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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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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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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This Land Is My Land
Just before 10 a.m. on September 7, 2009, residents of Mill Creek heard gunshots. Some heard one shot; others as many as three. At the time it did not seem important. The sound was not uncommon along Mill Creek Road, an unmarked ribbon…
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Jack London's Journalism:The Story of an…
Upon receipt of the first news of the earthquake, Collier's telegraphed to Mr. Jack London-who lives only forty miles from San Francisco-requesting him to go to the scene of the disaster and write the story of what he saw. Mr. London started at…
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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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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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Starters Guide to iOS Design
As someone who does work on both the development and design side of iOS apps I find that many designers struggle with the transition to UI work, or with the different processes involved in iPhone and…
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Slippery Business
“Fraud is so widespread that few growers can make an honest living,” one expert says. On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal II docked at the industr
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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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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 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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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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Writing Testable JavaScript
We’ve all been there: that bit of JavaScript functionality that started out as just a handful of lines grows to a dozen, then two dozen, then more. Along the way, a function picks up a few…
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WIRED
I don’t think I’ve ever hated a piece of cloth so much in my entire life. It’s Monday morning in mid-April, and I’m sitting in a many-couched conference room at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond with…
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High Scalability - The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo…
Monday, May 20, 2013 at 8:25AM It's being reported Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion. You may recall Instagram was profiled on HighScalability and they were also bought by Facebook for a ton of…
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For John Carona, Conflicts and Interests, by Jay…
Sen. John Carona. This is one in a series of occasional stories about ethics and transparency in the part-time Texas
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Why won’t Bitcoin die?
I attended the first Bitcoin World Conference and Expo, held in a second-floor meeting room in a midtown Manhattan hotel, on a Saturday in August 2011. The virtual currency was powering an…
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Dirty Medicine - Fortune Features
By Katherine Eban 1. The Assignment FORTUNE -- On the morning of Aug. 18, 2004, Dinesh Thakur hurried to a hastily arranged meeting with his boss at the gleaming offices of Ranbaxy Laboratories in…
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Drinking And Driving And Dying
October 20, 1987Jerry Jerome Brown Jr. comes along at a strange time in history: a time when humans willingly enter cages of glass and steel that move in such great numbers at such terrific speed that a subtle turn of the steering wheel can easily…