This week, a new startup called Brandless started selling a mix of household goods and food online with the goal of changing consumption habits and making quality food affordable . As the name suggests, Brandless is trying to emphasize the products it sells rather than the brand itself. But creating…

Going for a jog? That question used to make my blood boil. No, I am not going for a “jog”, I do not jog, I run, I would say. I am a Runner. Running was serious, dynamic, intentional, a permanent state. Jogging was something other people did. Occasionally, slowly, and wearing heavy duty cotton. God,…

Malcolm Gladwell , known for his deep inquiries into how the social sciences impact our day-to-day lives, recently sat down for a talk with Adam Grant , a Wharton psychology professor whose latest book, Originals, deals with the character traits that foster creative success. In this conversation, at…

Like "homecoming" and "curfew", "popular" is one of those words we tend to associate with high school; and understandably so, since that's the era of our lives when social status can be a daily crushing concern. But even in the thick of those angsty teenage years, you probably sensed that there was…

Strunk Rule: Omit needless words Trump Rule: No word is needless. They’re all great! Terrific! They’re fantastic words! I know about fantastic words! On Day One, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. We will use the best technology,…

Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?

The Committee on Moral Books (1866) by Jehan-Georges Vibert. Courtesy Wikipedia We’ve done it. You probably have, too. No matter what we believe about morality or politics, we’ve all used moral talk to project an impressive and morally respectable image of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that one…

(And why you should too) As I write this it’s the first week of May, and there’s an energetic buzz in the air — because it means that Summer Hours are about to start here at Basecamp. The description of Summer Hours in our employee handbook is simple: During summer, we work 4-day work weeks, aka…

Master of None , which just returned for an impeccable second season, is a stylish, studied comedy about identity, self-discovery, and the winding path toward fulfillment. (Not to mention pork and pasta. It’s also about those.) Although the show is an extremely personal expression from creators Aziz…

When Dwayne Johnson meets you (and I can assure you, he would love to), the first thing he will do is ask you six thousand questions about yourself, and remember the answers forever. If you are a child, good luck getting past Dwayne Johnson without a high five or some simulated roughhousing; if…

F or me, Brexit fell from the sky. On the night of 23 June last year, while the referendum count was in progress, I was flying home from an Observer job in New York. When we took off from JFK the pilot, in his measured British Airways tones, mentioned that several people had been asking him the…

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family 点击这里阅读中文版本 (Chinese) | Alex Tizon passed away in March. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self . For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note . T he ashes filled a black plastic…

Ambling onto the Art Deco set of “The Tonight Show” for his monologue rehearsal one Monday afternoon, Jimmy Fallon gave the crowd here at Studio 6B a warm, practiced welcome before trying out a new batch of jokes about the French election, the pop star Harry Styles and President Trump’s definitions…

Who doesn ’t want to be more efficient? Pay someone else to do your grocery shopping — and clean your house, walk your dog, take that package to the post office. Blend your food so you don’t have to spend time chewing it. Don’t waste time remembering to buy toilet paper; just sign up for an Amazon…

PARIS — Last month, the face of Marine Le Pen appeared on my computer screen. The headline under the picture read, “Marine Le Pen in Round 2.” The leader of France’s far-right National Front, she had advanced to a runoff vote in the presidential election. I immediately thought of my father, a…

Think of it as Airbnb for refugees, quips Robina Qureshi. It’s a simple premise: people with a spare room in their house are matched with a refugee or asylum seeker in need of somewhere to stay. And it’s a popular one: before 2015, Qureshi’s organisation, called Positive Action in Housing (PAIH),…

It was only 11 years ago that Jack Dorsey first sent a message via the experimental messaging platform that would be known as Twitter. He thought of it as a real-time status tool—a kind of smoke signal that would let your friends know where you were, what was on your mind, and whether you hiccuped.…

As he approaches his hundredth day in office, Donald Trump appears to be suffering—once again—from an acute case of presidential status anxiety. In public, of course, he has labored to play it cool, strenuously insisting (and insisting , and insisting ) that he does not care about the “first hundred…

Credit Illustration by T.S. Abe for The New York Times By SAN FRANCISCO — Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, visited Apple’s headquarters in early 2015 to meet with Timothy D. Cook, who runs the iPhone maker. It was a session that Mr. Kalanick was dreading. For months, Mr. Kalanick had…

Photo by Joshua Ness A growing number of people feel like an old carton of milk, with an expiration date stamped on their wrinkled foreheads. One paradox of our time is that Baby Boomers enjoy better health than ever, remain young and stay in the workplace longer, but feel less and less relevant.…

On “DAMN.,” he’s drawn to the idea of being judged by what we leave behind. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad At some point during 2015, Kendrick Lamar came to seem like much more than a rapper. One of his best songs, “Alright,” was adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement as an informal anthem;…

(Dan Evans Illustration) For more than a decade and a half, the Fast & Furious franchise has ripped, roared, and pressed every last NOS button on its way to action-franchise preeminence. To mark the release of The Fate of the Furious , the series’ eighth installment, we’re declaring it Fast 8 Week .…

How to make the most of your workday

‘Last year, Impossible Foods debuted its veggie burger that bleeds.’Photograph: Evan Sung/Impossible Foods S ome of the most anticipated and iconic promises of the future have come up empty. There are no flying cars, interstellar teleporters, floating hoverboards, or fully functional, live-in…

“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place to write from,” Morrison says. “It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” Photograph by Richard Avedon No. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lorain, Ohio, is a two-story frame house surrounded by look-alikes. Its small front porch is littered with the…

Biden in Washington on Dec. 14. Credit Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times J oe Biden’s personal compartment on the modified Boeing 757 that serves as Air Force Two had the feel of a motel manager’s office equipped with state-of-the-art communications gear. The room held a little black couch…

L ast fall, Adam, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, made the mistake of agreeing to do an "Ask Me Anything" session with a class of undergrads. It was a course on organizational behavior — psychology applied to work — but the students went straight for love. "What advice do you have for…

There is a simple and surprisingly durable myth about what causes men to rape women. It goes like this: if a man is too horny, from sexual deprivation or from being constitutionally oversexed, he will lose control in the presence of an unguarded woman. Through the early days of psychology as a…

took a shot at minimalism

So far, in my ongoing series of columns making the case for implausible ideas, I’ve fixed race relations and solved the problem of a workless working class . So now it’s time to turn to the real threat to the human future: the one in your pocket or on your desk, the one you might be reading this…

How Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Cancer Expert, Spends His Sundays

A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks. What ensued in the United States Court of Appeals for the…

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…