Sara Lautman for The Morning News The first time I peed in a bottle was in the spring of 2006, at a folk concert in Ann Arbor—my brother Peter’s album release party. I was tending bar in the back of a small art space while Peter played for a packed house of friends, family, and local fans, crammed…

J ulian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy…

Many celebrated writers have championed the creative benefits of keeping a diary , but no one has put the diary to more impressive practical use in the creative process than John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968). In the spring of 1938, shortly after performing one of the greatest acts…

TL;DR: There is market saturation of web tech professionals in client services, so make your personal or agency’s differentiating factor an excellent client experience, aka CX, and share that via your site, blog, and social media proudly. Currently, all corners of the tech world are filled with talk…

TL;DR: Client experiences start long before they meet you. To give your clients an excellent experience when working with you, start by laying a path of crumbs, or positive experiences, so when you do meet, your relationship isn’t starting from square one. Here’s a common scenario: You’re an agency…

I find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable when people call me a generalist and imagine that to be a compliment. My standard response is that I am actually an extremely narrow, hidebound specialist. I just look like a generalist because my path happens to cross many boundaries that are meaningful…

Having been in marketing for over 10 years, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that marketing isn’t for me. Now before you start making assumptions, keep reading. I started marketing back in 2005 after I created a music video for a local heavy metal band. After spending an entire summer filming…

The Man in the Van He throws 96. He's the Jays' No. 1 prospect. He signed for millions. And he lives in a VW camper. Meet Daniel Norris, the most interesting pitcher in baseball. ESPN The Magazine by Eli Saslow PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHANIEL WOOD 03/05/15 THE FUTURE of the Toronto Blue Jays wakes up in a…

There’s something I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time. Something that I was confident expressing halfway or in private, but never fully and never in an article. Then last week, I saw someone on reddit write about essentially the exact same idea , better than I ever could have, and it…

M arcus Wanner needed a little adventure in his life. A skinny 15-year-old brainiac with wire-frame glasses and wavy brown hair, he was the eldest of five, home-schooled by their mother, a devout Catholic, near Roanoke, Virginia. Shuttling Marcus between home, church and the Boy Scouts seemed like…

For the past year and a half I’ve been going to yoga every Friday morning. Before this I’d done maybe a handful of classes and every one had left me in a barbed, mutinous mood. It was uncomfortable! And crowded! And on a couple occasions a little like being in a relationship where you end up…

The first thing I do every morning is take my phone, wedged carefully beneath my pillow, and check my sleep stats. They’re tracked, in a weirdly calming graph of blue-blacks, within an app called Sleep Cycle , where I’ve used them to feel very, very good about the sleep habits of a thirtysomething,…

A week before Christmas 2011, Ruth Soukup, a thirty-three-year-old stay-at-home mom of two girls in Punta Gorda, Florida, was throwing toys into a bin. An avid shopper who started a blog about spending less, Soukup had the art of buying on a budget down to a science. She referred to herself as “a…

…and one weird trick you won't believe works every time. The hardest part of design is presenting work. You can't even argue about this. I've seen people who did amazing work get up in front of a client and lay eggs. I've also seen people do alright work and work clients around their little finger.…

BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long The media mogul (twice over) on being both contagious and sticky By Felix Salmon Illustrations by Young Professionals I first got to know Jonah Peretti in February 2011, very shortly after the Huffington Post was sold to AOL. At the time, he explained to me that…

Sometime this spring, during the first half of the final season of “Mad Men,” the popular pastime of watching the show — recapping episodes, tripping over spoilers, trading notes on the flawless production design, quibbling about historical details and debating big themes — segued into a parlor game…

Yesterday was the 65 year anniversary of the German Basic Law, the equivalent of the constitution. When it was signed in 1949, it was supposed to be an interim solution (hence avoiding the word “constitution”), to be replaced by an actual constitution at the time East and West Germany re-united.…

Monday. Late-morning. Hotter than hot. Not even 24 hours home from vacation, and I was going through the piles of mail. There was a knock at the door, which was weird because no one ever knocks on our door unless it’s the UPS guy, and he doesn’t come until dinner time. Corralling the crazy barky…

The steel man of #GamerGate An amazing piece of writing appeared here on Medium the other day. It made me more optimistic about the possibility of public deliberation than anything I’ve seen in a long time. Weirdly, it was about an argument on the internet.…

Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Credit Illustration by Alex Williamson / Clockwise from Top: Keld Navntoft / AFP / Getty; Graham Turner / Keystone / Getty (London Police); William Lovelace / Express / Getty…

Capture Queen / Flickr MORE ARTICLES BY Lenore Skenazy Free-Range Win 4.01.16 12:00 pm Blind Injustice 3.01.16 12:00 pm Hold That Veggie 2.01.16 12:00 pm Free-Range Kids Correction: A previous version of this piece publishedresults about 9- and 12-year-olds that reflected a subset of thepoll’s total…

Stick Around When I was 17, the hottest kid in the entire world was this guy I knew at Governor’s School (basically an academic summer camp funded by the state). I’ll call him Kevin because he was Irish and that seems like a good Irish name. He was really smart and popular and athletic, and he had…

Believe it or not, the man-hating movement loves you and needs your help. Here’s why. I drink from a coffee mug that says “Male Tears.” Female friends sign off emails to me with “ban men” or “kill all men.” In at least three people’s phone contacts, my name is followed by an emoji depicting a man…

Other than Barack Obama, no one in the White House is more polarizing than Biden. A proud man, he seems determined to keep himself “in the deal,” by helping his President and burnishing his legacy. Credit Photograph by Alex Majoli / Magnum At noon on Thursday, July 17th, Vice-President Joe Biden was…

Christopher Waller, the principal of Parks, was lauded in Atlanta, and became a minor celebrity of the school-reform movement. Credit Illustration by Oliver Munday One afternoon in the spring of 2006, Damany Lewis, a math teacher at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, unlocked the room where…

If you are a man, you are part of rape culture. I know … that sounds rough. You’re not a rapist, necessarily. But you do perpetuate the attitudes and behaviors commonly referred to as rape culture. You may be thinking, “Now, hold up, Zaron! You don’t know me, homey! I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let…

Richard Barnes It was an unseasonably warm December, and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers, but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if, by the…