On April 28, 2014, a fishing trawler intercepted an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, a day after the tanker had left Dubai for Greece. Three men climbed aboard the tanker and spent the night packing hu

“HUMAN inventiveness…has still not found a mechanical process to replace horses as the propulsion for vehicles,” lamented Le Petit Journal , a French newspaper, in December 1893. Its answer was to organise the Paris-Rouen race for horseless carriages, held the following July. The 102 entrants…

It was the fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s US Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of…

1 Nestor Tabares must have known the hijackers were out there, waiting. It was his 13th day at sea aboard the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso , and as the ship turned east, into the pirate-strewn waters off Somalia, the 54-year-old chief engineer would have understood that it made for an obvious…

Just because you didn’t work last weekend doesn’t mean you had a good weekend. White-collar workers are logging longer hours than a generation ago, and Americans excel at the losing game of competitive busyness. In this context, a weekend without email and spreadsheets might seem like a victory in…

“I don’t envy you,” Pam jumped in after some pleasantries, “I don’t think you really get what you’re up against.” “Up against?” I asked. “You’re Steve’s guy.” I must have given Pam a terribly puzzled look, because I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Pixar and Steve have a long history,” she went on. “Not…

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” goes the saying — one that now seems like a relic of simpler times. Today, President Trump is sticking with his own facts — his claim that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the election — in the face of testimony to the…

One More Thing Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (of Just Insane) New Mothership 05.16.17 On June 7, 2011, a local businessman addressed a meeting of the Cupertino City Council. He had not been on the agenda, but his presence wasn’t a total surprise. Earlier in the year the man had expressed his…

This is a pretty darn good interview with Tim Cook around how Apple has changed post Steve https://t.co/qWq85RZJzI

Great parent read RT How to raise a brilliant child without screwing them up | Life and style | The Guardian https://t.co/LMjSblmYPE

T his April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of…

I. Into the Night On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before…

Minh Uong/The New York Times If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School , whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts:…

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American…

Every summer when he was a boy, Satchin Panda would stay on his grandparents’ farm near Chandipur on the east coast of India. He lazed in a hammock, caught fish in the lake and climbed trees to pick mangoes. His grandfather spent most of his 91 years there, working on his 20-acre plot. He produced…

Orphaned Better Place charging stations along Route 90, Israel’s longest highway, photographed in March 2014. CEO Shai Agassi hired noted designer and fellow Israeli Gadi Amit to style them. [Photo by Loulou d’Aki] "So this is the car." I'm standing outside a shopping mall somewhere in Tel Aviv,…

A 12-year-old Owen at Walt Disney World. From the Suskind family In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared. Just shy of his 3rd birthday, an engaged, chatty child, full of typical speech — “I love you,” “Where are my Ninja Turtles?” “Let’s get ice cream!” — fell silent. He cried,…

Moneyspinners, clockwise from top left: Gold Diggers of 1933, Woody Guthrie, The Beatles, Kanye West, Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys, David Geffen and Joni Mitchell, Abba It was a strangely dressed supergroup from Sweden who put it most succinctly: “Money, money, money, Must be funny, In the rich man’s…

The DWYL-inspired apartment of designer Jessica Walsh. Photo courtesy Mario de Armas/ design*sponge “Do what you love. Love what you do.” The command is framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog…

Artwork: Freegums , Good Vibrations , 2011, acrylic on wood, 8′ x 15′ Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a…

Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire , when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a…

ECONOMICS The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It , by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, Princeton, RRP£19.95/$29.95 This is the most important book to have come out of the financial crisis. It argues, convincingly, that the problem with banks is that they operate…

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence .” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they…

Interview With My Mom, One Who Stayed Home by Roxane Gay My parents have been married for 40 years, and what they modeled for my brothers and me has shaped so much of who I am. My mom, Nicole, is one of the smartest people I know. She’s also very funny. It is only now, in my thirties, that I’ve been…

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now.…

After years of debate and study, in 2007 McKinsey & Company initiated a series of business model innovations that could reshape the way the global consulting firm engages with clients. One of the most intriguing of these is McKinsey Solutions, software and technology-based analytics and tools that…

If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it. Credit Illustration by Yan Nascimbene The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning,…

Scary myths and scary data abound about life as a tenure-track faculty at an "R1" university. Scary enough to make you wonder: why would any smart person want to live this life? As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it?…

I t happened this spring, in the 2012 Virginia Scholastic and Collegiate Chess Tournament. Both Quentin Moore and his opponent, a rising star on the D.C.-area chess scene named Clark Smiley, came into their match undefeated over the weekend-long competition. So the state title and an expenses-paid…

T he great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected. The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man.…

Our financial elites are the new secessionists.

Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. Tape Installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times. Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most…

Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to…

Image credit: Phillip Toledano Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister…

It almost seems as if we’re trying to raise a nation of “adultescents.” Credit Illustration by Christoph Abbrederis In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live…

You know the drill. It's Monday morning. You arrive at work exhausted from a weekend spent entertaining the kids, paying bills, and running errands. You flick on your PC -- and 70 new emails greet you. Your phone's voice-mail light is already blinking, and before you can make it stop, another call…

Imagine going into an espresso bar, as I did in Tokyo, ordering a single shot, and being told that it's not on offer. The counter at No. 8 Bear Pond may feature the shiniest, spiffiest, newest La Marzocco, as well as a Rube Goldberg–esque water-filtration system, but the menu, which lists lattes and…

Longform Best of 2011

Longform Best of 2011

Every week Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change their name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the…