I once downloaded a speed-reading app that would flash individual words across my phone. I aggressively set the rate to 400 words per minute and braced for the onslaught. I used this system to parse essays, primers, and long-form interviews, all in the name of advancing my career. Yet, all I had to…

Nutritional Media: Part Two of The Media Pyramid Media Pyramid 1.5 — thanks for feedback and comments so far! PART ONE: YOU ARE THE MEDIA YOU EAT PART THREE: WHY WE LIKE THINGS THAT ARE BAD FOR US We Hunger for Ideas A defining aspect of humanity is that we are driven, fed and led by ideas as well…

Here is an anecdote about a very small and seemingly irrelevant occurrence that happened way back in like, 2009. It doesn’t involve anyone you’ve ever heard of and it’s honestly not that interesting. But trust me, once you make it to the end of this thing, it’ll all make total sense, and you’ll feel…

If two examples constitute a trend, then a movement is afoot among editors to encourage short writing. It began at The Washington Post, where an editor argued that many stories could be tighter. Before you could say “Strunk and White,” an editor at The Wall Street Journal made the same case. What…

In an Amsterdam supermarket, a new “plastic-free” aisle is a microcosm of the entire store. It’s possible to buy around 700 items–meat, sauces, produce, yogurt, snacks, cereal, drinks, enough for a week’s worth of groceries–but nothing is packaged in conventional plastic. Any package that looks like…

I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.…

The end of an era: Marc Maron in the garage where he began the “WTF” podcast. Credit Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times By Photographs by Elizabeth Weinberg LOS ANGELES — By the end of March, one of the most famous rooms in comedy will close its doors when Marc Maron leaves the garage where…

Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a 30-minute drive into town for coffee and a scone at his favorite coffee shop in Athens, Ohio. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times GLOUSTER, Ohio — At first, the experiment didn’t have a name. Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d…

Chapter 1 Gerald Selbee broke the code of the American breakfast cereal industry because he was bored at work one day, because it was a fun mental challenge, because most things at his job were not fun and because he could —because he happened to be the kind of person who saw puzzles all around him,…

Artwork by Raul Soria . In design, “white space” is negative space. It’s not blank space because it has a purpose. It is balancing the rest of the design by throwing what is on the page (or the screen) into relief. The white space helps focus your visual attention. Now let’s expand this concept of…

Illustration by La Boca . Do you leave your front door open, allowing anyone who chooses to walk in and command your attention? I highly doubt it. And yet this is exactly how our email inboxes function. Your email is the front door for access to your work identity. And anyone who has access to the…

Heavy specialty blankets have been used for decades as therapeutic aids. Now they’re going mainstream. Illustration by Pepa Prieto Puy Late one night last October, I was practicing what I like to callanti-self-care—lying under the covers, scrolling compulsively on myphone, and vaguely hoping that…

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present. Well, I guess it’s a little more complicated than that. The first two years Two years in, I loved Google. When the annual employee survey asked…

Delta There’s a lot of cool stuff to do and see in the world, and Delta wants to help you get on it pronto. A gorgeous new almost-minute-long ad from Wieden + Kennedy New York makes that familiar case in a surprisingly fresh way, stringing together footage from more than 15 destinations serviced by…

Apple Spike Jonze has long been deeply embedded in the dance world. He explored movement in everything from the Fatboy Slim videos he helped to choreograph in the late ’90s, to Levi’s “Crazy Legs” commercial a few years later, all the way up to the famous 2016 Kenzo film he directed starring…

Vincent Stanley in conversation with Nikki Stefanoff Photos supplied by Patagonia This profile was first published in Mini Matters. Vincent Stanley has worked for Patagonia his whole life and, alongside his uncle and Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard, has built a business more passionate about the…

One day in mid-November, I followed a crowd of teenagers from Trump Tower to Washington Square Park in the pouring rain. They were protesting President Trump’s election and I was writing about them. In order to talk to as many kids as possible, I kept running ahead in the protest, falling behind as…

‘The idea that the poor should be forced to work for board and basic subsistence has been revived without a murmur of public disapproval.’Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Daniel Lavelle is a postgraduate journalism student at Goldsmiths, University of London. This is his winning entry for the…

Pixel Dust Digital Frank Sinatra. Michael Jackson. Ray Charles. Malcolm X. Elon Musk. Truman Capote. Buzz Aldrin. Prince. Tupac. Even Leni Riefenstahl. Quincy Jones has run with them all. Chris Heath stays up late with the 84-year-old music legend who has a tale to go with every famous name. "I feel…

It has been one year and 28 days since my last tweet. I deactivated my account shortly after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!” on Jan. 2, 2017. The tweet…

In 2013, Jason Kottke wrote a prediction for Nieman Lab’s year-end roundup: “ The blog is dead, long live the blog. ” Kottke was then (and still is) owner of one of the longest continuously running blogs on the web: kottke.org , founded in 1998. “Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In…

Today's discussion video is all about that feeling you get as a fan of music, the fatigue that sets in sometimes. Make sure you join in on the discussion in the comments section! Support Deep Cuts! - https://ko-fi.com/I2I35VNR…

All it had taken was a moment’s distraction. In a well-practiced sleight of hand, the cashier had double-bagged in plastic a dozen eggs, which were already encased in two protective layers of plastic. I briefly contemplated appealing for the liberation of my groceries but chose the path of least…

L ast spring, a dozen people filtered into a sunny, whitewashed conference room on the seventh floor of the Royal College of Art, overlooking London’s Hyde Park. Mostly Western Europeans from different precincts of the fashion industry, they had been called together by a British man named David…

This is an excerpt from Ryan Holiday’s new book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue , available now. Peter Thiel’s vague idea to do something about Gawker , the site that had outed him as gay in 2007, was concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. It began…

Ten years ago Shaun Smith was an enforcer for one of the biggest crime families in Liverpool and embroiled in a war against a rival drug gang. Shaun introduced urban terrorism to the British underworld. He sprayed up houses with machine guns, tortured people and used homemade napalm to firebomb his…

PepsiCo wants to rethink how and what consumers drink–and it has invented an entirely new system to give people a healthier alternative to soda. The company’s newest venture is centered on a 20-ounce reusable water bottle that comes with sets of flavor pods. [Image: PepsiCo] The new product line,…

The new year is the perfect time to finally take up ceramics, learn Mandarin, start a book club, start rock-climbing, or plant a garden. In 2018, the Cut has practical advice on trying something new. Make bowls, not just resolutions. I am a daughter of the Midwest, practically born with a glue gun…

S hivaun Moeran and Adam Raff met, married and started a company — thereby sparking a chain of events that might, ultimately, take down this age of internet giants as we know it — because they were both huge nerds. In the late 1980s, Adam was studying programming at the University of Edinburgh,…

Jack Dorsey: We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress. Commenter zestyping at Hacker News : Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don’t mean…

Given the level of unpredictability out there around the funding of the arts and other cultural efforts in the US, I panicked this morning when I thought of losing my fav essay on the clunky PBS site. Here it is just in case. “Personal Renewal” Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ November…

In 1999 I made these four rules for myself to live by. I can’t remember what motivated my putting these down to paper — I recall that it was shortly after I became a professor at MIT and was trying to figure out this “leadership” thing. I still strive to live by these rules every day — failing more…

“I, Tonya” tells the true story of Tonya Harding, an American figure-skating champion who was banned from the sport after her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, was assaulted in 1994. Or maybe that should be the true stories, plural. What happened, according to the press notes, was that the film’s screenwriter,…

‘I hit a hornets’ nest at the most propitious time’ ... Jordan B Peterson giving a lecture at the University of Toronto.Photograph: Rene Johnston/Toronto Star/Getty Images T he Canadian psychology professor and culture warrior Jordan B Peterson could not have hoped for better publicity than his…

In December 2015, I wrote a story about the potential uses of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. That piece, based on a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C., quoted six men and one woman. The six men included five scientists and one historian, all quoted for their professional…

Never miss a talk! SUBSCRIBE to the TEDx channel: http://bit.ly/1FAg8hB Magnus Walker talks about his life journey of following his passion and going with his gut feeling which eventually led him to turning his dreams into his reality. TEDxUCLA was organized by UCLA Extension Visual Arts…

Illustration: Trevor Fraley T his is not urgent. Don’t look at it while you’re at the family dinner table. Don’t glance at it from behind the wheel during your drive home from work. Don’t lean off your yoga mat and interrupt the few precious moments you’ve set aside for transcendental meditation.…

Who delivers Amazon orders? Increasingly, it’s plainclothes contractors with few labor protections, driving their own cars, competing for shifts on the company’s own Uber-like platform. Though it’s deployed in dozens of cities and associated with one of the world’s biggest companies, government…

O n Oct. 11, 2016, Michael Foster and two companions rose before dawn, left their budget hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., and drove a white rental sedan toward the Canadian border, diligently minding the speed limit. The day was cold and overcast, and Foster, his diminutive frame wrapped in a down…