Despite all the stories you’ve heard, the hardest part of working from home isn’t putting on pants every day. I’ve been working from home, a few different homes, since late 2007. And the biggest thing I've learned during those four years is that working from home doesn’t have to change how you get…

Ads via The Deck Emil Krebs. Image courtesy of the C. and O. Vogt Brain Research Institute. On my search since 2005 to find who might be credibly called “the person who speaks the most languages,” I encountered many fascinating historical characters who had learned and used dozens of languages. I…

At 17, I wrote a speech titled, “When You Come to the End of Your Days, Will You Be Able to Write Your Own Epitaph?” It reflected the approach to life I adopted after my mother’s untimely death from cancer at age 49. I chose to live each day as if it could be my last — but with a watchful eye on the…

Beijing NOT long ago, I was stuck in a dead-end job near Greenwich, Conn. I was in my early 20s, overeducated with a series of non-performing degrees from New York University and Columbia, and frustrated. When I saw the Occupy Wall Street protesters on TV, fed up with the economic status quo in the…

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had…

Steve Denning, Contributor RADICAL MANAGEMENT: Rethinking leadership and innovation + Follow on Forbes There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management “Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of…

As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts. By Tim Boyle/Getty…

Big Idea / by Geoffrey Miller / A radical explanation for a conundrum about extraterrestrial life, and what it means for the future of humanity. The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with some other…

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park…

Pinboard Blog Don't Be A Free User Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did "I Want Sandy" change your life? These projects are all very…

28th November 2011 Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have made a significant breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language in which a series of eight objects have been sonically identified by dolphins. Team leader, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, ‘spoke’ to dolphins with the…

The Port of Los Angeles, 23 October 2011. At the Goofy Pool on deck 9 of the Disney Wonder, the Adventures Away celebration party has begun. "Goodbye, stress!" the cruise director shouts. "Hello, vacation!" The ship's horn sounds out When You Wish Upon A Star, to indicate that we're about to set…

by robfitz · November 7, 2011 Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels. It has been fascinating. That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what…

Xabi Alonso eases himself on to a wooden bench in a tiny dressing room at the Spanish Football Federation's headquarters in Las Rozas, north-west of Madrid, and talks –eloquently, intelligently, rationally, occasionally passionately and in Spanish. Well, mostly in Spanish. Every now and then, when…

Protesters severely disrupted operations at the Port of Oakland, Calif., earlier this month. OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in…

Me propongo demandar a la revista “Fortune”, pues me hizo víctima de una omisión inexplicable. Resulta que publicó la lista de los hombres más ricos del planeta, y en esta lista no aparezco yo. Aparecen, sí, el sultán deBrunei, aparecen también los herederos de Sam Walton y Takichiro Mori. Figuran…

UI16: Creating Intuitive Designs November 9, 2011by Luke Wroblewski At the User Interface 16 Conference in Boston, Jared Spool walked through what makes a product design intuitive and how teams can use this information to create better designs. Here are my notes from his The Unintuitive Nature of…

I HAVE a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses. More than three years since the global financial crisis started, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up. The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection last week…

Hi, I'm Tynan! I love life and explore its possibilities by ignoring common sense and discovering what is really possible. If you are sick of the Standard 9-5 Lifestyle and want more out of your life, you're in the right place.Read more about Tynan.com or Contact me Subscribe to my RSS feed and get…

In the terrific boxing documentary When We Were Kings, George Plimpton recounts the story of Muhammad Ali's commencement speech to the graduates of Harvard University. "Give us a poem!" one student shouted. Ali surveyed the quieting crowd and said: "Me, we." "It stands for something more than the…

This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch for her Bridging Differences blog, which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website. Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author…

Rajai Davis had 34 stolen bases this year. I had no clue. Josh Tomlin of the Indians had a 1.08 WHIP this year, 11th best in the majors. I had to look that one up. I have never been a fantasy sports lover and those two statistics are two of the reasons why. I don't want to be in a position where I…

February 2008 The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines…

Here's how I have created the beginnings of a profitable Kindle formatting and conversion service, LiberWriter, from scratch. Last Winter, I read one of the best business books I have read in a long time, Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small: Rather than being a "big idea" book that includes one…

Beautiful Savings is officially dead. Beautiful Savings was the first business I’ve ever started. I wanted to take a minute and write about the experience of bootstrapping your own startup. Some things I did well, and many things I did poorly. First of all, you should know something about me. I’m…

First time here? Get updates by RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, an innovative, award-winning enterprise software company. Atlassian produces tools that help technical and business teams collaborate, plan projects and build software. Based in…

This story needed an ending before it could find its first sentence. So please forgive me for delivering it ten years overdue. Maybe it shouldn't have been so hard to write. Looking back, it had everything: merriment, adventure, and a journey to the top of the world. It contained a crash into ground…

Ten years ago, David Foster Wallace admitted in “Tense Present,” one of his best and most charming essays, to being a “SNOOT,” which he defined as a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He outed himself…

Robert B. Reich is the former secretary of labor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.” THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the…

Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back." (CNN) -- The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's…

(Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr) Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten…

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online…

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it…

Dan Shapiro asks the question and also provides an answer: ... what to do when an investor requests that you conjure an obsolete 30-page document from the ether and send it to them that evening [?] (...) Whenever an investor asks you for your business plan, send them the same damn packet you send to…

Hot Topics: Unemployment once again has crept past 9 percent. GDP growth fell below 2 percent this last quarter. Inflation is up. Home values are down. There’s talk of a double-dip recession. According to one market analyst, “We’re on the verge of a great, great depression.” But through it all,…

Aug 10th 2011 9:40PM The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield. In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money.…

No publication has a better story about back-end chaos than BusinessWeek. Before it was acquired [1] by Bloomberg LP, the publication sank a shocking $20 million into the back-end development of Business Exchange, a professional social networking site being built atop a proprietary content…

WSJ.com is available in the following editions and languages: Please register to gain free access to WSJ tools. An account already exists for the email address entered. Forgot your username or password? This service is temporary unavailable due to system maintenance. Please try again later. The…

Bill Clinton, Andrew Hetherington for Newsweek Next week in Chicago, the Clinton Global Initiative will focus on America for the first time, inviting business and political leaders to make specific commitments in support of the former president’s jobs blueprint, which he details below. Harry Hopkins…