O n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles. So began a career as an endurance runner. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive…

Ricky Jay photographed by Richard Avedon in New York City, March 4, 1993. The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted…

I t’s eleven p.m. on Thursday, September 17, 1925 – “Black Thursday” to the residents of Sing Sing prison in New York’s Hudson Valley. The inmates are locked down for the night, unable to leave their cells. All except one. Prisoner Julius Miller, with four guards as well as the chaplain in tow, just…

Most notably, 61% of the company’s senior team is female, as are 50% of its executives.

Travis Kalanick’s bellicose style served him as he built Uber. Now it’s hurting the company. Hey Backchannelers, it’s Jessi. As I watched Uber’s pugnacious CEO get called out for being rude to a driver earlier this week, I thought back to the first time I wrote about him, in 2013. A week before…

Few women in Silicon Valley were surprised by the revelations about Uber detailed this month by Susan Fowler, a software engineer who published an exposé on the culture of sexism and sexual harassment that she said she battled during her year at the ride-hailing company. For many women in Silicon…

‘Google’s data-driven diversity programme cost $2.65m but failed to significantly change the composition of its workforce.’Photograph: Erin Siegal/Reuters T hese are the dark times for diversity: in an era of walls, barricades and divisive rhetoric, how can it can ever hope to thrive? But then maybe…

(iStock) Mark Trifilio, principal of the public pre-K-5th grade Orchard School in Vermont, sat down with the school’s 40 educators last summer to discuss the soon-to-start new school year and homework — how much kids were getting and whether it was helping them learn. Trifilio had been pondering the…

Note: Amy Krouse Rosenthal died on March 13, 2017, 10 days after this essay was published. You can read her obituary here . In June, 2018, her husband published this response . I have been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five…

Leah Pearlman has grown wary of Facebook. The 35-year-old illustrator uses the social network to promote her business, Dharma Comics, but has set up various safeguards to avoid becoming too emotionally invested in the happenings on the site. She uses a web browser plug-in called News Feed…

never die words: laura yan photography: michael overbeck, zachary moxley Spencer Seabrooke takes a deep breath. He’s up high—290 meters, or about level with a 70-story skyscraper. If he dropped a rock, it would take eight seconds before he’d hear it land. Before him is a slackline stretched between…

We were keeping our eye on 1984. But it’s Brave New World we should have feared instead.Photograph: Flickr/Urban Integration Over the last year, as the presidential campaign grew increasingly bizarre and Donald Trump took us places we had never been before, I saw a spike in media references to…

Routines bring structure to our days so we can get the most out of them. In his book, Daily Rituals , author Mason Currey examines the routines of more than 150 great performers across diverse fields—artists, scientists, poets, mathematicians—and concluded that “a solid routine fosters a well-worn…

Illustrations by Nick Norwood & Ana Vasquez I’m putting less energy into social media and more into creating physical artifacts from my life. It’s an act of political rebellion and joy. P eople mean something specific when they complain about the internet — they’re sick of the social media…

Flo Morrissey and Matthew E. White at Spacebomb By Jethro Waters Listen to "Look At What The Light Did Now" and pre-order 'Gentlewoman, Ruby Man' here: http://www.smarturl.it/gentlewomanrub... Follow Flo Morrissey: http://www.facebook.com/flomorrissey http://www.twitter.com/flomorrissey…

In the future, a lot of people might look like Danielle Shewmake, a 21-year-old college student from Fort Worth, Texas. Shewmake has dark, curly hair, brown eyes, and an olive skin tone that causes many to mistake her heritage as Mediterranean. Her actual pedigree is more complex. Her father is…

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WASHINGTON — President Trump loves to set the day’s narrative at dawn, but the deeper story of his White House is best told at night. Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander…

The digital age is still in its nascent phase. The first iPhone was released in 2007, barely ten years ago, and now our pocket devices are constantly updated, promising a solution to fill the voids in our mind. Already, we have experienced a change in basis of expression. We swipe to find love,…

Picture Teddy Roosevelt boxing with a bear zDetail from a 1887 movement study by Eadweard Muybridge. (Library of Congress) J esus comes in many forms — rugged Jesus, hot Jesus, black Jesus, hippie Jesus, a barefoot dude tending his flock. During the Victorian era, it was sissy Jesus, a gentle man…

Creators Have Made $100M on Patreon 2016 was the best year, in the history of humans, to be a creative person. Over the last 10-15 years, the pipelines to audiences have been unlocked and free distribution channels have bloomed. If you have something to say, then fucking say it, because in 2017, no…

We all say “I’m sorry” too often—that much you already know. And, trust me, I’m right in that boat with you. I’m consciously aware of the fact that I’m a chronic over-apologizer. Sure, I’ve read the countless articles about apps that could help me and little tweaks that could stop me in my tracks…

Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful, but that might not surface when she goes to college. Have you had a chance to discuss them with her? I’ve had the chance to discuss some. And she’s interested in being a filmmaker, so storytelling is of great…

Something remarkable has happened over the last decade. For the first time in history we have gained the powers to build relationships with people all over the world, and to maintain those relationships with hardly any contact. We never need to lose touch with anyone, ever again, as our Facebook…

Technology is commanding our attention in infinite, insurmountable loops. A country trip off-grid helped me escape. There are a thousand beautiful ways to start the day that don’t begin with looking at your phone. And yet so few of us choose to do so. For twenty-eight days this winter I lived on the…

Franklin (seated) blends secular sounds with an uplifting devotional message. Photograph by Brent Humphreys for The New Yorker It’s hard to describe in a word what Kirk Franklin does for a living. Franklin, forty-six, is the most successful contemporary gospel artist of his generation, but he isn’t…

A lot of New Year’s resolutions are aimed at springing into action—whether the goal is losing weight, finding love or moving to a new city. But my main priority now is learning to be still. And the Chinese concept of strategic non-action—has helped me do just that. The Tao Te Ching , written in…

A few years ago, a fellow political journalist asked me, quite sincerely, whether depression "really is an illness". In 2016, when I decided to speak out about the mental illness that had forced me off sick for two months , the reaction could not have been kinder or more enlightened. I was…

I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog. Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account. At the moment, this makes me an outlier, but I think many more people should follow my lead and…

O ne morning in the summer of 2011 Bart Campolo left his house in Cincinnati for a long bicycle ride. Goateed and bald, but still trim and fit at 48, Campolo was the envy of his generation of evangelical pastors. That morning, Campolo was, as usual, a little self-conscious about his attire. “I feel…

We’ve lost our way. We’ve been bamboozled, tricked, fooled. We’ve been convinced that the final 1% is more important the beginning 99%. In our present world, gadgets, and hacks not only lead the way¬–they are the only way. Cryo-saunas, fasting, super foods, magical supplements, polyphasic sleep, and…

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity , “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a…

Ethel Mary Smyth Hulton Archive/Getty Images T his month at the Metropolitan Opera , audiences can see and hear, for the first time there in over a century, an opera composed by a woman — Kaija Saariaho's “L’Amour de Loin.” The milestone is shocking — and it can be explained, if not fully justified.…

A perfectly ripe strawberry sitting in a lab at a startup in Santa Barbara, California, looks and tastes exactly like any other perfectly ripe strawberry. But on the grocery store shelf, it would last twice as long as the regular strawberries you’re used to. It hasn’t been genetically modified, it…

Ian Allen “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong” In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party,…

In the days after the presidential election, Jessa Blades , an herbalist and makeup artist in Brooklyn who supported Hillary Clinton, was devastated. “All I could think to do was blend a tea to control my stress,” she said. Ms. Blades, 37, mixed three pounds of lemon balm, nettle, chamomile, rose…

We gaze into our crystal ball… (Image: The Universe in a Sphere ) Every December, we take a look back at big ideas from the past twelve months that promise to gain momentum in the new year. With more than eleven thousand projects launched between our Design and Tech categories in 2016, we have a…

The past year was almost certainly not the worst one ever, but 2016 does seem to have earned some sort of special designation. COURTESY YOUTUBE A meme is currently circulating on Twitter in which people post two contrasting photos: one is “me at the beginning of 2016”; the other is “me at the end of…