Download the PDF How Nokia designed what may be the best-selling cellular products on earth.
by Michael Specter
Frank Nuovo seems somehow out of place on the frosty streets of Helsinki. Not lost, exactly, and certainly not unhappy, but different. Surrounded everywhere by tall blonds, Nuovo is a short, dark, carefully assembled man who looks as if he might be Jerry Seinfeld's younger, slightly more credulous brother. Read more »
Download the PDF How the songs of canaries upset a fundamental principle of science.
by Michael Specter
Fernando Nottebohm has lived transfixed by the melodies of songbirds. He is sixty now, and it has been decades since he left the plains of Argentina–first to study agriculture in Nebraska, then zoology at Berkeley, before coming to rest, in 1967, at Rockefeller University, in New York. But his interest in birds has sustained him since his earliest childhood. Read more »
Download the PDF How easily could a hacker bring the world to a standstill?
by Michael Specter
Like at least several hundred thousand other people around the world, I found a surprise waiting in my E-mail on February 12th. I was in Southern California, and when I turned on my laptop there was a promising message from my wife, who was in Rome. Read more »
Download the PDF Cancer researchers used to call him a fraud. What's changed?
by Michael Specter
Nicholas Gonzalez, part Mexican, part Italian, all American, and very ambitious, grew up in Queens, attended New York City public schools, and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1970, where he majored in English literature. Read more »
Download the PDF How could any one building have produced such hostility?
Throughout the month of December, the people of Britain were bombarded by a radio advertisement that made light of what many consider to have been the country's most embarrassing failure in years. "When your kids ask you one day what the Millennium Experience at the Dome was like, what will you tell them?'' a gentle voice began, its echo of Churchill invoking memories of the nation's finest hour. "So what was it like, Dad?" a child asks. Read more »
Download the PDF What's gone wrong in his own country?
by Michael Specter
Late on the afternoon of August 29, 1995, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Georgian head of state, walked out of the Parliament Building, in the capital city of Tbilisi, and climbed into the back seat of his car for a long-awaited ride. Read more »
Download the PDF Why a satellite system may mean that we will never get lost again.
by Michael Specter
I recently bought a compass that slips over the band of my wristwatch. It's the size of a dime, cost less than ten dollars, and was designed for people who ride mountain bikes into the wilderness. I don't own a mountain bike, but I do own many compasses. Read more »
Reviewied by Michael Specter
By the last days of the last millennium, there was very little left that Boris Yeltsin could do to astonish the people of Russia. He had embraced more than a half-dozen prime ministers and scores of senior aides during his decade of power — only to toss them one by one from the Kremlin bell tower. In 1991, when he stood on the top of a tank to stare down a coup, his impulsiveness was heroic. Two years later, when he shelled a mutinous parliament into submission, it still seemed understandable. Read more »
Rush hour for Gucci
by Michael Specter
Milan is governed more completely by fashion than it has been by any other ruler since the Emperor Hadrian. Even so, there is something particularly excessive about the place when the men's collections are unveiled, at the end of June. Read more »
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 »
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998.
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