I Accidentally Bought a Banksy in 2003 The other day, I stumbled on this New York Times article called “Does Anyone Here Speak Art and Tech?” It’s about the cultural clash between the worlds of art and technology. Seldom does a Styles article read my mind, and yet here was a perfect depiction of my…

Medium: We thought foursquare was crap, and believed the design nerds flocking to Gowalla validated our attitude: https://t.co/uMZsrERK9k

Tools Blog About 5 lessons learned from Apple’s conquest of the world Apple is the highest valued company in the world, and love them or hate them, everyone can learn from what got them there. You should be amazed Like millions of people I was carried to work today in a comfortable metal box by the…

Published: December 2012 The Tunnels of Gaza The tunnels of Gaza are a lifeline of the underground economy but also a death trap. For many Palestinians, they have come to symbolize ingenuity and the dream of mobility. By James Verini Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin Editor’s note: As this issue went to…

Let's start by going back in time. It's 2007 and in only a few weeks the global financial crisis will begin to become apparent. Four naive idiots are un-boxing new Apple equipment behind a wall of glass inside BBH London's incredible marble atrium. They are joking nervously about keeping the boxes…

Sarah Lacy calls acquihires a payday lending scheme . I have to disagree. There are a number off issues at play here but some counter-points to her whole thesis: Not all failed startups are acquihired – I’ve spoken with countless entrepreneurs who have shut down their apps. You’re just not reading…

Bourdin once wrote, “When you fight monsters, be careful that . . . you do not become one.” Credit Photograph by François-Marie Banier On May 3, 2005, in France, a man called an emergency hot line for missing and exploited children. He frantically explained that he was a tourist passing through…

Everyone says small startups require focus. Say “no” to anything that distracts from your goal, your vision, your strategy, tempting though it is to explore all opportunities, hoping each time that this is the one that will catapult you from Mixergy listener to Mixergy interviewee. Lack of focus…

Primarily, the fragility of my relationship with services that I've grown to depend on. Somewhat crazily, I started to consider photo sharing as a kind of human right. Ok, I am not by any means saying it's on a par with access to clean water or safety from repression, but it's become an essential…

Original article posted by Greg: This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword,…

James Lowe was for a time head chef of St. John Bread & Wine in London. He got to know "like-minded" chefs Isaac McHale and Ben Greeno through a stage at Noma and subsequent collaborations at one-off events. In 2010 the trio formed the Young Turks , a collective with the goal of creating "a platform…

Last week John Butcher, a hedge-fund manager in his early 40s, went looking for a blazer for the first time in several years. He was pleasantly surprised: “Every jacket used to be hard, square and formal,” says Butcher. “You couldn’t blame people for working in shirts and chinos in our industry –…

How often do you kick off a new week and have one of those moments of self-reflection where you ask yourself “Why aren’t all my Mondays like this?”. It might be a subtle shift in your routine that triggers such an epiphany or perhaps it’s a random act of human kindness that makes you smile and sets…

“If you are a London obsessive then I think you’ll enjoy meeting these good people”. Copyright Peter Berthoud 2016 | Website designed by The Smarter Web Company Peter Berthoud

"Count" Victor Lustig was a con man of considerable note. Born in 1890, by the 1930s he was wanted by approximately 45 law enforcement agencies worldwide. He had 25 known aliases and spoke 5 languages. He cunningly gained $5k from Al Capone . Better still, in 1925, Lustig posed as a government…

O n December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took place that was so dramatic, controversial, and ferocious that it continues to haunt the imagination of boxing more than 200 years later. One of the fighters was the greatest champion of his age, a bareknuckle boxer so…

Want to try freediving? James Nestor takes a freediving lesson . William Trubridge Trubridge is a world-record freediver from New Zealand. Michal Risian Lost, then found: Risian Diving flotilla The diving flotilla near Kalamata, Greece. JUNKO KITAHAMA’S FACE is pale blue, her mouth agape, her head…

S o I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before. This shouldn’t come as some huge shock. I mean, raise your hand if you’d built a full responsive site back in November 2010. (You can put your hand down now,…