Moon at his last Who concert, at Shepperton Film Studios, outside London, in May, 1978. Photograph by Ross Halfin I had a traditional musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town. I was s
The True Cost of a Burger In 2005, the House of Representatives passed an act that forbade consumers to sue fast-food operators over weight gain. “The Cheeseburger Bill” (formally, “The Personal Respo
Thirty years after the release of This Heat's Deceit , John Calvert re-examines a record that embraced the Cold War terror of ultimate destruction - and made something far more complex, humane and mor
Illustration by Nishant Choksi I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned t
The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit A view of Detroit from G.M.'s Renaissance Center. Credit... Andrew Moore for The New York Times In downtown Detroit, at the headquarters of the online-mortgage compan
"Man is about to make use of that fabulous electrical network he carries around in his skull" –Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, 1963 "Electric technology, by virtue of its immediate relation to our n
“Homo Sacer” is Latin for “the accursed man”, and a figure in Ancient Roman law, one who has been banned, or exiled, and may be killed by anyone, without penalty. The accursed man acquires their statu
A MACHINE," SAID ED RASALA, ONE DAY IN THE spring of 1979. "The machine. It's what everyone calls it. That's the whole thing, to build the machine." Rasala's machine was the new 32-bit minicomputer, n
ONE holiday morning in 1978, Tom West traveled to a city that was situated, he would later say guardedly, "somewhere in America." He entered a building as though he belonged there, strolled down a hal
On his thirteenth day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. He’d travelled more than three miles thr
Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Illustration by Brian Stauffer In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be
Hi, Marc . I grew up using your work. Thanks to one of my parents being employed by a university, I got to use Mosaic to browse the early Web way before most people had even heard of it. My first software development internship was a summer spent using beta versions of Netscape technologies – what…
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In March 2008, the New York Public Library announced a $100 million gift from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and a plan to radically remake its landmark main building on 42nd Street. Si
CITY PERILS THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS THE NEW YORKER, MAY 29, 1995, pp 45-53 What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designedfor a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are f
Photo: Anneli Salo All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! Of the two people who have written books called My Struggle , Karl Ove Knausgaard is the le
In her bi-weekly column, Social Anxiety , Emilie Friedlander peeks underneath the artifacts of contemporary culture to question what it all really means. When I was 17, in 2003, I landed a summer job
As I was cycling home the other night I came across a few of my fellow students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies . Several of them asked me: Where is your bike helmet? I get
Google’s Road Map to Global Domination Luc Vincent, the man in charge of all the imagery in Google's online maps, next to a Trekker. Credit... Dan Winters for The New York Times Fifty-five miles and t
The Sassiest Boy in America is, at the moment, not sounding at all sassy. He is unfailingly polite, kind and patient. It’s a bad sign. Ian Svenonius, a 20-year-old Washington musician, has just been named the first winner of a nationwide search for the “most perfect boyfriend material a girl could…
View Photo Gallery — Svenonius, a man of many bands, has landed in his most provocative group yet, Chain and the Gang. In a city clogged with people who think they’re really interesting, Ian Svenonius actually is. He’s an underground rock star, an icon of the D.C. punk scene, an author and an…
Being an early adopter is exhilarating in the same way that riding a rollercoaster can feel like travel. You’re moving, but you’re not actually going anywhere, only devising ever-increasingly complex methods to make yourself feel slightly more barfy. You are in a loop de loop of productivity,…
In the only photograph of Jean McConville, taken in 1965, she stands beside a row of her children. She’s pregnant, her arms folded, hands hidden, wearing an apron. Her head is tilted, dark wavy hair p
Knausgaard has an artistic commitment to ordinariness and inexhaustibility. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan / Pen American Center Walter Benjamin, in his great essay “The Storyteller,” written in the ni
Around this time, an advisory council of scientists in Germany proposed an alluringly simple way to think about climate change. Look, they reasoned, human civilization hasn’t been around all that long
The Piketty Panic “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty , is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piket
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. This is the fifth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone.
Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash regist
How to read On a phone: Tap the edges of the page On a computer: Click the edges of the page, or use the arrow keys, the space bar, the trackpad, or the scroll wheel On paper: Print it out Basically,
It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, "I'm not completely nuuuuts!" Upon further…
Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard
“The ideal situation is to be discovered after you’re dead: because then people will leave you alone to actually do your creative work while you’re alive,” the composer, musician, and software enginee
inkwell.vue.473 : Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2014 of 196 : Brady Lea (brady) Sat 4 Jan 14 20:19 It's time for the 2014 edition of the state of the world conversation withBruc
At about one in the morning on Friday, August 12, I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat at M.K. I was surprised. The extravagantly talented young painter, once among the more visible night birds of Manhattan’s h
It is the middle of the night between Friday and Saturday, and I am thinking about Guitar Center. If the above sentence appears strange to you, we are in the same boat. I do not know how bizarre and r
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Fairgoers cheer for Sarah Palin while she appears on the Sean Hannity Show at the Iowa State Fair, August 12, 2011 Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new nat
S itting in an almost empty pub/club two hours before the doors opened, and one and a half hours after the Main Event was meant to turn up for his soundcheck, was hardly my original idea for a magic n
“Classical music in America is dead.” Those words rang out across the Internet last week; their source, a Slate article written by Mark Vanhoenacker, complete with a gravestone illustration and the ho
This is this early psych band I dl’d from Root Strata back when there was just dial-up. They were from rural Austo-Hungary and I read they had a sex collective in, like, a, like, castle. Everyone knows you’re supposed to hate the Grateful Dead. Or is it that everyone knows you’re supposed to love…
JOHN KERRY has spent much of his first year as Secretary of State on a quest to bring about a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority through sheer relentless diplomacy. As of thi
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