A couple of years ago, I started to talk to strangers. That's not to say I hadn't talked to strangers before that, because I had. I'm the son and brother of highly social small-business owners , and
Photo by CurvaBezier/Getty Images . Listening is hard. We come into conversations with our own agendas and low attention spans, and that can be a dangerous combination. When you’re doing the talking,
Yifan Wu(Photo) In Lake Tahoe, the unwelcoming party was hardly a deterrence. The outsiders have settled in. (Photo: Yifan Wu) Outside Magazine's Award Winning Travel Journalism Apr 15, 2021 Spun-out
A fter years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not
Courtesy Soraya Simi(Photo) Madsen wanted to become the oldest woman—and first paraplegic—to row the 2,500 miles between California and Hawaii solo. (Photo: Courtesy Soraya Simi) A Death at Sea on the
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement. Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses t
Inside a series of tubes in a bright, warm room at Harvard Medical School, hundreds of fruit flies are staying up late. It has been days since any of them have slept: The constant vibrations that shak
The past weekend saw the start of an uprising in dozens of American cities, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets for peaceful protests and violent encounters with the police. The pro
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi
In the nineteen-sixties, Jack Nilles, a physicist turned engineer, built long-range communications systems at the U.S. Air Force’s Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory, near Dayton, Ohio. Later, at NASA ,
This story appears in the June 2020 print edition of Rolling Stone. Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani was traveling in a car across New York City with Jon Sale, his longtime friend, when some construction w
One day in October 2015, a forest surveyor working in an area of dense woodland near Mount Redington in Maine came across a collapsed tent hidden in the undergrowth. He noticed a backpack, some clothe
A few months ago, I had dinner with a friend who argued that it was time to rethink Donald Trump’s presidency. After all, the economy was fine, we hadn’t ended up in a nuclear war, and the tough postu
W here were you planning to be on the Fourth of July this year? Backyard barbecue with your crankiest relatives, fighting over who gets to light the illegal fireworks that your derelict cousin smuggle
Climate change is the major environmental challenge facing nations today, and it is increasingly viewed as one of the central issues in international relations. Yet governments have used a flawed arch
Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on April 15, 2020. W hat a difference a few months can make. In January, the United States watched as the new coronavirus blazed through China and reached American shores. In
Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here’s why we do it, and how to stop. *** How can
Photo by Michelle Pullen / EyeEm / Getty Images . The good life is the simple life. Among philosophical ideas about how we should live, this one is a hardy perennial; from Socrates to Thoreau, from th
In southern Chile, where the Andes sink into the Pacific, on the cold and rain-soaked coast of Patagonia, lies a province called Palena. It is a mountainous land of virgin valleys and steep-walled fjo
On the walls: photographs of snow-covered mountain peaks and vast, verdant forests. On the table: a pile of books on environmental activism. In the corner: a small group fiddling with a surfboard, and
The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differen
The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. Whe
I was homeschooled for eight years, from age 11 through to college, before it was a novel way for tiger parents to show off their dynamic commitment to their children’s education. Now, if millions of
T hese should be boom times for sex. The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—a
Toward the end of last year I found myself craving both snow and a slowing down of time. It had been a feverish few months crammed with work and deadlines and in which hardly a week passed without my
Laurent Hrybyk for BuzzFeed News In April 1997 , Wired magazine published a feature with the grand and regrettable title “Birth of a Digital Nation.” It was a good time to make sweeping, sunny pronoun
In a first grade classroom I visited a few years ago, most of the six-year-olds were using iPads or computers. They were working independently on math problems supposedly geared to their ability, whil
In a shiny new factory in the Benin forest, a woman named Blessing slices pineapples into rings. Hundreds of miles away, at a remote border post in the Sahara, Abubakar scans travellers’ fingerprints.
Many people ask, “How do I find time to refactor?” I think the question itselfbetrays a misunderstanding of refactoring. The solution, therefore, does not liein finding ways to convince a product mana
Turning Points Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology Credit... Nicolas Ortega for The New York Times Turning Point: In July, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it would fine Facebook $5
Credit... Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times Opinion Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise Can high taxes be good for business? You bet. Credit... Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times By Anu Pa
Posted December 5, 2019 In the future, we’re all going to be shopping on video apps like TikTok. Whether you’re buying instant noodles or high-end sweaters, it has become increasingly clear that short
At 26, Julian Brave NoiseCat has already grappled with a range of human experiences wider than many people will know in a lifetime. “There was a memorable moment when he was maybe 11 or 12,” recalls N
Honey bees are under extreme pressure. Beekeepers in the US have been losing and then replacing an average of 40% of their honey bee colonies every year since 2010, a rate that is probably unsustainab
Maybe every paper abstract should have a mandatory field of what the limitations of the proposed approach are. That way some of the science miscommunications and hypes could maybe be avoided. — Sebast
Depending on who you speak to, artificial intelligence (AI) What is AI? Read my explainer here. is either the answer to all our major problems – from climate change to queuing (if you talk to Jeff Bez
To trace the progress of the wealth tax from a fringe academic idea to the center of the Democratic Presidential primary, it is helpful to begin a bit off-center. On September 15, 2008, the day that L
If you live in Santiago, Chile, and run out of dish soap or detergent, you don’t need to toss out the empty bottle. Instead, in a pilot that the Chile-based startup Algramo been running since May, cus
A few years ago, I wrote an article that detailed the differences between various Agile methodologies. The article was republished by DZone.com, and got this comment (among others): Shortly afterwards
Drawn From Poverty: Art Was Supposed to Save Canada’s Inuit. It Hasn’t. Indigenous work is all the rage in the Canadian art world. But life in the North is as much a struggle as ever. Hunters returnin