I was in high school, he was 45. I didn't realize at the time that he was abusing his power and authority over me WATCH: Here’s the fake-debate “SNL” skit that caused Donald Trump to melt down in real life Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin open "Saturday Night Live" with a pitch-perfect skewering of…

Most Recent Today’s Picks Drowning Man Climate Change Has Finally Come For Burning Man Unpredictable weather and delays following Hurricane Hilary turned the festival for ultra-wealthy techno-utopians

Last year saw 500% growth for the online eyewear brand, Warby Parker . The company is disrupting prices in a business historically rife with mark-ups, all while advancing a social mission of bringing

[Update: I've consolidated all of my TV anachronisms posts at a different blog, Prochronism, and new ones on Mad Men, Deadwood, Downton Abbey, and the rest are going there.] It's Monday, so let's run last night's episode of Downton Abbey through the anachronism machine. I looked for Downton Abbey…

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee was on the most terrifying airplane trip of his…

Earlier this week I got a nice comment from Jeff Hochstetler, a student at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, who asked a great question: Do you think that for a Pietistic vision to be successful, it must be rooted in institutional expressions, as the Anabaptist vision was/is? Harold S. Bender…

The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences? By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries…

It goes without saying that we use Rails a lot here at 37signals. Often times, when we look at a problem, we turn to Rails or something similar, because when you have a high-performance precision screwdriver, everything starts to look like a finely engineered screw. Sometimes, what you really need…

Jeremy Lin has given Asian-Americans a popular sports figure to relate to.Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times Last weekend, I was driving home when my BlackBerry buzzed with a text message from a Korean-American friend from my church: “You watching J Lin tearing it up?” I texted back,…

The Great Divorce I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most imp

Once upon a time, I bought new lenses. Long story short, I don't anymore. You see, people are fickle and camera manufacturers know this. I swear that Nikon and Canon meet secretly to discuss who will

From a small office along Highway 101 in Palo Alto, Neeru Khosla is quietly trying to upend the way teachers teach and students learn. It’s a tall order for a woman who is not a politician, educator or administrator. Instead you can call her a crusader — a crusader who has adopted the urgency,…

I had to check that my computer wasn’t an old black-and-white television set showing blocky white text Thursday morning and that I wasn’t clacking away on a 6502 computer over a 110-baud modem when I heard about Apple’s announcements relating to iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and its new multimedia…

[Woman in skyway over Nicollet Mall. Photo by author.] Stop what you’re doing, and go right now into the Minneapolis skyway system. Then ask a passerby, “Why does Minneapolis have skyways?” I would place good odds that they would say something about the weather. Popular narratives of the skyway…

CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its defining, most welcome features. CSS style sheets are just long lists of rules, each consisting of a selector and some styles to apply. But as our websites and applications get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen…

Christmas Specials | Belgian beer How a small, unremarkable country came to dominate the world of beermaking |Leuven and Westvleteren |10 min read THE Trappist Abbey of St Sixtus of Westvleteren has little to offer those wishing to gawp at ecclesiastical architecture. The 19th-century…

Christmas Specials | Social media in the 16th Century Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation |13 min read IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime…

Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always…

When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her hu

It is true, if inconvenient, that information wants to be free. Which fortunately doesn’t mean we’re done with Art or Journalism or the other services embodied in bits. Stewart Brand · He coined the phrase in 1984; the original is “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so…

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a…

Annals of Technology The Tweaker November 6, 2011 Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.Illustration by André Carrilho Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old…

20 years ago, in January of 1991, a very critical 28-page internal memo — written by the then-head of Disney’s film studios , Jeffrey Katzenberg , and distributed to his fellow executives in an effort

When Howard Abrams, a software engineer in Beaverton, Ore., wanted to teach his daughter, now 10, and son, now 8, how to program computers, he thought of the fun he had playing with Logo, the first programming language he learned. He quickly discovered that “Logo is pretty old school. Now there are…

Two of the three founders of Moonbot Studios are festooned in Mardi Gras attire, leading 100 people through the streets of the French Quarter as they push what appears to be a puppet shaped like a gloriously fat woman stuffed into a shopping cart. She wears a pink polka dot dress. Her gray hair is…

Conor writes to ask: I’m a big fan of wool jumpers (or sweaters I guess?) and cardigans. A lot of those I own say hand wash only on the care label. Do you think I could get away with machine washing them on a cool wash? How else can the machine damage them other than with heat? This is a tricky…

COVER STORY Dakota and Elle Fanning Finally Join Forces Even a notoriously cutthroat industry can’t shake the Fanning sisters’ bond. Elle and Dakota open up about (finally) starring in a film together, navigating Hollywood, and defying expectations. By Savannah WalshPhotography by Inez and Vinoodh…

Aug 22, 2011 New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms About The Author LukeW is an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently … More about Luke ↬ Email Newsletter Weekly tips on front-end &…

I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Learning. In the last month, I’ve had 3 VC firms bring me in to chat with their partnership about education…

On the afternoon of July 18, in remarks from the Rose Garden amid the bruising showdown with congressional Republicans over the debt ceiling, President Obama made what the White House billed as a simple “personnel announcement.” In a brief speech, the president announced that he was nominating…

Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world Support Americas+1 212 318 2000 EMEA+44 20 7330 7500 Asia Pacific+65 6212 1000 Bloomberg…

With QNX now firmly roadmapped at RIM and Android spreading among vendors like a virus, I wanted to point out that these operating systems share one ancestor: Unix. A technical triumph Technically Linux, which underlies Android, among others, is walled off from Unix from an IP point of view, but the…

Last night, high-profile Google engineer Steve Yegge mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part,…

Annals of Medicine Personal Best September 26, 2011 No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.Illustration by Barry Blitt I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating…