Top Reads
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Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO…
Uma Swaminathan tuned the television set in the living room of her ranch style home in the suburbs of East Brunswick, N.J. to CNBC. It was 9:00 a.m. on May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher thought might make her rich. She logged onto her Vanguard brokerage account on her computer and placed an order for 5,000 shares of Facebook at $42 a share. On TV, wearing his trademark hoodie, 28-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the world's largest social networking site, stood in the courtyard of Facebook headquarters in…
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The One-Person Product
In 2006, I moved to New York and started working for David Karp doing web development for various media companies. That fall, in a brief gap before starting a new client, David said that we were going to make a prototype of an idea he’d had…
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Revenge, ego, and the corruption of Wikipedia
In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded…
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Survivors
Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her…
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Welcome to the Real Space Age
(Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic) At dawn one morning last November—just as the edge of Earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles…
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Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros
Rajat Gupta, who was indicted in the largest insider trading case in United States history. Late one Friday morning, Rajat Gupta was rushing through security at
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First Australians
A finger across the throat and a glance seaward. That’s the signal. The two men grip their spears, hand-carved from stringybark trees, and walk barefoot over the red soil to the water’s edge. Then into the aluminum dinghy, engine…
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Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking
Daniel Dennett: 'Often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.' Photograph: Peter Yang/August 1 USE YOUR MISTAKESWe have all heard the forlorn refrain:…
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Crack Rock City
Hallie Bateman for The Morning News One afternoon, my friend Corine called to see if I felt like taking a walk. Corine was a Dutch photographer who’d been living in Detroit for nearly 10…
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How I Cut My Spending in Half to Take a Job I…
In 2009, I was a very senior executive celebrating my fourth anniversary at a brokerage firm. I was working about 70 hours a week, managing 80 people, and traveling to the company’s other…
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How Exercise Affects Your Body (and How to Pick…
We all know that exercise is good for you, but when you understand why, it makes getting off the couch and into the gym a lot easier. Here’s an explanation of what happens when you work out,…
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How to Supercharge Your Router with DD-WRT
Few routers utilize their full potential out of the box because their firmware limits their functionality. Thanks to an open-source project called DD-WRT, you can unlock your router’s…
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A Word from Our Sponsor
Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power…
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The Air Travel Rights You Aren't Aware Of (and…
If you've ever sat in a plane on the tarmac only to have the flight cancelled, been bumped just before boarding, or landed at your destination only to be told your luggage will arrive sometime in the…
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Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
On Friday, we migrated Soundslice from Heroku to direct use of Amazon Web Services (AWS). I'm very, very happy with this change and want to spread the word about how we did it and why you should consider it if you're in a similar position. My…
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Rolf Potts in Rishakesh
I. The Girl You spot The Girl on your first afternoon in Rishikesh. She is long-limbed and graceful, and she walks carefully along the path, as if not to disturb the dirt beneath her bare feet. She…
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Google Glass apps: everything you can do right now
Google Glass isn’t ready for prime time. Even Google knows this, which is why it hasn't shipped to the masses yet. Instead, Google floated a few units to “Explorers,” glorified guinea pigs who can…
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In Facebook We Trust: What Really Happened Behind…
Uma Swaminathan tuned the television set in the living room of her ranch style home in the suburbs of East Brunswick, N.J. to CNBC. It was 9:00 a.m. on May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher…
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Unknown Mathematician Proves Surprising Property…
Image: bwright923/Flickr On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the…
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The Design of Code: Organizing JavaScript
Great design is a product of care and attention applied to areas that matter, resulting in a useful, understandable, and hopefully beautiful user interface. But don’t be fooled into thinking…