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…

Alex Miller’s spare room had been on Craigslist for two weeks when, last March, she got the call she’d been waiting for. The man at the other end identified himself as Jed Creek. Creek was a lawyer from New York, but he had grown up just outside Philadelphia, only a few minutes’ drive from Miller’s…

Some quirk in me enabled me to ride the bare rails of my father’s memory into the past. Illustration by Greg Clarke Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. “You want to be a doctor, too?” the patient asks me, pushing up his left shirtsleeve…

Will they notice that you've left? There are lots of ways to be noticed. You can be loud. Argumentative. You can be sour, difficult, a bit of a diva. You can take umbrage at every opportunity, crack jokes at the expense of others, or merely scowl. You can use hyperbole, drama and shame to get your…

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The Death of Clothing Photos by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg By Lindsey Rupp Lindsey Rupp , Chloe Whiteaker Chloe Whiteaker , Matt Townsend Matt Townsend and Kim Bhasin Kim Bhasin The apparel industry has a big problem. At a time when the economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are rebounding and…

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Especially around Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for “date nights” and romantic dinners for two. But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it’s equally important to cultivate the skills of…

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine there is a long profile of a new kind of pedagogy unique to our particular stage of civilization. It’s called “porn literacy,” and it involves explaining to young people…

Video Premiere: Nervus “The Way Back” ~ words by tom johnson In the same way that it can be fleeting, fun, and fanciful music also has the ability to be powerful and provocative, and while music that aims for those latter sentiments can often come across as trite or untrue, there are moments, too,…

B eneath the bland veneer of supermarket automation lurks an ugly truth: There’s a lot of shoplifting going on in the self-scanning checkout lane. But don’t call it shoplifting. The guys in loss prevention prefer “external shrinkage.” Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo…

D rew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.” A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone. The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also…

Matthew the Horse Job Title Illustrator, Poet, Lecturer Based Leeds Selected Clients The Guardian , New York Times , The Economist , Converse, Crabbies Ginger Beer, Nature Magazine , National History Museum, Nobrow Books Previous Employment Graphic Designer, Copywriter, Greengrocer, Agricultural…

Photograph: bee32/Getty Images/iStockphoto I t’s not what you say, it’s how you say it – isn’t it? According to language analysts, we may have this wrong. ‘‘We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realise,” says Elizabeth Stokoe , professor of social interaction at Loughborough…

Media playback is unsupported on your device Tattoos can be frowned upon in Asian culture but tattoo artist Heleena Mistry explains how she’s using her Indian-inspired designs to challenge the taboo. She has more than twenty tattoos. Filmed and edited by Nalini Sivathasan, BBC Asian Network 07 Feb…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks to reporters during a media event at Facebook’s Headquarters office in Menlo Park, California. Photo: AFP/AFP/Getty Images Last month, in its second round of layoffs in as many years, comedy hub Funny or Die reportedly eliminated its entire editorial team…

In the winter of 1906, the year San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake and SOS became the international distress signal, Britain's Punch magazine published a dark joke about the future of technology. Under the headline, "Forecasts for 1907," a black and white cartoon showed a well-dressed…

Grizzly Bear has been a band for over 15 years now and you just released Painted Ruins , your 5th record. Is it funny to look back and try to trace the evolution of your work? Yes, certainly if you go far enough back. I can start uncovering things I did when I was a teenager that are just…

Pretend you are the lead detective on a hit new show, “CSI: Terrible Stuff on the Internet.” In the first episode, you set up one of those crazy walls plastered with headlines and headshots, looking for hidden connections between everything awful that’s been happening online recently. There’s a lot…

It’s an early evening in January, and David Harbour is already in his pajamas, lying on a mattress without sheets in a country club just outside of Los Angeles. Moments before, he had been jumping on the bed like a giddy teenager at a slumber party. He turns to his side, looks over his shoulder and,…

Part of a grassroots project called the Refill initiative, the stickers were first used in the city of Bristol in 2015. Two months later, 200 businesses had signed up, and the idea quickly spread to other parts of the country and international cities like Hamburg and Berlin . Around 1,600 “refill…

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To cash in on the growing anxiety that we are fast becoming a bunch of Wi-Fi-enabled cyborgs, the marketplace has spawned a new consumer category: products to free you from the crushing grip of always-on digital ubiquity. There are digital detox retreats : off-grid playgrounds where the habitually…

LONDON — When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the internet, there was a practical — as well as compulsive — reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines. “If you’re interviewing David Bowie , you don’t want to be like, ‘O.K., mate, what’s your…

Most people are products of their time. Only the rare few are its creators. Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) was one. A fierce thinker and largehearted, beautiful writer who considered writing an act of falling in love , Le Guin left behind a vast, varied body of work and…

One million plastic bottles are sold around the world each minute . Most are used for bottled water, and most end up in the trash. As demand for bottled water grows–particularly in China–so does the bottle problem. By 2021, humans will use an estimated half a trillion bottles plastic bottles a year.…

Not long ago a friend told me how she had come to end her relationship with WeWork , the entrepreneurial-class fun house that at recent count had been rolled out in 59 cities around the world. A playwright and producer, she had been renting office space at a WeWork location in Brooklyn when one…

When did finding something to put in your coffee get so complicated? For the lactose-intolerant or merely dairy-averse, there are more alternatives to good ol’ American cow’s milk than ever. First there were powdered “creamers,” with their troublesome corn syrup solids. Then came soy, which may come…

Alexey Boldin / Shutterstock / The Atlantic The defining feature of conversation is the expectation of a response. It would just be a monologue without one. In person, or on the phone, those responses come astoundingly quickly: After one person has spoken, the other replies in an average of just 200…

On “The End of the F***ing World,” intimacy doesn’t need to be healthy to be genuine. Illustration by Adrian Tomine The first person we meet on “The End of the F***ing World,” on Netflix, is James, a dour, pie-faced seventeen-year-old who is “pretty sure” he’s a psychopath. At nine, James tells us…