Danny Meyer scaled the subway stairs two at a time, emerged on Lexington and 77th, lengthened his stride and called over his shoulder: “Have I told you about the Meyer Street-Crossing Method? Meyscrom.” He scanned traffic. “Cut off every possible angle without being killed.” A car whipped by.…
Brian Sutorius
To cut down on waiting time for customers, many cash registers line the main counter of a Pret a Manger store in London. Hazel Thompson for The New York Times SOMETHING weird is happening inside a Pret a Manger sandwich shop on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. It’s not all those quirky British…
The new MacBook Air is the best Mac I’ve ever owned. This machine is shaping the future of OS X, both as an operating system and a bridge between iOS and the desktop. In October 2008, I bought my first Mac. I had been a Windows PC user for seven years, and I was accustomed to using a PC at home for…
The first computer I ever owned was a laptop. It was a Dell Inspiron that I bought after high school to take to college. It lasted a few years until my roommate bought a PowerBook G4, and that was the end of my career as a PC guy. Since that Dell, I’ve owned three more laptops: a 12-inch PowerBook…
On a cold day in late January, Paul LaRosa , an author and CBS producer, and his wife, Susan, were shopping for cheese at the Park Slope/Gowanus Indoor Winter Farmer’s Market at Third Avenue and Third Street when they struck up a conversation at one of the stands with a tall, clean-cut yoga…
‘”Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”‘ – A Christmas Carol,…
R egression’s a bitch. Two months ago the Cleveland Indians, losers of 93 games last year, were 30-15 and seven games up on their AL Central rivals. Seven weeks into the season, even the most hardened skeptics had to concede that the Indians were in good shape to make the playoffs. In a division in…
NASA’S SUCCESSFUL QUANTIFYING OF COMEDY TIMING (By Penn Jillette and Teller) Excerpt from “How To Play In Traffic”, Penn Jillette and Teller, 1997 (out of print). This is long, but for my money, it’s the best thing about the space shuttle ever written. Buddy Hackett said, “Ask me what’s the secret…
OUTSIDE SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- To most, the word “Zodiac” conjures up images of astrological symbols and the positions of stars. But Corey Starliper, a Tewksbury native and hobby code-cracker, thinks of a serial killer of the same name. Starliper also thinks that he has solved a cipher devised by…
You know a celebrity is coming to the Berklee Performance Center when a campus announcement informs students they will NOT be allowed to queue up at the BPC doors until 2 hours before an 11 o’clock event (you also know it’s a celebrity when students would choose to wake up before 9, but I digress).…
The post is temporarily removed. I will restore it after ensuring that there are no legal liabilities for myself or my employer. Until then, you can read my commentary in my new blog post: A tale about parking. The discussion on Hacker News was good as well. Also see the response that I posted at…
Even if a videogame features extreme fantasy elements that have no connection to reality, usually these elements at the very least fit into the context of the game’s story. Take a game like Final Fantasy , for instance. On several different occasions your party will fight a cactus that shoots…
By Brendan Greeley
(Corrects price of subscription fee in Europe in 10th paragraph.)
“You can’t work in music. You have to find another job.”
Per Sundin’s concerned mother was on the phone. It was the summer of 2006, and both Sundins were watching a debate between Sweden’s two major party candidates…
Books Mission: Impossible In this exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding , GQ researcher Cole Louison chronicles the fascinating and dangerous world of competitive skating GQ researcher Cole Louison gave…
T he old man’s back was bent from decades of stooping over hot dogs. For the longest time, I thought he was a hunchback. That’s how I described him to my wife the one time I took her over to Pete’s Famous: We gotta visit the hunchback in Birmingham who makes the most amazing secret sauce. His…
i, like many others , have been contemplating the demise of manned spaceflight in the United States since Friday morning's final launch of Atlantis. this is not the sort of thing that typically tugs at me…i tweeted as much just prior to the launch. i have very vague early memories of watching…
Oliver Reichenstein Shared publicly - 2011-07-07 *WHY AND HOW GOOGLE+'S INTERFACE IS KICKING ASS After using this for a couple of days with an inner smile, and going through a couple of expert comments about its future with an even bigger smile, I got to say one thing: All of this here is really…
The Year of Wonders By posted at 6:00 am on July 7, 2011 1. âWeâre closing in on a deal,â my agent told me on the phone. âIâm just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.â It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000. The Nasdaq, rested from its…
CLASSICS Eric Berley, left, makes a cherry phosphate soda. At right, a sundae at Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain. Left, Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times; right, Phil Kline for The New York Times WHO killed the soda fountain? Was it Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the 1933 repeal of…
E very NBA team starts a home game the same way: by announcing the visiting team’s starting lineup, then turning out the lights and cranking a song that’s either hip-hop happy or gratuitously goose-bumpish (like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”). Within seconds, a JumboTron highlight-video…
Hi, I'm a UX Developer - You're a what? Like a geeky, mythical creature, UX developers are part designer, part developer. Article No :693 | June 29, 2011 | by Tim R. Todish “So, what do you do for a living?” “I’m a UX developer.” “You’re a what?” “I’m a user experience developer…” “Uh-huh… what’s…
Victoria Johnson Cartographer / Geogrump. DC resident, Buffalo loyalist. Opinions are mine etc etc etc. Also: @goalhorns ! The Awl Be less stupid.
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. When I first got my iPhone, I spent a lot of time playing iPhone/iPad games to do some research as I…
Anna Faris clutched her stomach with both hands. The actress was in a West Hollywood editing room to give notes on her new film, "What's Your Number?," but she hadn't said much. "Is there anything you're cringing at?" the director, Mark Mylod, asked solicitously.
"My face!" she wailed, and Mylod…
Over the winter vacation I relaxed and spent time away from thinking about the startup fundraising process . I had a latent interest in Jekyll ever since Tom Preston-Werner (Cofounder of GitHub) created, released and wrote about it in Blogging Like a Hacker . I finally got the chance to sit down and…
Since turning 30, in January, Justin Timberlake has been kicking back, trying to make sense of his wild two-decade ride from the Mickey Mouse Club to music and movie stardom. A very different person now, Timberlake lets Vanessa Grigoriadis in on why he stripped for the camera in Friends with…
CBS MoneyWatch published what they called the “20 Craziest Job Interview Questions.” The questions, they claimed, were real job interview questions that “such companies as Google, Capital One, and Goldman Sachs asked internship candidates.” Our writer Giles Turnbull could do with a proper job, so we…
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “ Baka malamig doon ” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend,…
SO, what’ll it be tonight? How about a Smoke Signal made with bacon-infused rye, chipotle syrup, cold-brewed coffee ice and porter? Or the Grillo Canción, an exotic and possibly deranged member of the Collins family that fuses pisco, cumin syrup, citrus and celery bitters? Or maybe a Knot Twist…
Here’s me at any given weekday around noon: I’m staring at some code usually written by some French guy back in 2003. After I curse the French, I refactor a chunk and restart my server, alt-tab over to my browser, immediately command-T and type ‘r-e’ until reddit.com appears in my omnibar, browse…
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has…
L awrence Kasdan’s Silverado gets my vote for most underrated modern Western. It’s got everything an oater should have: gunfights, robberies, murders, wisecracks for days, and real, honest-to-goodness heart. There are funny cowboys facing off against tough but evil ranchers, duels to the death for…
Steve Rhodes David Foster Wallace giving a reading at All Saints Church, San Francisco, 2006 The following conversation is drawn from an interview I did with David Foster Wallace in September 2006 as part of a series of articles and radio pieces about important foreign writers, artists, and movie…
Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom | vector poem This post is intended as a companion piece for the release of Arcadia Demade . A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary…
I have very few rules in life, but this is one of them: Any time a team chokes away the NBA Finals 11 months after throwing a “Welcome Party” for itself, and it happens on the same night that Matt Stone and Trey Parker win 35 Tony Awards, I have to wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning and write a…
The audience at a show featuring Disney characters. Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times Something you learn rearing kids in this young millennium is that the word “Disney” works as a verb. As in, “Do you Disney?” Or, “Are we Disneying this year?” Technically a person could use the terms in…
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