I have been reading The New Yorker ($112/yr international) for almost a year now. I love the refreshing mix of serious world issues, cultural commentary, and comics. The issues arrive exactly a week late, so here is a small sampler from last week’s Talk of the Town section:

Picks from The New Yorker

Vive la France // Adam Gopnik takes the French presidential elections as an opportunity to rebut perspicaciously how Europe is seen from America: “the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe.”

Food Groups // On a decidedly lighter note, Ben McGrath reports on a lost-edited-and-found nonsensical children’s book “The Hare and the Pineapple” that originally was about a rabbit and a tortoise an eggplant. The New Yorker shows time and again that you don’t need to be serious all the time to be taken seriously.

Opportunity

3 Years of Bootstrapping – Half a Million Dollars A Year Later - and 30×500, Redux // Amy Hoy’s “30×500” class sounds like a wonderful idea. Promising no-nonsense lessons, intensive tutoring, and the benefits of the alumni network, 30×500 sounds like a Y Combinator of bootstrapped startups. (Alas, this year I am trying my own way of finding what I want to do, or else I might have just joined.)

A Whole Other Country // Will Wilkinson on radically pivoting his career: “we overestimate the value of what we already have and so underestimate the upside of taking a chance, leaving something behind, and making a big change.” (via Ben Casnocha)

App of the Week

Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe // Chris Harris demoed this iPad app at Úll and blew everyone away with the intuitive user interaction, fluid transitions, and his charming ad-hoc presentation style. His team built an amazingly powerful iPad editor to live-edit the images and transitions – exactly what Bret Victor was getting at with direct-feedback IDEs in Inventing on Principle.