Illustrated | iStock Time, like life, hasn't stopped under lockdown. It only feels that way. Amidst the pervasive anxiety about illness and economic hardship, it can be easy to miss somewhat subtler f

Background Anna Quindlen is an author, journalist, and opinion columnist. She originally delivered this speech as the commencement address to the class of 1999 at Mount Holyoke College. 1 Note: Thanks

If life is a game, how do you play it? The answer will have a huge impact on your choices, your satisfaction, and how you achieve success . *** James Carse, the Director of Religious Studies at New Yo

Photo: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. I worked at various start-ups f

The desk on the top of Hancock Hill is metal and dark gray, maybe from the sixties. Its drawers are banged up, and its top is graffitied with initials. When you get to the desk, someone might already

via Spark

This is Chapter 10 in a blog series. If you’re new to the series, visit the series home page for the full table of contents. Part 5: A Dangerous Trend “The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imper

This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among

Buying Christmas gifts for you friends, family, and loved ones is always hard—and after yet another turbulent year it looked like maybe it was finally time to just cancel the holidays! But things are

I often talk about the use of cell based structures (e.g. think Amazon Two Pizza, Starfish model) which are populated not only with aptitude (the skill to do something) but the right attitude (type of

In a digital world that clamors for clicks, news is sensationalized and “facts” change all the time. Here’s how to discern what is trustworthy and what is hogwash. *** Unless you’ve studied it, most o

I put on a pair of wool socks, slippers, mittens, earmuffs, and a surgical mask, remove my shirt, and open the door of a coffin-sized chamber, thereby releasing vapor into the room. I glance up at the

Having Kids December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point Ifelt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about livingvirtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd neve

John Smith making another title look like child’s play (no audio) From 1994-1995 I had the great pleasure of training with wrestling legend John Smith, 2-time gold medalist and 4-time world champion (

The constellation Orion is one of the most recognizable patterns in the night sky, visible around the world. But if you’ve looked at Orion recently and thought something seemed off, you’re not wrong:

In the first week of the second decade of the third millennium, it was 68 and sunny southeast of Baghdad. At an outpost known as Contingency Operating Station Hammer, intelligence analysts for the U.S

November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural abilityand determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not aswell understood: an obsessive interest in a particular to

Performance reviews are designed to motivate and bring the best out of our teams, but they often do the opposite. Here’s how to bring out the best in your people. *** If you ask people what’s wrong wi

“This could save lives, cure depression, help alcoholism, get people off opioids—why wouldn’t I want to be invested?” Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary is sitting across from me in a restaurant talking ab

This wallpaper trades money and battery life for increased charisma and personal longevity (full explanation in Step #6). The Very, Very Complete Guide to Productivity, Focus, and Your Own Longevity C

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more. The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post…

If something is true in one field it’s probably true in others. Restricting your attention to your own field blinds you to how many important things people from other fields have figured out that are relevant to your own. Here are a few laws – some scientific, some not – from specific fields that…

Yawning gap: days of nothing are a ‘soon-to-be lost plane of human experience’.Illustration: Nathalie Lees I n moments of digital anxiety I find myself thinking of my father’s desk. Dad was a travelling furniture salesman in the 1980s, a job that served him well in the years before globalisation…

As we were putting together this month’s issue, The Sun ’s editor, Sy Safransky, recalled an article he’d come across years ago. He couldn’t remember the name of the author or when the piece had been published, only that it was the best writing he’d ever read about being a policeman. Fortunately we…

BESIDE + RADIO-CANADA Natural sites are being overrun by a new wave of tourists just "doin' it for the 'Gram." And the consequences are far from harmless: threatened fauna and flora, exhausted staff, competitive jockeying for framespace. When our call of the wild rings false. Intro Chapter 1 Chapter…

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our…

In early February this year, what appeared to be a website glitch sent thousands of drugs-buyers into a panic. Liam (not his real name), a student at Manchester University, needed to buy some MDMA for the weekend’s big party. So he did what he had been doing for the last two years: he opened up the…

I just spent the past week it the Bay Area, and it’s hard not to come away with an acute sense that there’s something wrong with the way that housing is working in the new economy: not just in San Francisco or on the peninsula, where it’s messed up for all kinds of local reasons, but really…

There’s a place in Iceland where you can see the northern lights any time of year, regardless of the weather. You don’t have to ride a snowmobile into the mountains or rent a glass-roofed igloo. You don’t even need a winter jacket. Leaning back in my recliner, I gaze upward at the ethereal reds,…

In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search…

(Photo: Gregg Segal) Last March, during the enormous South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing. "People who go to music festivals pride themselves on knowing who the next acts…

What do executives do, anyway? An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of workin a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year perperson in their reporting hierarchy... even if they work onnothing else. That job seems impossible. How can anyone make anyimportant decision…

Hear an audio version of this story below: Fittingly enough, it was hot as blazes in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell slunk back home for Congress’ annual summer recess. One week earlier, Robert Mueller had testified that Russia was meddling in the 2020 U.S. elections. McConnell, the Senate majority…

Illustration by Laurène Boglio Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are aging. And it shows. Timothy Noah is the employment & immigration editor at POLITICO . He has previously written for the New Republic and Slate, and is author of The Great Divergence:…

Translated from Hebrew by Josh Friedlander Like any great invention, I stumbled upon the idea of the hotel-room vacation by accident, nine years ago, after Toony and I arrived in Chania, Crete, for our honeymoon. The “magical Venetian town” I’d read of in a British travel magazine turned out to be a…

Occasionally—once or twice in a lifetime if you are lucky—you encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on. The first time I heard anyone speak of the “wood wide web,” more than a decade ago now, I was trying not to cry. A beloved friend was dying too…

Given that modern life is so regularly baffling, it can sometimes feel like the only explanation for it all is that we’re collectively experiencing a Sims playthrough as directed by some sadistic cosmic being. But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the…

Brevity 22: Brian Arundel Brevity 22 Brevity Home | Next Essay | Guidelines | Past Issues The Things I’ve Lost By Brian Arundel Fleece hat and gloves: in the backseat of a Boston cab in 2002, before driving back to Maine. Round, purple sunglasses: in an Atlanta pool hall over drinks with Ashby,…

POLITICO illustration/Getty Images photo The paper’s onetime data guru can’t stop kicking his ex-employer for its 2020 polling analysis and supposed capitulation to Trump. Nate Silver made his name as The New York Times’ data guru, creating the methodology that predicted Barack Obama’s reelection.…

W hen When Moiz Ali launched his startup Native , the maker of a natural deodorant brand, he couldn’t help but be self-conscious when mingling with other Bay Area entrepreneurs. “In Silicon Valley, it’s often embarrassing when you haven’t raised money,” Ali told Recode recently. “When I’d go to…