In August of 2015, my hands stopped working. I could still control them, but every movement accumulated more pain, so every motion came with a cost: getting dressed in the morning, sending a text, lifting a glass. I was interning at Google that summer about to begin a PhD in Scotland, but coding all…

More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about. I have a selfish reason for my demand: I have a lot of friends who are thoughtful, but keep their thoughts to…

The question facing Hacker News is whether the site’s original tech-intellectual culture can be responsibly scaled up to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology. Open-plan offices offer few pleasures; one of them is snooping on other people’s browsing habits. When, years…

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…

07.29.2019 Australians have an odd relationship with Antarctica. The fact that there's an even less hospitable piece of territory further to the south seems to soothe the young country, reassuring them that the attempt to re-create rural England on a vast slab of desert using convict labor wasn’t a…

Berlin’s reputation as a compulsively livable city where creative types can rent inexpensively and still afford to do as they please is eroding. Photograph by Katja Hoffmann / laif / Redux Last New Year’s Eve was my first in Berlin. We live at the edge of Wedding, a neighborhood just north of the…

A long, long time ago, that is, in days of film photography, it was a rather difficult task to learn how to produce properly exposed pictures. There was no instant feedback and the only way to see how good of a job you did exposing the scene was to wait until the picture was developed. Nowadays,…

How to assess the quality of garments: A beginner's guide What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you see one. You need to be able to tell the difference between a durable, well-crafted piece and one…

How to assess the quality of garments part II: Seams, tailoring, linings & details As promised, here comes part II of the quality beginner's guide: all about assessing seams, linings, tailoring and details like buttons and pockets. If you haven't yet, make sure you also check out part I for some…

I think I amat least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me forproductivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compoundgrowth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well,and it is magic. A small productivitygain,…

By Marty Nemko If you are a star—very bright, talented, motivated, andpersonable and you have a passion, even if it’s in acompetitive field, sure, go for it. This article is for everyone else. Based on the 2,700 clients I’ve worked with over the pasttwo decades, the hundreds of callers to my…

André Staltz The Web began dying in 2014, here's how 30 Oct 2017 Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally…

Photo: The Voorhes estimated that residents of the United States bought 183 million smartphones in 2016. There are already as many TVs in this country as there are people. That’s a lot of electronics, and these numbers are just going up. On balance, all this technology is probably making our lives…

08.20.2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called…

Next post Previous post Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the remarkable clarity of the writing done by Ritchie and the other early Unix developers at Bell Labs. The…

Former Google software engineer James Damore. Photo: Peter Duke By James Damore Aug. 11, 2017 3:54 pm ET I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the…

By now, most of us have heard about Google's so-called "anti-diversity" manifesto and how James Damore, the engineer who wrote it, has been fired from his job. Titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, Mr. Damore called out the current PC culture, saying the gender gap in Google's diversity was not…

Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language. And some spoilers. The goal was for the aggression to stay on the blacktop at Baltimore’s neighborhood-famous Cloverdale Courts . Proposition Joe’s Eastside squad was going up against Avon Barksdale ’s Westside unit. The losing team would have to…

meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Y ou were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the…

Share 7.0K Share I am reprinting this from an email I received from Malidoma Some , a west African Shaman whom I’ve had the privilege to meet, drive around Boulder, and work for for two days. Since I am going through what I believe to be a spiritual emergence , I am reading a lot on the topic. I…

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay . Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just…

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, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their…

Daniel Dennett’s naturalistic account of consciousness draws some people in and puts others off. “There ain’t no magic here,” he says. “Just stage magic.” Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted.…

A good sign of a philosophically sound interactive Unix tool is the facilitiesit offers for interacting with the filesystem and the shell: specifically, howeasily can you run file operations and/or shell commands with reference to datawithin the tool? The more straightforward this is, the more…

It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather than the direction they are pointed. But reflecting on the other side of the issue is also interesting: I find that the more input I have…

Housing prices have soared in fashionable Berlin neighborhoods like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Under pressure from a growing grass-roots movement, the city has put in place measures to fight gentrification. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times BERLIN — When visitors want to experience this…

Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick Credit Icinori Jet lag makes everyone miserable. But it makes some people mentally ill. There’s a psychiatric hospital not far from Heathrow Airport that is known for treating bipolar and schizophrenic travelers, some of whom are occasionally found…

Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berlin apartment had for me two facets, both familiar from literature, film, and art. The working-class…

I recently found myself facing a vending machine in a quiet corridor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I was due to speak at a conference called ‘Reinvent Money’ but, suffering from jetlag and exhaustion, I was on a search for Coca-Cola. The vending machine had a small…

On the evening of November 9, having barely been awake to see the day, I took the subway to Sunset Park. My objective was to meet a friend at the arcade Next Level . In size, Next Level resembles a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. It does indeed serve food — free fried chicken and shrimp were…

Illustration by Jasu Hu The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a…

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. An Italian newspaper reporting on Donald Trump retweeting himself depicted as Pepe the Frog in September of 2016. credit: Serena Danna / Corriere della Serra . 1. Born from Something Awful A round 2005 or…

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Illustration by Gérard DuBois In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In…

The unceasingly curious composer on chance, minimalism, and the politics of form. Photos by Shamil Tanna Visiting Brian Eno ’s studio in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, there’s plenty to catch the eye. Shelves sag beneath books and records, a spiral staircase climbs up toward the rafters, and a…

Ornette Coleman was not scheduled to perform at the all-star concert held in his honor, back in the summer of 2014. That celebration, at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, was chiefly organized as a way for fans and associates to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s legacy as an American composer and innovator .…

Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. February 1, 2017 This article was contributed by Eddie Kovsky 2016 was a big year for project anniversaries.…

In 1999, the Roots were in limbo. The Philadelphia hip-hop band had released three critically acclaimed albums but were still considered something of a novelty act, featuring a big guy with a big Afro on drums ( ?uestlove ), a sharp but unshowy MC (Black Thought), two beatboxers (Rahzel and…

How the space jazz icon’s radical and regal garments projected a hopeful realm outside of the very troubled real world. Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns/GettyImages This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review . Buy back issues of the magazine here . The year is 1972,…

We do this to our philosophies. We redraft their contours based on projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a caricaturist emphasising all the wrong features. This is how Buddhism becomes, in the popular imagination, a doctrine of passivity and even laziness, while Existentialism…

It is a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town in France. Two men meet at a cafe. One of them, Berenger, is half-drunk. He is being berated by his companion, Jean. All of the sudden, they hear a great noise. When they and other townspeople crane their necks to figure out what’s going on, they see a…