How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has

Two paramedics, a man and a woman wearing green and blue scrubs, toss biscotti to seagulls. They glance out at the open ocean. Behind them, at the old port, their empty ambulance waits. A lone jogger, wearing a sweaty knee brace, runs around the parking lot. He, too, keeps his eyes on the Mediterranean Sea. Although he looks like a tourist, he’s probably a policeman.

When I was twenty-five years old I appeared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in my underwear. Well, almost. A cartoon drawing of a girl in her underwear—a girl who, with her short blond hair and apple cheeks over a pointed chin, looked remarkably like me—appeared in conjunction with an essay I’d written about the way Generation X was reacting to the safe-sex message. The year was 1996 and the AIDS crisis, though technically past its apogee, seemed to have finally succeeded in infiltrating every corner of the general public consciousness and scaring the hell out of

“This is the way that pop ends,” music critic Simon Reynolds wrote in his 2011 book, Retromania. “Not with a bang but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pavement album you played to death in your first year in college.” The death of originality in music; our cultural obsession with nostalgia; the near-total availability of any kind of music, at any time—these are the themes that made Retromania one of the year’s most controversial books—inside and out of the world of music criticism.

Nathan Wolfe is one of the last members of a dying breed: the adventurer scientist. As the founder and CEO of Global Viral Forecasting, he has spent much of his professional life in the jungles of Africa and Asia hunting down new viruses with the goal of stopping the next pandemic before it spreads. He shows off his potent combination of expertise and swagger in his new book, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age, which gamely attempts to explain why humans are more at risk from pandemics than ever before and what we can do to

Books of essays don’t sell, an editor once told me, so don’t send me one. Joseph Epstein, who considers the label “essayist” an honorific and who himself has been one of the editors of the annual series, The Best American Essays, has compared the essayist’s place in the realm of literature to a seat at the children’s table at the family holiday dinner. Not to get too snooty about it, as Joe Epstein might say, the essay deserves a better seat than that, maybe even one at the high table.

Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’?

At Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, I teach a writing workshop called “Daily Life.” Students read poets, philosophers, essayists, and novelists, each of whom emphasizes, in one way or another, the sheer fleetingness of time. Chinese poet Tu Fu describes life as “whirling past like drunken wildfire.” Twelve hundred years later American poet James Schuyler says: “A few days / are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass too quickly / out of breath.”