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When Reddit’s co-founders approached seed venture fund Y-Combinator to ask for money, they were unceremoniously dismissed. Half a train-ride later, they re-invented the company and created a social news giant.

A conversation with the co-founder of Reddit.

“It’s been a dream in the minds of many people to associate the excitement of sense and olfaction and perfumes with other elements from the entertaining world,” says Laudamiel. His […]

Perfumers sometimes aim to recreate the scents of things not typically associated with smell.

The world of perfumery must borrow the language of music, botanics, architecture, and taste—and apply them in a rigorous and objective way—to describe its fundamental elements.

When you smell a perfume you may be smelling hundreds of molecules at once, but the best nose in the world cannot smell more than five distinct scents.

Judging a fine fragrance is like watching the pieces of a puzzle fit together, or examining the many facets of a building, Christophe Laudamiel.

A conversation with a fine fragrance perfumer.

The thrill of acting is “the honor of being able to change a person’s life by what it is you do,” says Grey. Illuminating an idea through your role is […]

The live performance that you see is unique. It’s yours. And sometimes a live performance can touch a nerve that both the actors and audience can share the experience of.

Acting always affects every part of your life because taking on the responsibility of someone else’s character is a solitary, lonely, thrilling circumstance.

When he was performing at just nine years old, Grey looked down from the stage to see audience members sobbing. “I thought, ‘Wow. Wow! This is the real thing.’ This […]

A conversation with the actor.

As the world’s largest brewer, AB InBev’s business is built around increasing the amount of beer people consume. So why is the company advocating for moderate drinking?

A conversation with the CEO of AB InBev.

Literature has always been slow to adapt to new technologies, which on the one hand might be its saving grace but could just as well lead to its demise.

“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth and “Kalooki Nights” by Howard Jacboson are Safran Foer’s picks for the best novels about the Holocaust—even though they are not explicitly about the genocide.

Safran Foer likens the experience of watching films of his novels to hearing his own voice on an answering machine—except far stranger.

Comedy may be difficult to pull off, but comedians can at least gauge their success by the audience’s laughter. For writers, there is no similar criterion by which to judge […]

Though some claim factory farming is necessary to feed the Third World, it requires seven calories of input to generate one calorie of food.

Safran Foer says Pollan is the most important and sensible food writer in American history, but he disagrees with Pollan over the idea of “table fellowship.” “We’re past the point […]

A recent study calculated the environmental costs of a 50-cent fast food hamburger to be 400 times its price at the register.

Eating meat is a part of our cultural and personal identity—think Christmas hams or Thanksgiving turkeys—but the factory farming system is not sustainable.

A conversation with the writer.

The neurotransmitter dopamine is crucial for learning adaptive behaviors, but addictive drugs exploit this normal mechanism by flooding the brain with dopamine.

“Your legs couldn’t tell you Newton’s laws, but they still obey them, and of course your brain might not be able to explain the laws of statistics, but it still […]

Kepecs uses rats to study the neurology of decision-making because their brains are evolutionarily similar to ours but much simpler. Likewise, if you wanted to learn how cars worked, you […]

A conversation with the neuroscientist.

Being able to retain some sense of control during his kidnapping—albeit small—helped Alpert overcome the trauma of the experience.

Humanizing yourself and creating a bond with your captor enhances your chances of survival, but sometimes you will also need to be deceptive.