Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (Melissa Golden, Redux) For the record, here is University of Pennsylvania’s Baccalaureate Address by David Brooks, an author and New York Times colu

On a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley, 101 in the shade, I merge onto Highway 99 past downtown Fresno and steer through the vibrations of heat. I’m headed to the valley’s deep south, to a little f

In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Alt

In a corner of Panorama Bar, the upstairs venue of the Berlin night club Berghain, there is a large, unlit photograph of the back of a throat—one of three photos by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans that hang on the walls. Berghain is a techno club known as much for its code of etiquette as for…

WHEN DOES EDUCATION STOP? by James Michener, 1962 During the summer vacationa fine-looking young man, who was majoring in literature at a topuniversity, asked for an interview, and before we had talke

Books drawn on for this article The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem by Joel Best and Eric Best Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization

Illustration by Jaime Hernandez A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so…

AT THE CORNER of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsi

What happens when refugees start to outnumber residents on a small tourist island The Greek island of Kastellorizo is normally a sleepy tourist destination, with its population of just a few hundred m

A merica is in the grips of a speculative frenzy. Investment bankers, private investment firms, and even a few dozen recently graduated MBAs labelling themselves “searchers” are calling, emailing, win

COVID-19 YC bio and healthcare companies are helping with the COVID-19 crisis and need your support: ycombinator.com/covid About Slideshow of founders and startups at Y Combinator. Twice a year we inv

During a trip to Tokyo last week, I made a little pilgrimage to the city’s Tama cemetery to pay my respects to an old acquaintance who died recently. Outside Japanese financial circles, the name Katsu

The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s rarest books: an intact Gutenberg Bible. When Gerhard Steidl, a printer and publisher of photography books, was growing up in Göttingen

Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949 Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wire

"Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress," photo by Luca Fregoso When I was very small, a little boy of five or six years old, I was certainly no infant prodigy, but I did do drawings with houses, with vase

What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fi

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 Let’s don’t be alarmist. The most important week in American financial history since the Great Depression began at 8 A.M . on a Friday in the middle of September last year. I have

A portrait of David Swensen at Yale. Mr. Swensen and former protégés oversee nearly $100 billion in endowment money at many top universities. Credit... Driely Schwartz Vieira for The New York Times As

Audio brought to you by Curio , a Lapham’s Quarterly partner H artwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of

Audio brought to you by Curio , a Lapham’s Quarterly partner I t was once said of Voltaire , by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that “our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the

-- An MIT Blackjack Team perspective The mathematics of probability that govern the trade-offs of risk and reward are fundamentally counter-intuitive. The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes out

G ross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position

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I. The Farm The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French officers but built of volunteers from around the world. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy…

The International Banking Corporation, in Bahrain, generated billions of dollars while issuing a series of fake loans. Illustration by Shout When Glenn Stewart enrolled at the University of Oxford, in 1975, he was not a typical first-year student: a twenty-year-old American with mediocre grades, he…

Ray Dalio has an uncanny ability to anticipate economic trends. Critics say that he runs a cult. Photograph by Platon Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s b

Modern Love Credit... Brian Rea When my relationship unraveled nearly two years ago, I decided to suspend my career as an actuary in Boston and take a long vacation in Costa Rica, where I planned to l

El Chapo escaped from a maximum-security prison and evaded many attempts at capture, often hiding out in the Sierra Madre. Clockwise from top left: Alfredo Estrella / AFP / Getty; Greg Mathieson / Mai

Frances Leech | Vintage | March 2013 | 14 minutes (3378 words) The Longreads Exclusive below is based on Frances Leech’s ebook of the same name, published in 2013 by Vintage UK. *** To make chocolate

When you get right down to it, even a mega-million-dollar international criminal caper is mostly boring shitwork. As Frank Bourassa tells it, his own criminal masterpiece hinged on the events of one m

Below are notes from Hillhouse Capital's Lei Zhang 's lecture at Columbia Business School courtesy of Zong Z. Peng . Notes From Lei Zhang's Lecture at Columbia Business School In the high flying world

When Ásta Stefánsdóttir failed to show up for work, her family called the police. This was in Reykjavík, Iceland, last year, on a Tuesday in the nightless month of June. A few days earlier, Ásta, a th

As I follow Neil Shen into the head office of DJI, the largest drone company in the world, its staff greet him with bowed heads. Wearing a black shirt, grey slacks and black Italian-made loafers, the

I t’s been ​ four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first t

Letter of Recommendation They’re so much more than just the hellish yin to drinking’s yang. Credit... Tim Davis for The New York Times I used to loathe hangovers. I used to keep my bedside table stack

L et me take you, dear boy,” said McHintry, “to the best little bar in Manhattan.” I could have told him Donna was expecting me home in good time to find out how my first day in the new job had gone.

Soon after the end of the second world war, André Siegfried, a political scientist, wrote the preface to a book on French spiritual values. “Absent France from the stage, [and] a certain way of approa

A picnic in the sun on the lawn of the Paris School of Economics would have been better, but it’s too late. We are at Les Jardins de Paul Ha, a bakery turned deli in the 14th arrondissement, and Thoma

Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in o

NFL NFL NFL Teams Can’t Have It Both Ways on Social Justice Zito Madu on the 49ers, the Washington football team, and the racism they claim to speak out against. By Zito Madu 16 hours ago View More Do