Today’s guest contributor is former Wall Street Journal and Fortune writer, Erik Calonius . Erik collaborated with Dan Ariely on Predictably Irrational and he has a new book out from Penguin Portfolio, Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us. +++ A few…

Brought to you by Seeso. Sign up for for only $3.99 a month . These days Norm Macdonald is all over the place — he has a Comedy Central special , a Twitter feud with Steve Martin , a profile in the New York Times , and a new show that premieres tonight. So what better time to revisit one of his most…

Back in 2001, Coudal Partners was on the ropes fiscally. And according to Jim Coudal, it’s the best thing that could have happened. "After 9/11, we lost a lot of business. And we were in trouble. It wasn’t any problem of ours. One company got bought and other people cut back on their spending," he…

Editor's note: Elizabeth Merrill's story on Brian Wilson marks the debut of "Curtain Call," a new weekly ESPN.com baseball feature that will spotlight a player, team or trend in the game. LONDONDERRY, N.H. -- The yearbook is 11 years old and stored behind a counter at the public library. Years…

Dealing with Twitter spam occupies seven people full-time, plus the services of two engineers. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian B iz Stone and Ev Williams discovered pretty quickly that Del Harvey was serious about the task they'd set her of putting a lid on Twitter's spam problem. Within a…

For me, 2011 is the year of the reader . Essential technologies such as pixel density and screen typography are at last reaching comfortable standards, and after years of being treated as mere eyeballs and drivers of ad revenue, users finally have tools that help them regain control of the reading…

When we self-diagnose, we look for control factors. Sometimes we invent them. The goal of solipsistic anxiety is to find an individual agent that explains our misery. We eliminate possibilities one-by-one in hopes that a single cause remains. This is how people deduce food allergies and come to…

Niko Bellic, the lead character in Grand Theft Auto IV. O nce upon a time I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down "only" a thousand words. Once upon a time I…

It might be the best marketing in the history of wine. The story of how a rap mogul transformed a $50 champagne into the next Cristal—and received millions for doing so. By Zack O'Malley Greenburg On a frigid February night, I’m waiting outside a ground-floor apartment in Harlem, beginning to wonder…

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from an interview with Neetzan Zimmerman, a professional, full-time…

Lending e-books THE latest newcomer to the e-lending business was the first to be called out. Like other similar sites, Lendle relies on loans of books purchased for Amazon's Kindle reader. But on Monday morning Amazon turned off the content tap that feeds the site; it was not switched on again…

A recent Vanity Fair profile of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey ends with an anecdote about an inspiring speech he gave to the assembled staff at his new mobile payments startup, Square . The internal “TownSquare” meeting took place on his 34th birthday last November, and it is a remarkable statement by…

Pryor enlightened his audience on race and interracial relationships using a flamboyant vocabulary that he’d learned growing up in his grandmother’s whorehouse. Credit Illustration by Al Hirschfeld, Courtsey of the Margo Feiden Galleries LTD SKIN FLICK Winter, 1973. Late afternoon: the entr’acte…

That’s when we first really noticed Charlie Sheen, and it’s the key moment in his movie career (it now seems to define and sum up everything that followed). He hasn’t been as entertaining since. Until now. In getting himself fired from Two and a Half Men , this privileged child of the media’s…

RAISE your hand if you remember when Starbucks seemed cool. Anyone? Think back. To before the planet groaned with 17,000 Starbucks shops. Before the pumpkin spice lattes and the Ciao Amore CDs. Before the Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino ice cream, the Starbucks cream liqueur, the Pinkberry-inspired…

Three short years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in San Francisco and instantly fell in love. As a former technology columnist for the Guardian (and, unbeknownst to me, about to become one again), I had more than a passing familiarity with the goings on in Silicon Valley. But unlike most tech…

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] I'm no stranger to In-N-Out, the massively popular California-based fast food burger chain (that is apparently poised to expand East , if only a couple states closer to me—hooray!). And of course, I've been aware of their secret menu for years. I've eaten plenty of…

Talking Carl is a mildly famous iPhone app in which a vaguely anthropomorphic red blob repeats things you say to it in a funny voice and responds to touches and prods with giggles and yelps. Readers have been sending us some quite angry messages about a mysterious recent update to the app which…

Marco Arment, the former CTO of the Tumblr blog platform, is best known these days for his time-shifting reading app Instapaper . But he could start a side-job as a financial advisor to start-ups. His motto: Get the money from your customers, not investors. Arment’s more traditional take is built…

SOMETIMES I can’t believe what my 82-year-old mother has been eating. Living now in a retirement home in Durham, N.C., she told me she recently had cherry cobbler for breakfast. Apparently she’d had French toast stuffed with bananas and Nutella for lunch the day before, and after lunch had gone to…

Charlie Sheen talks to Amy Wallace about his latest bender, his true feelings about sobriety and 'Apocalypse Now,' and the cyclical insanity of his crazy-ass life Five days ago, we closed a profile built around an interview with Charlie Sheen that will appear in the April issue of GQ . Since then,…

Dear Apple-centric media, It’s time we had a chat. I think you know what this is about. Writing about rumors concerning Steve Jobs’ health is not only unprofessional, but it is disrespectful. I get that a lot of people think that Steve Jobs equals Apple. Not only is that incorrect, but it places an…

BILL PLASCHKE School celebrates its first conference basketball victory since before the players were born. Caltech's Ryan Elmquist makes the winning free throw with three seconds… (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles…) It was the last chance in the last game of the last basketball season Ryan Elmquist…