Who really rescued General Motors? 1. In February of 2009, Steven Rattner was selected by the Obama Administration to oversee the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. It was not a popular choice. Rattner was a Wall Street financier with no expertise in the automobile business. The head of the United Auto Workers, the chairman of Ford,...Learn More

The Naked Face Can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them? 1. Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It was about two in the morning. He and his partner were in the Willowbrook section of South Central Los Angeles, and they pulled over a sports car. “Dark, nighttime, average...Learn More

The Formula What if you built a machine to predict hit movies? 1. One sunny afternoon not long ago, Dick Copaken sat in a booth at Daniel, one of those hushed, exclusive restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where the waiters glide spectrally from table to table. He was wearing a starched button-down shirt and a blue blazer. Every strand of...Learn More

In Plain View How child molesters get away with it. In a 2001 book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” the psychologist Carla van Dam tells the story of a young Canadian elementary-school teacher she calls Jeffrey Clay. Clay taught physical education. He was well liked by his students, and often he asked boys in his class to stay after school, to do...Learn More

Small Change Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. 1. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a...Learn More

Baby Steps Do our first three years of life determine how we’ll turn out? 1. In April of 1997, Hillary Clinton was the host of a daylong conference at the White House entitled “What New Research on the Brain tells Us About Our Youngest Children.” In her opening remarks, which were beamed live by satellite to nearly a hundred hospitals,...Learn More

Creation Myth Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation. 1. In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs. Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox...Learn More