This is a story about two roads — Should and Must. It’s a pep talk for anyone who’s chosen Should for far too long — months, years, maybe a lifetime — and feels like it’s about time they gave Must a shot There are two paths in life: Should and Must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again.…

On a bitterly cold January morning in 2008, Adam Friedman and Alvin Valentine, friends and co-workers, climbed into a Brooklyn boxing ring and proceeded to go at each other for three hard-hitting rounds. There was nothing particularly artistic about what transpired in those grunting six minutes.…

'Hello. Thanks for Coming' We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. Some of us like his screens more than our families. For…

Illustration by Luke Pearson “Hopeless.” That was how Roald Dahl’s longtime editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Stephen Roxburgh, described an early draft of the cantankerous author’s last long chapter book for children. And, once Dahl, who was in poor health and his early 70s, was honest with…

Shortly after Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple AAPL -1.15 % in August 2011, he told a confidant that he got up every morning reminding himself just to do the right thing—and not to think about what Steve would have done. But Jobs's ghost loomed everywhere after he died from pancreatic…

Follow @TIME There are a lot of ways to study a painting, and one of the best is to get to know the painter. The splash or splatter of color makes a lot more sense when you understand the rage or whimsy or heart behind it. The songwriter, similarly, can lay bare the song, the poet the poem, the…

A few months ago, my son, who is in second grade, went on a field trip. As the class assembled in the parking lot, a new child joined in. He had metal leg braces and difficulty walking. Nobody quite knew how to talk to him and so he was left by himself at the edge of the crowd. But my son seemed…

Forget Russian figure skater Julia Lipnitskaia spinning in a blur with her leg impossibly held straight up against her ear. The sight of skier Bode Miller collapsing with emotion at the end of a race dedicated to his brother while NBC cameras lingered uncomfortably on the long shot. Or even jubilant…

The Great Zucchini arrived early, as he is apt to do, and began to make demands, as is his custom. He was too warm, so he wanted the thermostat adjusted. It was. He declared the basement family room adequate for his needs, but there was a problem with the room next door. Something had to be done…

Recently, our nation’s financial chieftains have been feeling a little unloved. Venture capitalists are comparing the persecution of the rich to the plight of Jews at Kristallnacht , Wall Street titans are saying that they’re sick of being beaten up , and this week, a billionaire investor, Wilbur…

The mayor was the last person to see Zina Nicole Lahr alive. Sometime in the early afternoon of Wednesday, November 20, Bob Risch, a 73-year-old native of Ouray, Colorado, and its mayor from 2007 until this January, noticed the colorful and well-known local strolling east. She was dressed in pants…

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt . This is the finale of his residency. Here’s a recipe for discovering new ideas: Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you’re likely to have…

Is The Internet Good or Bad? Yes. It’s time to rethink our nightmares about surveillance. All photos by Mstyslav Chernov/ Unframe TEAR GAS IS A GOOD TEACHER. It taught me that what they say is true: Awful conditions can bring out the best in people. It taught me that one can get used to almost…

The thirty zombies went silent and knelt in the darkness. They could hear the jangling of keys and police radio bleeps. Individuals fidgeted with their costumes and picked at their caked-on makeup. They tried to be quiet, hoping the police would leave. Had someone seen them enter? Nerves about the…

My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. I’m standardized-lingo SP for short. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and…

Most Popular Charles Krupa/AP Photo, Vantage Deluxe World Travel version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? By Dave Wedge and Casey Sherman On a mid-sized cruising vessel, at dusk along the Rhône River in the south of France, two men sit facing each other, speaking slowly through an…

Sex, trash and nature in the city Marie Viljoen Back before my knees began to ache, I ran in my neighborhood park, a 585-acre swath of meadows streaked through and bounded by mostly deciduous forest. Unlike most urban runners, I avoided the paved ring road and stuck to the interior, seeking out…

A history of politics and betrayal at Russia's Bolshoi Ballet—and an investigation into the acid attack on Bolshoi artistic director Sergei Filin: "The liquid was sulfuric acid—the “oil of vitriol,” as medieval alchemists called it. Depending on the concentration, it can lay waste to human skin…

⋆ Rec Recommend this Post 2 I'm not sure why the film crew picked me out of the crowd. It could have been because I was the first contestant to sign up, walking into the dim bar at 11 a.m. sharp and putting down my $5, signing my life away in a waiver form and strapping on bib No. 27. Or it could…

I often joke that, for me, listening to Kanye West is like a religious experience. Apparently, for some people, this is not a joke. Enter the best religion of all time: Yeezianity . The church of Yeezus was founded about a month ago by a man who doesn’t want to tell me his name, because he fears…

One day last April, a 25-year-old named Ash smoked a cigarette in the garden of his London workplace and scrolled through the Twitter feed on his phone. He stopped at the headline “ Who Failed Rehtaeh Parsons? ” and clicked on the link, which took him to the website of The Chronicle Herald, a…

Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wiki Meetup on Aug. 19, 2009 Courtesy of Sage Ross/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons On Jan. 4, 2013, Aaron Swartz woke up in an excellent mood. “He turned to me,” recalls his girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, “and said, apropos of nothing, ‘This is going to be a great year.’…

Einstein’s Camera How one renegade photographer is hacking the concept of time Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might…

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s? If Netflix can show…

Blueberries grow on bushes. Whatever. I don’t care if they grow on bushes or on trees or underground or are skimmed from the surface of fetid water, but bushes are what most of us would consider natural or “as intended” by the naturalness of evolution, which is the most natural thing. That’s the…

“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable… then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. “ -Marcus Aurelius Everybody complains. I want to get that out in front, so we’re all working from the…

Of all the occupational golden ages to come and go in the twentieth century—for doctors, journalists, ad-men, autoworkers—none lasted longer, felt cushier, and was all in all more golden than the reign of the law partner. There was the generous salary, the esteem of one’s neighbors, work that was…

Download Dotcom's faves, but “we must not overdo it” Megaupload employee Van Der Kolk allegedly uploaded Lost to the file-sharing site. ABC Studios The men behind the so-called "Mega Conspiracy" also shared copyrighted content among themselves, according to prosecutors. A centerpiece of those…

MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not waste words. “What time does your clock say, exactly?” he asked. He checked the reply against his watch and described a place to meet. “I’ll see you there,” he said. Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into…

Edward Snowden is a patriot. As a whistleblower of illegal government activity that was sanctioned and kept secret by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government for years, he undertook great personal risk for the public good. And he has single-handedly reignited a global debate…

Most Popular Gabriel Rinaldi version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? By Published in the January 2014 issue Interviewed by Tom Junod, September 15, 2013 I'm definitely assuming, because you called my home phone, that this call is being monitored. I'm not saying it's being monitored in real…

A senator campaigning for reform says that the intelligence leadership drives “how decisions get made at the White House.” Credit Illustration from the Heads of State On March 12, 2013, James R. Clapper appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss the threats facing…

E arly one morning last December, Glenn Greenwald opened his laptop, scanned through his e-mail, and made a decision that almost cost him the story of his life. A columnist and blogger with a large and devoted following, Greenwald receives hundreds of e-mails every day, many from readers who claim…

A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed…

Not another Flower Maiden! … Parsifal. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian T here's no hiding it. I find some passages of Wagner insufferably tedious. Take Parsifal , just opened at the Royal Opera House. Some of the music is sublime, but other bits invariably have me nodding off. I really…

And so here we are, ready for an assault on our Everest: the mind that lies behind the low-reactor Sociopath face. A face that gazes upon the worlds of Losers and the Clueless with divine inscrutability. It’s certainly been a long climb. Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V |…