The Geography of Women’s Economic Opportunity

At the APEC Summit this past September, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that women are a great untapped economic resource… Read more

Economic Troubles Cited As the Top Risks in 2012

Severe income disparity and chronic fiscal imbalances are the top two risks facing business leaders and policy makers this year and over the next decade, the World Economic Forum said in a report Wednesday… Read more

Remembering Richard Holbrooke

Essays about the foreign-policy stalwart Richard Holbrooke, and some writings of his own… Read more

Egypt’s raids on NGOs are about control

Restricting NGO funding is typical of authoritarian regimes happy to take foreign aid but less happy about human rights… Read more

A provocation in Egypt

Egypt’s military regime undertook an act of repression that even former strongman Hosni Mubarak never dared to try… Read more

The Forgotten Wages of War

Americans’ view of its wars has been blind to one specific aspect of destruction: the human toll of those who live in war zones… Read more

LONGFORM

Best long form essays and articles 2011 …. Read more

Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’

The Atlantic’s James Bennet, Scott Havens, Bob Cohn and Justin Smith. Photo courtesy of Richard A. Bloom.

With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the “digital first” strategy it embraced four years ago… Read more

The ‘Arab spring’ and the west: seven lessons from history

Drawing on the British Pathé archive, Seumas Milne picks out the recurrent themes of imperial efforts to control the Middle East… Read more

Damascus on the Edge

A young writer in Damascus shares observations about the uprising in Syria… Read more

Amman without Maani

The mayor of Amman oversees an organization that is in effect a mini state, with tens of thousands of employees and a budget that runs into the hundreds of millions of dinars. Omar Maani held the coveted position for nearly half a decade. What got done in that time… Read more

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model

An educator from the Scandinavian country that ranks among the world’s leaders in school quality visited New York and explained his nation’s success….Read more

The Art of Destruction

YAFRAN, Libya — In a country where creativity was stifled to ensure the pre-eminence of one man, art can be the best revenge. Inside the gutted shell of a building that once housed a Qaddafi-regime intelligence unit, the paint of a new mural of a tree whose roots are feeding on the blood of fallen rebel fighters is drying on the wall. The house was half-destroyed in fighting between Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces and the rebels who brought him down — and that’s exactly the way the artist Belgassem Grada hopes it will stay.The slight, wiry oil-field engineer never thought of himself as an artist — at most he used to doodle in his spare time. But today Grada, 47, has turned a former outpost of intimidation and symbol of Qaddafi’s stranglehold over Libya into Freedom House, a museum devoted to memorializing Libya’s civil war… Read more

BITS BLOG: With iPad Boost, Apple Set to Become Top PC Vendor

Is the iPad a PC?

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, has said, in no uncertain terms, that it is. The late Steven P. Jobs said no, the iPad is part of the “post-PC era.”

What’s funny is that if you take Mr. Ballmer’s position and lump the iPad in with traditional computers, Apple looks stronger in the PC market than it has in decades. A new report from the British research firm Canalys predicts Apple will become the No. 1 PC maker in the world in the second half of next year, when iPad sales are included as part of the equation, bumping Hewlett Packard from the top spot… Read more

ADVERTISING: Redefining Public Relations in the Age of Social Media

THE public relations industry has decided that it may be a good time for, well, a public relations initiative. The industry’s largest organization, the Public Relations Society of America, is embarking on an effort to develop a better definition of “public relations,” one more appropriate for the 21st century. The effort, to begin on Monday, will solicit suggestions from the public along with public relations professionals, academics and students.

The effort, of course, has a catchy name, Public Relations Defined, and a logo, too, that proclaims its goal: “A modern definition for the new era of public relations.” The effort is being spurred by the profound changes in public relations since the last time the organization updated its definition, in 1982… Read more

Twitterology: A New Science?

DENIZENS of the Twitter-verse, please be advised: Whether you are a Libyan celebrating the demise of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a New Zealand office worker sleepily starting your day or a California teenager trying out the latest slang, your words are being analyzed.Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze… Read more

Being Handcuffed? Press Send

There is a strong technological strain running through Occupy Wall Street, and software developers have been gathering at events in several cities to develop such tools for the demonstrators. One mobile app being developed, Shouty, would allow people to use their phones as radios, amplifying the human microphone at meetings in Zuccotti Park.But the app that has gained the most attention is called I’m Getting Arrested. It allows users to write a message and identify recipients — friends, family, a lawyer — in advance. Then, if they are about to be taken into custody, they can push a button to send a text message blast. Its developer, Jason Van Anden, created it in two days after an acquaintance narrowly avoided an arrest at a demonstration several weeks ago… Read more

PRACTICAL TRAVELER: Personalizing Your Hotel Search

SEARCHING for a hotel online has long been limited to plugging in your travel dates and destination and then sifting through star ratings and prices. But there are other factors involved. Is the hotel in a convenient location? Is it child friendly? Will the room have a view of a brick wall or the sea? Read more

Barriers to Failure

I’ve always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a “fail camp” (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I restarted the blog carnival, a site that I’ve organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, I dedicated a month toward failure. I’m working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it… Read more

GADGETWISE BLOG: 7 Ways to Automate Your Life With ifttt

Ever wish you could get a text message every time someone tagged you in a Facebook photo? Or that you could record notes to yourself that are transcribed and sent to your e-mail account? A nifty new Web service called ifttt (pronounced “lift” but minus the l) offers a way to automate tasks involving a bevy of services like Instagram, Craiglist, Dropbox and Instapaper, among others… Read more

All the News You Want, When You Want It

Each morning, bleary-eyed, I retrieve the newspaper, glance at the headlines and toss it on the coffee table to read later.I know I shouldn’t admit to that — in a newspaper — but I’m an avid newshound. I want to know what’s happening right now, so I reach for the iPad instead and dive into the news of the day.At first, that meant visiting a handful of Web sites on Safari, Apple’s Web browser that comes installed on the iPad. It hit the usual suspects — my local paper, the Weather Channel, ESPN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN — before checking … Read more

BITS BLOG: A Web Tool That Lets You Automate the Internet

The phrase “if this, then that” is a bit of programming-speak: you tell the computer that if this happens, it should perform this action. Now, a simple new Web service called ifttt — pronounced like “lift” without the l — aims to take that concept to the mainstream. It provides a way for people to easily automate interactions between Web services, like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and Tumblr … Read more

How Digital Magazines are Transforming the Old Media World

Newspapers have gone the way of the stone tablet. As a former newspaper journalist, I say good riddance. Technology moves on. News editors may cry themselves to sleep at night as they contemplate new careers in the car sales industry, but what’s done is done. The world has changed, thanks to the vast amount of interactive content available on digital magazines. Think about it. With an Android Magazine, I can hold the entire Web, literally, in the palm of my hand, and read practically anything, from the New York Times to out of print Nancy Drew murder mysteries in Google’s library…. Read more

How Digital Subscriptions Are Altering Our Relationships with Media

A recent article in Filmmaker Magazine covered Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and Factory 25’s partnership to distribute Swanberg’s films on an annual subscription basis. For $99.95, subscribers receive a DVD and other related materials each quarter. According … >Read more

The University of Wherever

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online… Read more