Kyle Chayka

If start-up founders are our new royalty—as Mark Zuckerberg is Silicon Valley’s prince—then perhaps venture capitalists are their grand viziers. Once advisers to the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, grand viziers wield power behind the scenes. They variously prop up, ...

An ad recently appeared on the New York City subway—right in one of those above-the-seat ad spots that turns even public transportation infrastructure into a passive #branding vehicle—for “the domain that never sleeps.” This “exclusively for New Yorkers” deal, as the ...

It only took the mega-entrepreneur and fume-drunk Delphic Oracle of innovation Elon Musk six years to win the favor of the federal government and use it to get into space. The turnaround is so fast one wonders if he didn’t just call an Uber. Musk’s galactic start-up SpaceX ...

Where technology start-ups have disruption, editorial outfits both online and off are now laying claim to a meaningless shibboleth of their own: the idea. Ideas are blooming everywhere. The New Yorker recently launched a “new blog about ideas” by its archive editor Joshua ...

I first awaited The Author in a claustrophobically tight crowd of people packed inside of a Brooklyn bookstore. The reading wasn’t to begin for another hour, but the store’s staff was forced to close the doors before too many more guests depleted the room’s oxygen levels. ...

The workplace has played a fraught role in America’s pop cultural life as of late, particularly as refracted through the lens of popular television. We’ve had the banal cubicle hilarity of The Office and Workaholics contrasted with the austere eros and thanatos of ...

At the southern end of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the hipster epicenter of the world’s hipster epicenter, is the site of the century-old Domino Sugar Refinery, now a hulking shell of empty warehouses. Soon, thanks to the development company Two Trees (the people who invented the ...

Car dealers seem to be the only people not enamored with entrepreneur-at-large Elon Musk. Musk’s car-manufacturing concern Tesla Motors is trying to enter state markets and sell its electric vehicles directly to consumers in a model of vertical integration, just as Apple ...