In journalism, we think our job is to “get the story.” We teach the skill of “knowing what a story is.” We call ourselves “storytellers.” We believe that through stories — or as we also…
Their public conference had been interrupted by a demonstration march and a bomb threat, so the white nationalists decided to meet secretly instead. They slipped past police officers and protesters in
You’re Not Stuck In Traffic You Are Traffic This started with a drivetime conversation about contemporary design with Joi Ito. We were stuck in traffic, and in our conversation, a question emerged abo
Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Photos by Shutterstock. These days I write more than I code, but one of the things I miss about programming is the coder’s high: those times when, for
The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association
From left: Rob Park, Brad Katsuyama and Ronan Ryan. Before the collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, Brad Katsuyama could tell himself that he bore no responsibility for that system. He worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, for a start. RBC might have been the fifth-biggest bank in North…
If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pi
GreatDismal: One of the most remarkable things I've read in a long while. 'Cloud Atlas' author David Mitchell on his son's autism http://t.co/piu176FJ6h
I ‘m a video-game reviewer who insists on playing 90 percent of my games set to the “Hard” difficulty. I’m also an idiot. Why do I do this to myself? I have no idea. Possibly it’s just simple masochis
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocke
Vince Gilligan clearly enjoys the decompression process. A few days after Season 5.1 of “Breaking Bad” ended, I had a chance to briefly catch up with him, as he was deep into a round of exit interview
1989 Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existe
To understand how air-force navigator Tyler Stark ended up in a thornbush in the Libyan desert in March 2011, one must understand what it’s like to be president of the United States—and this president in particular. Hanging around Barack Obama for six months, in the White House, aboard Air Force…
This may be the year where newspapers finally drop the idea of treating all news as a product, and all readers as customers. One early sign of this shift was the 2010 launch of paywalls for the London Times and Sunday Times . These involved no new strategy; however, the newspaper world was finally…
Ali Soufan, as the F.B.I.’s lead investigator on the U.S.S. Cole bombing, suspected a larger Al Qaeda plot. Credit Illustration by Steve Brodner On October 12, 2000, in the deep-water port of Aden, Yemen, the U.S.S. Cole, a guided-missile destroyer weighing eighty-three hundred tons, was docked at a…
Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” Atlanta IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood…
No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course. Credit Photoillustration by John Ritter Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters…
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic…
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