How British and French press see politicians differently 10 June 2010 From the section UK Politics Image caption Politicians are often judged by different rules on different sides of the channel In a new series for BBC Radio 4 looking at cultural differences in politics and public life in France,…

T here are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is…

'This is awful. I feel as if my brain has entered a school zone and has to slow down to 25mph.' Photograph: Christopher Lane Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 07.38 EDT This article has been removed as our copyright has expired.

May 25, 2010 [Published in Het Financieele Dagblad , the Dutch financial times, on the opening day of WCIT 2010 in Amsterdam.] A shadow economy controls all of the systems of monetary influence in the world. This system derives value from sharing wealth, in the form of information. It is the economy…

For more than a century, prospective Fellows of All Souls, Oxford have had to sit a frightening exam paper that contains no questions and just one word. Now it has been dropped – and Harry Mount (failed, 1994) says the college is the poorer for it.

Ever wondered why forks have four prongs? Or why we choose salt and pepper over other spices? For his new book, Bill Bryson took a trip around his own house to find out why we live the way we do

Alan Watkins revelled in what he called 'the silver age of Fleet Street' before the journalistic diaspora of the 1980s. Photograph: Jane Bown Alan Watkins, who has died aged 77, was a political columnist on newspapers and magazines around old Fleet Street for more than 50 years. He was distinguished…

An artist takes on the umbrella.

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had…

In the months before the invasion of Sicily, British spies fooled German spies with a caper inspired by a detective novel. Credit Illustration by John Ritter On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The…

They marched southward from Ramallah one windy morning in March 2012. Sheikh Nasser a-Din al-Masri led them--a slim man with a short black beard that half-hid a puckered scar on his neck. They filled the road to Jerusalem, a long procession of men, women, and children wearing white robes to show…

Working with a patient he calls Debra, a compulsive hoarder, the psychologist Randy O. Frost tried a simple experiment. Frost proposed sending Debra a postcard, blank but for the name and address. Debra’s assignment was to throw it away. Days later, Debra complained that she had not had enough time…

She was clever, learned, and unflinching when it came to plunging a paper knife into a man's back or poisoning an old lady with strychnine. Agatha Christie, the author of more than 60 crime novels, six straight novels, more than 140 short stories, 22 plays, and uncounted poems, wrote with matchless…

CAIRO — "Get out! Get back! Get back! I am not selling to you!" Ibrahim Ali Muhammad, a bread seller, is shouting at his customers. His teeth are brown and misshapen from decay, and he says the stress of his 20 years on the job has given him diabetes. He is standing behind bars, jail-like bars,…

Home > Harriet: News & Community > A Textual Ecosystem This Month's Featured Blogger Urayoán Noel Each month we invite a different blogger to discuss poetics and craft, influence and trends, and the writing life of a poet. Recent posts from Urayoán All Posts Faced with an unprecedented amount of…

I previously offered a Weberian reading of The Wire. And now I'm equally convinced that Mad Men is an outstanding Foucaultian deconstruction of contemporary American capitalism. In some ways the two play off against each other very well. The Wire is concerned constantly with norms, rules, duties: to…

It seems clear now how everything happened. Hindsight is always clear. I remember that the reporter told me this would be an article about Orchises Press as well as Salinger. She asked me basic questions, about how I’d got Salinger to say yes, about the size of the press run. Foolishly—if…

The shocking theft of the Mona Lisa, in August 1911, appeared to have been solved 28 months later, when the painting was recovered. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors suggest that the audacious heist concealed a perfect—and far more lucrative—crime.

Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture. Credit Illustration by Adrian Tomine A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He…

Wendy Kopp interview WENDY KOPP proposed the idea for creating a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. She then did just that, creating Teach For America (TFA) shortly after graduation. Ms Kopp tells the remarkable story behind the early days of…

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke working on 2001: A Space Odyssey in Kubrick’s apartment in New York (from Moonwatcher’s Memoir by Dan Richter) In the early 1960s, I wrote an appreciative essay for The New Yorker about the science fiction of Arthur Clarke. Not long after I got a letter from…

Barack Obama inherited George W. Bush's war—not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the nation's public schools. Bush's battle plan was to criticize teachers' unions, increase the number of charter schools, and promote testing and accountability through No Child Left Behind, his signature…

Like a Night Watchman When you lack a particular skill, you are often curious what it would feel like to have it. For example, I marvel at people who can sing in key, or even recognize the right key when they hear it. I suppose it’s more about feeling the music than thinking it. So I wonder what…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell Thorbjørn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in presenting the Peace Prize to Barack Obama last week, quoted the previous African-American recipient, Martin Luther King, Jr., and added, “Mr. President, we are happy to see that through your…

Hurry Up and Wait Hurry Up and Wait Design by Share January 6, 2010 We asked some of the world's most prominent futurists to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed. Julian Bleecker Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist, and co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory,…

[ Editor's note: This essay is the cover story for Paste 's February issue. This version contains corrections. ] In 1966, John T. Elson posed a dangerous question. The Time magazine editor, in a now-legendary essay, asked: Is God dead? “It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps…

It’s not that it couldn’t be used in rural environments of course; just that it wouldn’t be. The general lack of third spaces in such places means that a phone and a PC are sufficient. By living in cities, in other peoples’ places, a different kind of device becomes appropriate. Something light and…