morrow,…

Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Janice Lowry: to-do list, August 9, 2003, journal no 101 . This notebook appeared in the exhibition “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations” at the Morgan Library . Writing with a pen or pencil on a…

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity , because they believe it is impossible to…

In the conversation about jobs, where are the freelancers and consultants? Good post by @conor64 for @TheAtlantic. http://t.co/yOI2SLot

It’s impossible to imagine the web as it is today without Steve Jobs in the story. Even something as seemingly simple as proportional width fonts might not exist were it not for Jobs and Apple, to say nothing of the WebKit project and dozens of other contributions. Through it all Jobs and Apple…

In comedy, earnestness is a rare and potentially distracting quality. Too much smiling sincerity can soften the crunch of good humor. So it’s always nice to watch Jason Schwartzman on-screen, acting one notch past deadpan (and two notches past irony) so all the humor in the room evaporates and just…

'Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets.' Photograph: Peter M Fisher/Corbis W ho are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and…

Just who is ex-MI6 superstar Alastair Crooke working for, anyway? Photo: Jason Larkin THE ALBERGO HOTEL, on a quiet, narrow street in the wealthy Ashrafieh neighborhood of Beirut , is a perfect place to meet a spy. The name of the street is Abdel Wahab El Inglizi—Abdel Wahab the Englishman—perhaps…

Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land with an SX-70 and an SX-70 snapshot in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office on November 1st, 1972. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/Getty Images What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back…

Thirty-five miles from Portland is the home of one of Oregon’s hottest tech properties. It’s a long way from the “Silicon Forest” of local startups. It’s an even longer way from those who work in Silicon Valley, their offices bustling with Razor scooters and wunderkinds having mad, Red…

To some, it's the most exciting development computer science has seen in years. To others, it's a science fiction experiment with an unknown outcome. Regardless, there is no denying that artificial intelligence, the field dedicated to making machines that can behave like humans, has begun to reshape…

Nouadhibou is a point of arrival and departure, a gathering place of broken dreams Migration is one of the defining characteristics of globalisation. Hotel Sahara is an ironic name for Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast of Mauritania, a transit location for thousands of immigrants in search of a…

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss Feynman by Jim Ottaviani, with art by Leland Myrick and coloring by Hilary Sycamore Shelley Gazin/Corbis Richard Feynman, circa 1985 In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market…

New on +972: Flotilla passengers are simply a post-modern form of tourists, not interested in genuine humanitarian work. http://t.co/7MGkiYK

“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. The best example of that is the so-called oddball effect. Credit Photograph by Dan Winters When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the…

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