Kevin Kelly is collecting the best magazine stories of all-time. It’s an ongoing project, so anytime you’re looking for something great to read, bookmark it, return, find something new. Interesting that Wired, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are all represented a great deal. [via]
A series of articles from The New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel and The UK Guardian with material primarily supplied from WikiLeaks documents exposing the military efforts of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The newspapers had access to the information two weeks ago to prep their stories, while Wikileaks published today. Truth to power. This [...]
Todd Levin recounts his time as a writer on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien — his first television writing gig of any kind. After those first adrenaline-fueled months, The Tonight Show entered a more uncertain phase. We were trying to develop a tone and style that was appealing to our larger audience without betraying what [...]
Interesting take on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps the finest American novel ever produced (certainly one of the five): Written by a woman, Harper Lee, but more, written by a woman who dared to see herself as her region’s Jane Austen. Told by a six-year-old girl. With a hero who’s not, in any [...]
In November, the University of California Press will release the first volume of legendary American author Mark Twain’s autobiography. Twain requested that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death. That occurred on April 21 of this year. “When people ask me, ‘Did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for [...]
Stop what you’re doing and go read this account of the city of Seattle making a wish come true for 13-year-old Erik Martin. Martin is dying of liver cancer and his one wish was to become his superhero alter-ego, Electron Boy. I’m pretty sure your cynical heart will melt at the ingenuity that led to [...]
Christopher Hitchens notices that there’s no Lenin pig while revisiting George Orwell’s classic novel, Animal Farm. And while it’s an interesting thought, given that the novel is an allegory for that particular period of Russian history, the more interesting aspect of Hitchens’s anaylsis is the book’s lasting impact. There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to [...]
Two interesting sites I came across yesterday: Short Form Blog and Longform.org. Each post on Short Form Blog is a single entry, and I agree with Robin, they are “almost info-visual tweets.” Stop by for bite-sized nuggets of information, easily digestible and certainly worthy of a conversation starter. Longform is a different beast altogether. It aggregates some [...]
Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged [...]
