Luke Leighfield
Y ou can tell a lot about a person by watching him lose. I did not suggest Ping-Pong specifically because I thought Jonah Hill would lose at it, but rather because his initial suggestion for an interview activity — tennis — presented logistical complications: specifically, the problem of trying to…
A little thing like capitalization can be a big deal Can you spot the differences with the messages above? The left side has a few more capital letters than the right side. Big O, little o. Who cares, right? Well, if you write for an app or website, you should care. A little thing like…
TED Talks Usage Policy Privacy Policy Advertising / Partnership TED.com Terms of Use Jobs Press Help © TED Conferences, LLC. All rights reserved.
When physical fitness meets the literary life. From a poster for the Works Progress Administration’s Recreation Project, ca. 1936. Young people are a mess. They eat the crappiest fast food, make a point of drinking only to excess, barely sleep, indulge in all sorts of chemicals—and yet, given even a…
Image: Ventral is Golden. There is the language adults use with each other and the language they use with children, which, in linguistics, is known as “child-directed” or “caretaker” speech. Caretaker speech obeys a separate grammar from adult speech, with diminutive inflections and suffixes. It…
The moral high ground of food just shifted a little bit. Using biophysical simulation models to compare 10 eating patterns, researchers found that eating fewer animal products will increase the number of people that can be supported by existing farmland. But as it turns out, eliminating animal…
Nope. I didn't see it. Not live, as it unfolded, not Friday morning, as the spin kept rolling in. I have my limits, and my limit is voluntarily watching Donald Trump officially accept the Republican nomination for president of the United States. And over the next few months, I promise to not watch a…
W hen Steve first came to my consulting room, it was hard to square the shambling figure slumped low in the chair opposite with the young dynamo who, so he told me, had only recently been putting in 90-hour weeks at an investment bank. Clad in baggy sportswear that had not graced the inside of a…
On her sweat-stained road to Rio, Greek-American distance runner Alexi Pappas has learned that success can be measured in messy moments. After training with her new Greek Olympic team in Karpenisi, Pappas is spending her final days leading up to the Olympics training in Mammoth Lakes, California.…
Photo by Derek Keats If you had asked 22-year-old me what my “career aspirations” were, I would have looked at you blankly and then casually changed the subject to what programs you’d recommend to model cute 3D bunnies for a video game, or whether the writers of Alias would be so devious as to ship…
A journalist from the Times called the Olympic rematch between Johnny Hayes and Dorando Pietri “the most spectacular foot race that New York has ever witnessed.” Photograph by David Lees / Corbis On Sunday, more than fifty thousand runners will mass behind the starting line of the New York City…
Share this Share this... Facebook Stepping into Natasha Khan’s East London home feels transformative. Outside, the morning sky is filled with low-hanging clouds, the heat oppressive in its humidity. Inside, save for the sound of Joni Mitchell’s Clouds wafting from a turntable in the study, a calming…
What family means to the world’s longest-married couple after 88 years together Kartari Chand, aged 101, and Karam Chand, 109, have the world’s longest known marriage. After 88 years together, their relationship and their family – including eight children, 26 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren…
Get Motivated Get Motivated Procrastination's main instigator? Insecurity. 0 Richard Petty , a psychology professor at Ohio State University has spent decades studying confidence. He defines confidence as this: the stuff that turns thoughts into action. Why? Because confidence first turns our…
Get Motivated Get Motivated Will we ever decouple perceived effort and long hours with our rewards system? 0 As you sink into the couch, or slide onto the barstool, at the end of an exhausting workday, it’s hard not to experience the warm glow of self-congratulation. After all, you put in the hours,…
The toast of this year’s American festival circuit, Thunder Road triumphantly debuts online today after winning awards at Sundance, SXSW, Los Angeles, and Palm Springs, including the coveted Jury Prize at both Sundance and LA. It’s hard to get stronger festival validation than what Thunder Road has…
Streetwear Supreme exists within the nebulous genre of streetwear, which emerged from the nexus of workwear brands, athletic gear, and hip-hop style in the early 1980s. Nike released its Air Jordans in 1984, just as Run DMC repped Adidas and LL Cool J popularized Kangol bucket hats. Also in 1984, a…
“I put lipstick on a pig,” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter, says. He feels “deep remorse.” Illustration by Javier Jaén Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald…
Heather Meyerend examines Mary, a ninety-two-year-old woman, at her home, in Marine Park, Brooklyn, in September, 2015. Mary died later that month. Heather believes in caring for the whole person, body and mind. Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker Heather Meyerend is a hospice nurse who…
Is the ubiquity of headphones just another emblem of catastrophic social decline, edging us even deeper into narcissism and unsociability? PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN PARR / MAGNUM Anyone who has recently spent time in a public space—traversing the aisle of an airplane, say, lurching toward your seat…
Ringer illustration In the Internet Age, monoculture is unachievable. But there remain a few things that we can all agree on. The Ringer is looking at this rarefied group all week. These are our Undeniables . Google Maps software engineer Andrew Lookingbill still remembers the night he and his…
A new app lets women charge for a night out. Will dating join the on-demand economy? Tara* had struck gold. After spending a lazy Saturday afternoon browsing through the dating app she was currently experimenting with, she hit it off with a nice-sounding guy, and the two exchanged real names and…
People have speculated for centuries about a future without work, and today is no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning that technology is replacing human workers. Some imagine that the coming work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own…
SAN FRANCISCO — The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was sitting at his kitchen table in his North Beach apartment on a drizzly morning, telling a story about Allen Ginsberg, when he hopped up suddenly and bounded out of the room to retrieve his hearing aid. “At my age, if it’s not one thing, it’s…
Are you familiar with that awful, pleasurable sound the Facebook messenger app makes when you refresh it? I certainly am… In the middle of doing hard, important, no-fun work, those tiny moments of reprieve glow like a fata morgana to a thirsty woman crawling the desert of academic boredom. My brain…
IDEAS McInerny hosts the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking A good way to become very popular is to be on your deathbed. Everyone wants to stop by, drop off a casserole (I’m in the Midwest), say the deep and meaningful things they always meant to say, have a poignant moment, a cinematic hand…
Photo Credit: Chuck Wilkins via Compfight cc As far back as I can remember, I always had this yearning to become a writer. When I got my first computer, after I realized how slow the internet was, and somehow figured out that I wasn’t going to be a programmer, I did the one thing I knew I could do…
A study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May 2016, found that what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve. In fact, researchers found that reading content and frequency may exert more significant impacts on students’ writing…
Private prisons are shrouded in secrecy. I took a job as a guard to get inside—then things got crazy
Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. Chapter 1: “Inmates Run This Bitch” H ave you ever had a riot?” I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). “The last riot we had was two years ago,” he says over the phone. “Yeah, but that…
You’ll be sitting this inning out. Photo: James Ryce/Getty Images The texts would arrive every few weeks and rarely deviated from a pattern: a link to an Onion story, a Housewives GIF , or a simple “Hey, how are you?” T. and I had gone on maybe three dates, but we were still exchanging the…
Credit: Red Bull Photofiles The truth about aging and fitness: Five fitness commandments to live by. Watching other people work out is endlessly interesting to me. Although I’ve tried many weird workouts over the years, the human drive to find new ways to get fit always amazes me. As I watch someone…
Human beings are the only creatures who can make themselves miserable. Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through self-views, judgments, expectations, regrets and comparisons with others. Because self-thought plays such a…
Han Cheng Yeh/Flickr Last year, a reporter in the Guardian described how the Man Booker Prize judges spent ‘a summer… devouring novel after magnificent novel’, culminating in their selection of ‘a (baker’s) dozen’. This is nothing unusual. The language of eating is often used to describe reading…
Photographed by Kate Anglestein I remember being 15 and flicking through magazines; every time I came across an interview with a pop singer or TV star, I’d frantically skim-read – not to find out their ideal boy or girlfriend, or their skincare routine, but to check their age. Then, I’d mentally…
Anthony Bourdain, the Distinguished Motherf*cker of Food, Is 60 America's culinary renegade is now part of the food establishment. That doesn't mean he's not pushing boundaries—and still mortified of writing a bad sentence. WRITTEN BY JOHN BIRDSALL PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID CABRERA / ANDY HUR The man…
Marc Burckhardt On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a…
The ancient Romans believed in generous vacations: They took sightseeing tours for two to five years at a time. In more recent centuries, Europeans of means and faint constitutions spent multiple months languishing at spas. Even Jesus withdrew for 40 days and 40 nights to find some peace and quiet…
Reset your password Blog By Anne T. Donahue on Thursday, Jun 23rd, 2016 Back to the Blog Web and Android coming soon. Get the lemon Newsletter Best of Series: The Best Online Checking Account Learn Money, Inc. 81 Prospect Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 © 2016 Learn Money, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal.…
Work / Photography Lunching at your desk is never a glamorous affair; crumbs gather in your keyboard, mayo gets smeared on your mouse and the reality of spending more time at your desk at work than at home slowly sets in as you gulp down the low fat yoghurt you bought as a “treat”. Capturing the…
No articles.