In a talk at the Atlantic Council this week, CIA director-general Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I'll take his word for it. But bin Laden's strange disappearance makes one wonder what exactly happened to him. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he apparently appeared in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden scoff at ...

General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, walked into the celebration of Saudi Arabia's national day in Washington D.C. and was immediately posed with the question of the day. "Is it true?" Hayden was asked by a Time reporter. "Nope," Hayden said, immediately adding to the accumulating statements on the paucity of evidence that Osama bin Laden was dead. About an hour before, the Saudi government itself declared that it "has no evidence to support recent media ...

Michael Fertik may be running a business, but by the time new customers are knocking on his door, things have turned decidedly personal. "People send us letters that say, 'You saved my life,'" says the CEO of Reputation.com, pointing to the dramatic ways in which a person's virtual reputation can shape their day-to-day routine. "They literally say, 'I'm now able to live my life.'" When most Web surfers Google themselves, the self-search begins and ends with social ...

As the founder and chairman of his eponymous computer company, Michael Dell changed the way PCs are made and sold. In the past year, though, rivals have gained on him. So this year he's going for a green advantage: he wants to erase some of the environmental cost of running computers by offering a way to neutralize the carbon dioxide emitted by a PC. Dell, 41, spoke with TIME's Bryan Walsh about climate change, the media and small, shiny objects. ...

Alice Munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest--her 11th--collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock , marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on ...

They come from different parts of the technology universe. Computer powerhouse Hewlett-Packard is an invention factory that has created hundreds of products, things like the handheld calculator, over its 62-year history. Compaq hasn't really invented anything. It sprang to life as an IBM-clone maker in 1982 and shot into the FORTUNE 500 in record time on the basis of its ability to give consumers low-priced machines built with mostly off-the-shelf parts. But in the current tech recession these two companies have ...

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: ...

When Starbucks coffee rolls out its new logo in stores in early March, you might notice something missing from your coffee cup: the words Starbucks Coffee. The company says removing its angular text from the logo allows for more flexibility overall. And Vikas Mittal, a Rice University professor who studies logo redesigns and brand commitment, believes it will have an added benefit as Starbucks begins to expand in Asia. In a paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer ...

Even after his death, Michael Jackson is breaking records."It wasn't really like going to the movies, it was more of going to a V.I.P. behind the scenes Michael Jackson concert," Gross said in his review. "There really is nothing to compare this to!" The film will show in 99 countries, and early reports from overseas territories show strong late show and early matinee attendance, Elzer said. Another iReport reviewer, FabTab, watched the movie in Beijing, China, and also said the ...

The Internet's most popular search engine should get smarter about music, as Google updates the algorithms that power its searches this week, a company spokesman said."It wasn't really like going to the movies, it was more of going to a V.I.P. behind the scenes Michael Jackson concert," Gross said in his review. "There really is nothing to compare this to!" The film will show in 99 countries, and early reports from overseas territories show strong late show and early matinee ...