Gary Shteyngart is one of those rare writers who is as funny and resplendent in person as he is on the page. Which does make one wonder how he gets his motivation to write, since he could just sit around having lunch. Before we are finished he will put on several different accents – Italian, Russian…

KABUL—Safi Airways, a start-up Afghan airline, ventures where few air carriers dare to go: Its in-flight magazine tells the ugly truth about the place where you're about to land. American Airlines' magazine lists the 10 best pizza parlors in America. United Airlines has a spread headlined "3 Perfect…

Feeling lonely? Don’t have anyone to go to the pub with? Then a friend rental service could be just the thing you need. But what’s it like to spend a day with someone you’re paying to be your friend?

6:38PM BST 18 Jul 2010 One night last month, a Virgin Atlantic flight left Heathrow Airport bound for Newark, New Jersey. As the plane neared the Eastern Seaboard, bad weather forced the flight to divert to Hartford, Connecticut, some 106 miles north of its destination. The plane sat on the runway…

Matthew Pillsbury/Bonni Benrubi Gallery On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading “The Trumpet of the Swan.” Her legs sprawled across mine; the grass tickled our ankles. It was the…

The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Arranged in chronological order.

MICHAEL SORKIN, AN architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. Zukin’s Naked City does make forays into the white-hot center of hipness, Brooklyn’s…

The U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair, in Montreal. The inventions that Fuller (in 1959, flying in a helicopter over Ohio) designed had a hallucinatory appeal. Credit COURTESY ESTATE OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER; ELLIOT ERWITT/MAGNUM PHOTOS One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car…

Few journalists have had as great an influence—or been proved right so often—as the man who, for 23 years, was the deputy editor of The Economist WHEN Norman Macrae died on June 11th, aged 89, no major British newspaper published an obituary of him. You could blame The Economist 's tradition of…

The vuvuzela is the symbol of the 2010 World Cup. It’s a one metre plastic trumpet, something like the Brazilian corneta , really loud and raucous. At its best a vuvuzela sounds like a fog horn. Everyone has a vuvuzela . In their tens of thousands, in the beautiful new soccer stadiums, they have the…

Celebrity Bill Murray Is Ready To See You Now He is one of the greatest comic actors alive. A man who's navigated his career with a peerless instinct for quality and self-respect. The man behind movies—from Caddyshack to Stripes , from Rushmore to Lost in Translation —that seem to have defined a…

For the first time in our nation’s history, our hopes and dreams and economic fate rest, not on a warrior or a politician or an astronaut, but on a team of repairmen. The effort to seal the ruptured oil well in the Gulf is the grandest and highest-profile repair job since the Apollo 13 duct-tape fix…

This article was reported by Sarah Lyall, Clifford Krauss and Jad Mouawad and written by Ms. Lyall. Hurricane Dennis had already come and gone on July 11, 2005, when a passing ship spotted a shocking sight in the Gulf of Mexico: Thunder Horse, BP ’s hulking $1 billion oil platform, was listing…

Norman Macrae I SPENT most of last week reading the assorted writings of Norman Macrae—surveys, leaders, articles etc—who died on June 11th (see our obituary ). What a giant he was! He not only predicted the collapse of communism, the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism and the Japanese miracle. He…

FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a…

Last February, when a 12,000-pound orca named Tilikum dragged his SeaWorld trainer into the pool and drowned her, it was the third time the big killer whale had been involved in a death. Many observers wondered why the animal was still working. But some experts, knowing the psychological toll of a…

“Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.” - Miranda July, in a 2005 interview, on the word “forever.”

It will mean that whatever: Amy King on reading: Reading appears passive because it takes place in a chair, on a bed, at the beach, in the tub, etc. Reading is action, exercise demanding strength of...

Truth in taxis: “You got to take care of your people, if you want them to take care of you.” That’s Phillip Graham, poet and author, quoting who he categorized to be a “lifer,” a taxi driver he met...

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you.

The government’s macho attitude is actually making Israel weaker THE lethal mishandling of Israel's attack on a ship carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza was bound to provoke outrage—and rightly so. The circumstances of the raid are murky and may well remain…

Chris Graythen/Getty Images It's a recurring dream. I'm standing next to a machine, some giant warm Fritz-Lang-inspired monster. I live in it. I am a piece of it. But I know at any moment this machine could destroy itself and there won't be a thing I can do about it. What a mutinous thing when a…

Palm oil is a popular, cheap commodity, which green activists are doing their best to turn into a commercial liability. Companies are finding them impossible to ignore EARLY on April 21st 2008, Greenpeace activists dressed as orang-utans stormed Unilever's headquarters in London. Similar raids took…

RT @sherlyholmes: By Timothy White: an awesome 1988 take on "The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray"

The Wired Interview Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Although NeXT failed to sell its elegant and infamously buggy black box, Jobs's fundamental insight – that personal…