Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects…
A s long as the City of New York has owned Rikers Island, since the 1880s, it has been a place for the unwanted. For a time, pigs were raised for slaughter there. Not longer afterward, the island…
Atanasio, a cliff-face opening in the Sierra de Juárez mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The mountains are home to the Chevé system, some eighty-five hundred feet deep—potentially the…
Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left. Credit PHILLIP…
My father’s name is Rex. He is an intelligent man. Could have been, could have done anything I believe. Very capable, he tries things, takes risks, and is pragmatic. He chooses not to dwell on…
When I was 11 I loved designing web pages and playing Sim City. Adults in my life didn’t recognize these skills as valuable, so neither did I. Actually, I began to feel guilty for using my…
1 The software developer job interview doesn’t work. Companies should stop relying on them. The savviest teams will outcompete their peers by devising alternative hiring schemes. Years from…
A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two.…
TAKEOFF As we push back from our gate at Heathrow Airport we light the Boeing 747’s engines in pairs, starting with those under the starboard wing. A sudden hush falls in the cockpit as the…
ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often…
A Scrapbook of Late-night New York I Miss Last Night Already By Jay McInerney I am a lifelong insomniac, so it was inevitable that I would make New York my home. Even if I don’t venture out…
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be…
Aaron Bagley The prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked: Which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that…
UPDATE. I am living a nightmare before lunchtime. First, the sofa delivery people gave me a window of 7 AM to 7 PM, so I'm a prisoner in my own apartment. Second, worse, I am out of…
So what’s up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It’s mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML…
Aaron asked a while back “What do we own?” I love the idea of owning your content and then syndicating it out to social networks, photo sites, and the like. It makes complete…
What’s killing comedy.What’s saving America. The last time Frank Rich had a conversation with Chris Rock was in early 1996, when they and the 1950s teen heartthrob Pat Boone were thrown…
Cool front-end developers are always pushing the envelope, jumping out of their seat to use the latest and greatest and shiniest of UI frameworks and libraries. They are often found bridging the gap…
A is blind, and has been since birth. He’s always used a screen reader, and always used a computer. He’s a programmer, and he’s better prepared to use the web than most of the…
Marci was watching television in her fourth-floor walk-up on West Twenty-first Street on the day the water reached the base of the streetlights. She stood up from her couch and let her carton of…
Adventure Time is a smash hit cartoon aimed primarily at kids age six to eleven. It’s also a deeply serious work of moral philosophy, a rip-roaring comic masterpiece, and a meditation on…
[Ed. note: The below piece of writing is extremely funny. It is also extremely profane. The word irreverent does not go far enough. If you're offended by salty language and off-color humor, please…
Sweet disorder … Merce Cunningham. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Getty. Click to enlarge In February 1968, the avant-garde legend Marcel Duchamp hosted an informal dinner in New York for a group of local…
I wrote a README the other day for a project that I’m hoping other developers will look at and learn from, and as I was writing it, I realized that it was the sort of thing that might have…
INDIANA JONES is the ultimate action-hero academic: played by Harrison Ford, the indomitable professor outwits Nazis and other villains in search of religious relics, lost temples and alien…
Karen McGrane works in the gap between organizations with enormous stacks of unruly content and the emerging processes and systems that can help them impose order and sense. She also teaches at the…
The decorator pattern, also known as a wrapper, is a mechanism by which to extend the run-time behavior of an object, a process known as decorating. The pattern is often overlooked because its…
Wear Comfortable Shoes Yes, there are women who walk around New York in five-inch stilettos. There are also people who like to have sex hanging from a ceiling with a ball gag in their mouth. This…
Astronauts Land On Plain; Collect Rocks, Plant Flag A Powdery Surface Is Closely Explored By John Noble Wilford RELATED HEADLINES Voice From Moon: 'Eagle Has Landed' Voyage To The Moon: By Archibald…
Updated March 30, 2012 11:28 a.m. ET John Waters, the writer and director who emerged from the midnight movie circuit of the 1970s, has earned his status as a social critic. In 13 feature films,…
"You can tell what a wonderful man he was. Condolences to..." "Val, It's been years since I last saw you. But you were..." "I don't know you val but thanks for the honest letter" "I grew up around…
Anita Sarkeesian is a cultural critic who makes YouTube videos. A lot of people like her work: she tried to raise $6,000 via Kickstarter to fund a new set of videos about women in video games, and…
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city's neglected treasures.Photo: UX Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of…
This is where we smoke the stuff, and it gets very intense, keep it going twenty-four hours a day. It's pretty well full of meat, wouldn't you say? Let's check these bacon bellies. Let's see... one…
In March of 1962, acclaimed author John Steinbeck wrote the following letter to Edith Mirrielees — a lady who, as his professor of creative writing at Stanford 40 years…
It all started with Snow Crash. If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality,…
The Medium We seem to know a great deal about attention spans, those constituents of character that have become the digital-age equivalent of souls. Everyone has an attention span. It can be short…
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