[Originally published March 6, 2012.] - - - I know what you’re thinking, so don’t even say it. Buying that thing won’t make you happy, is what you’re thinking. Buying things never makes you happy, so why would you buy this thing? It won’t make you happy. But you haven’t seen this thing. It’s really…

Susana Vera / Reuters During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous…

I spent a lot of last year urging people to work on stuff that matters . This led to many questions about what that “stuff” might be. I’ve been a bit reluctant to answer those questions, because the list is different for everyone. I thought I’d do better to start the new year with some ideas about…

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine. Illustration by Mark Matcho "Don't take anything that happens to you there personally," the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a reporter who, confronted with living the same day over and over again, matures from an arrogant, self-serving professional…

Alec Saunders, the head of developer relations for Research In Motion, denied on Tuesday that the company’s execution stumbles over the past 18 months have led to a trust gap with mobile app creators. “I don’t know that I’d characterize it in that fashion,” Saunders told AllThingsD at a briefing…

“INNOVATION is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession,…

Adam Hasler looks like a footloose millennial. He’s worked as a model, waited tables, and lived all over the world. But at 28, there’s more to his résumé than meets the eye. He earned a dual degree in history and international relations at American University. After graduating, he and two…

Table of contents Reckoning in Waterloo Apple's iPad similarly re-defined the market for tablet computers, and then dominated it, a host of Android-powered competitors following in its wake. Apple had already released the iPad 2 by the time RIM offered its response, the tablet Lazaridis held in his…

DJ Patil pulls a 2-foot-long metalbar from his backpack. The contraption, which he calls a “double pendulum,” is hinged in the middle, so it can fold in on itself. Another hinge on one end is attached to a clamp he secures to the edge of a table. “Now,” he says, holding the bar vertically, at its…

Ryan McVay / Getty Images How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice. In a groundbreaking paper published in 1993, cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson added a crucial tweak to that old joke. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Deliberate practice. It’s not a minor change. The difference…

From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the 6th generation iPod nano. Not just any watch band, "Everyone is going to make a plastic one," said Scott…

On TV, airtime is a scarce resource; on YouTube, it’s infinite. Credit Illustration by Anders Wenngren On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns.…

Robert Nozick. 1. Recently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on politics. "You know, it's because I'm a libertarian ," he said, sounding like a vegetarian politely declining offal. Later that afternoon, in the otherwise quite groovy loft I sometimes crash at in SoHo, where one…