longreads: RT @3rdparty @walrusmagazine Back in the Hall by Adam Sternbergh (January/February 2009) http://bit.ly/7j8uW7 #longreads #kidsinthehall

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog So. I’ve returned to Thomas Jefferson St. after taking a few months off for a book leave. Why does it take such effort to write a book? Consider this cautionary tale: the story of The Greatest Newspaper Lead Ever Written. When I embarked on the…

EXPERT OPINION Yawn It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain. Nov|Dec 09 contents Gazette Home First Person Alumni Voices Two old souls Elsewhere A (tiny) pot to piss in Expert Opinion Yawn! By Andrew Newburg | Yawn. Go ahead: Laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if…

#185771 - Pastie He’d decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, hadgreat fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit abig rock, and then he couldn’t get it started again. There were no cellphone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had…

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of…

The Making of an Agent After 16 weeks of action-packed exercises that will test them to the core, the recruits in Training Class No. 283 will pass into the elite ranks of the Secret Service -- or leave humiliated By Laura Blumenfeld Sunday, July 26, 2009 LESSON ONE: Get Ready To Die The teacher…

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and…

The Mystery Pit of Oak Island A 19th century excavation. One can only wonder what would have happened if young Daniel McGinnis had chosen to go exploring somewhere else on that fateful day in the summer of 1795. If he had, perhaps nobody else would have walked the woods on the eastern end of Oak…

longreads: DigitalBeat: Mark Zuckerberg On How to Build a Hacker Culture Inside a Company. http://bit.ly/43D0Zw #longreads

Photo: Kenji Aoki When Good Enuf Is Great Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.— Erin Biba Phone Net-based calls can be laggy, and they sometimes drop out in mid conversation. But they can also be free—even…

More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time. The international prototype of the kilogram is inside three…

Photo: Dan Winters The rules changed all the time—sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour—and whenever he tried to recite them, people thought, "This guy is nuts." The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire , was allowed to speak. He could…

Ahhhh, summer's here, and with it come trips to the beach, bar-be-ques, fireworks and vacations. Been on a vacation yet this summer? How was it? Did you come back feeling rested and refreshed? Good for you. Or, did you get swept up into a modern 'American-style' vacation: unable to forget about…

Alex Roy has a crazy dream: to beat the legendary Cannonball Run record by crossing the country in under 32 hours and 7 minutes. Floor it! Photo: Brian Finke And so the clock starts and the taillights flare, and they're off again, strapped down, fueled up, and bound on an outlaw enterprise with…