“I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age.”

The online world was his stage; he just needed to decide who would come out from behind the curtain.

MOST PEOPLE GO through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.

Amazon had begun as a virtual bookstore before becoming our everything supermarket. And Google, which had started as a search engine, was trying to build cars that could drive themselves.

He planned to build an app with an old friend from Austin, René Pinnell.

A little more than an hour later, at around 5:30 p.m., Preston walked out of his bedroom for what would be the last time in his life.

With these hints, and others, he searched through the list of incoming passengers arriving at O’Hare who fit his profile. Eventually he identified an inbound passenger who he believed would be smuggling the drug.

And what did Ross have on his résumé? Two degrees and a series of dead ends.

the paper that referenced the “Gambler’s Ruin problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will eventually win.