Download the PDF The race to build a better search engine.
by Michael Specter
It's not easy to impress the people who fly into Scottsdale, Arizona, each spring to attend the annual PC Forum. The event, organized by the Internet impresario Esther Dyson, is held at a resort near the foot of the McDowell Mountains, and it has become a sort of digital Renaissance Weekend. Read more »
Download the PDF Did Monsanto just want more profits, or did it want to save the world?
by Michael Specter
Each fall, the environmental group Greenpeace holds a conference, in an effort to make its priorities as clear to corporate executives and investors as they are to its two and a half million members. Read more »
Download the PDF A visit to the madcap world of Manolo Blahnik
by Michael Specter
The first thing I noticed when I entered the two-hundred-year-old town house in Bath that serves as Manolo Blahnik's weekend retreat was the alligator. About three and a half feet long, with olive-brown skin and black hatch marks flecking its body, it was sprawled imperiously across a Queen Anne table at the end of the foyer. The jaws were parted, and the teeth shimmered in the fading light. Read more »
Download the PDF A dealer sets out to give his business a better name.
by Michael Specter
When I first visited the city of Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, four years ago, the streets near the Old Town's twelfth-century minaret were filled with carpet salesmen. They advertised themselves by shouting in German, English, Russian, and Turkish–any language that they thought might work. Read more »
Download the PDF Why the old art of the tailor is still found in modern Naples
by Michael Specter
Naples is nothing like other Italian cities. It lacks both the mannered elegance of Florence and the fervor of Milan. It is sumptuous, sweltering, and licentious–much as it was two hundred years ago, when the city was routinely the place where any gentleman could be found as he finished his Grand Tour. Read more »
Download the PDF What happens to the messages you never got?
by Michael Specter
Not long ago, I sent an E-mail to a friend of mine who works at The New Yorker. There was nothing unusual about that; I send a lot of E-mail. Read more »
Millennial Americans have to be the world's most aggressively adventurous human beings. We eagerly rappel down rockfaces, canyoneer across rivers, and paraglide over mountaintops. But those are risks we choose to take. We adopt a very different attitude toward the risks of daily life, no matter how small, which we can't avoid. Although most tap water is safe to drink, we spend millions on bottled brands. Read more »
Download the PDF Peter Singer's belief that animals should be treated like people gave birth to the animal-rights movement. Does he also think that people should be treated like animals?
by Michael Specter
It has been ten years since the breezy April afternoon when ninety-six British football fans were crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, in Sheffield, England. There was an important playoff match scheduled that day, between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, but as more and more people crammed themselves onto one of the runways leading to the stands the crowd panicked. Read more »
There was a run of bad news out of Russia last week: cholera appeared in Siberia, and officials there could only close the borders and pray; energy workers in the far east, desperate for wages that nobody intends to pay them, have entered the second week of a hunger strike; a plague of locusts laid eggs over millions of acres of central Russia's finest farmlands; and, in an eerie echo of the country's most recent sustained catastrophe, a thousand of the most successful Islamic guerrillas in the world stormed across the Chechen border into Dagestan, declared a holy war, and are battling the Russian Army for control of the province. Read more »
Download the PDF Doesn't Venice want to be saved?
by Michael Specter
This has been a thoroughly humiliating year for the people of Venice. The city's population of doddering countesses and hapless roués has declined to its lowest level since long before the fall of the Serenissima, two hundred years ago. Read more »
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998.
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