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Not far away, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is building a $40 million-plus replica of the Japanese Katsura palace on 23 wooded acres. Presumably, he'll be parking his new Marchetti Italian jet fighter elsewhere - perhaps next to the aerobatic plane he just bought as an eighth-grade graduation gift for h…

[...] Workers and bosses? Those were twentieth-century phrases, according to the CEOs. They were outmoded, old-fashioned, irrelevant concepts. Their new mantra was: "We're all equal, we're all a team, we all work as owners of the company because we all have stock options. So unions are passé, since…

Aside from the simple geographical designation, Silicon Valley is the name for a psychological obsession found anyplace where people believe that instant fame and fortune can be gained through silicon chips and Web sites, or lotteries or stock-market trading. This dream nourishes itself on an addic…

So right off, he readies us for voices weaving together and for radical shifts in tone from light to dark. As a writer you can’t just start jamming stuff together, hoping the reader will magically know what’s in your mind. You have to start out slowly, by laying transitions—like leaving breadcrumbs…

There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, I’d lie on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there y…