You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a…

Longreads: "Cranking." Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) on work and what matters. http://t.co/80NTy2R v. @morgank @marcoarment #longreads

From ``Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman'', by Richard Feynman , Copyright 1985, pg. 157-158. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winningphysicist who, among other things, worked on the first atomic bomb atLos Alamos, NM. He died in 1988. Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now,…

Today we kick off an occasional series of guest commentaries by Readability friends and neighbors. We believe the new Readability, alongside efforts elsewhere aimed at innovating the reading experience, is part of a broader conversation: the possibilities of fresh thinking around digital content,…

328 notes My daughter recently checked out a book from the preschool library called “My Working Mom.” It had a cartoon witch on the cover. “Did you pick this book out all by yourself?” I asked her, trying to be nonchalant. Yes. We read the book, and the witch mother was very busy and sometimes…

What is Kickstarter? We’re the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Learn more! To borrow a phrase from his own “thought-provoking design content” site, Frank Chimero thinks for a living. The graphic designer, teacher, and writer recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for…

In 1919, the young EB White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte’s Web , took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition entitled “The Elements of Style”, a 43-page list of…

PETER O’TOOLE ON THE OULD SOD from the book FAME AND OBSCURITY by Gay Talese. All the children had their pencils out and were drawing horses, as the nun had instructed--all, that is, except one little boy who, having finished, was sitting idly behind his desk. "Well," the nun said, looking down at…

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks. Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy” * , the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the…

British Prime Minister David Cameron, en route to the Group of 20 summit in Seoul, stopped in Beijing this week and suddenly found himself in a sartorial conundrum: Chinese officials, eyeing his lapel, asked him to remove the poppy that Britons wear every November in memory of their war dead. The…

The myth of meritocracy has been exposed on more than one occasion. Sociologists like Lani Guinier [8] , Stephen McNamee, Robert Miller, and numerous others have pointed out exactly how the promise of meritocracy -- "hard work rewards the deserving" -- is an empty one. Meritocracy forgets privilege,…

In The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, food writer and UC-Berkeley professor Michael Pollan examines three American food supply chains: the industrial, which encompasses factory farming and supermarkets; the organic, which includes family farms and other small-scale producers;…

What would happen if, instead of spare change, you handed a person in need the means to shop for whatever they needed? What would they buy? Can you spare your credit card, sir?

There’s never been a better time to be a storyteller. Writer Ian Brown on escaping the 24-hour news cycle and the hidden opportunity for long-process, long-form journalism.