A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated today.

In the last year alone, over 150,000 people have risked their lives to leave.

On his twelfth appearance on Letterman, Bill Hicks killed. The network refused to air it.

Thinking about launching your own media startup? You might want to consider my crazy story first.

The button that ruined the internet—and how to fix it.

On the people who lie about serving in the military and the detectives who try to expose them.

A plane crash survivor and trauma researcher turns her attention to the memories we’re making now.

Getting arrested was the best thing to ever happen to Jeremy Meeks.

The Piano Man of Yarmouk fled the ruins of Damascus to a life of criss-crossing Germany playing songs about his old neighborhood to huge crowds. Because of refugee law, he is paid nothing.

When a wealthy businessman set out to divorce his wife, their fortune vanished. The quest to find it would reveal the depths of an offshore financial system bigger than the U.S. economy.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

The author comments on the medium of the graduation cliché while still advancing it:

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

On January 1st, 2011, the U.S. estate tax will jump from zero to around 50%, which gives a lot of very rich elders (or perhaps more accurately, their heirs) millions of dollars in incentive to expedite death.

When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease, then was diagnosed with it herself, she and her husband set out to find a cure.

Cancer has taken his voice, but the unlikeliest movie star in Hollywood history still has a lot he wants to say.

The writer and his oldest friends reunited to mourn the ones they lost—and honor the time they have left.

On mayonnaise.

“It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the ‘right’ way to eat.”

A healthcare nightmare.

An interview with the author.