This feature, on the continuing destruction of colonialism through exploitative tourism, is the fourth in our monthly longreads on the topic of Fragility. Every month through December 2017, we’ll publish a new must-read perspective on the subject that we hope you’ll read, share, and make part of…

Today in Tedium: This week, the world (for a brief moment) lost its collective mind after learning that Microsoft was planning to retire its legendary Paint software , which has a lineage that dates all the way back to Windows 1.0 in 1985. People calmed down some after learning that the company was…

If there's one thing I've learned about Apple's dealings with SIM cards in the past seven years, it's that Apple gets what Apple wants. The little gold-plated circuits — which identify you as a subscriber on a particular carrier — plug into phones, tablets, and basically anything else with a…

LoRa Phone & the Deconstruction Paradigm, ResonanceDesign It is easy to think the internet’s core paradigm is connectivity. If you look at the way the internet and every relevant new company has created their services and products one might observe that connectivity alone is just not enough. What…

Have you ever had a moment where you didn't know whether to laugh or cry? That's the situation playing out in the graphics card market because of the cryptocurrency mining boom, a topic we've covered extensively in recent months. But just when we thought there was nothing left to report on the…

Vacations are pretty great already. But as psychological researchers discover more about how the human brain works, we’re gaining insights into exactly how to crank up the enjoyment factor–and why you should. Here are nine strategies for getting the most bliss out of your precious vacation days, and…

Stephen has never hacked a voting machine before. But within a few minutes of tinkering, he has already made some progress. "We're trying to figure out how the machine works," Stephen told Motherboard at the annual DEF CON hacking conference as he typed commands on his Ubuntu laptop. His computer…

ON DECEMBER 31st the world’s oldest coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow, in Amsterdam, was forced to roll down its bright yellow shutters one last time. Over the past half-century, many a foreigner has smoked their first spliff at this cosy cafe, which sat perfectly on the route between two tourist…

T he setup could have been a scene from Blazing Saddles : a group of artsy foreign filmmakers visiting a rural Texas ranch to shoot guns for the first time in their lives. They’d come from all over the world—Belgium, Colombia, Canada, and South Africa, among other countries—to attend Fantastic Fest,…

It’s a question central to daily life: Do you spend money to save time or spend time to save money? Well, if happiness is the goal, you might consider opening that wallet. That’s the takeaway of a study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, whose findings…

Sign up here to get the Smarter Living newsletter, a weekly roundup of the best advice from The New York Times on living a better, smarter and more fulfilling life. You know when you stub your toe and involuntarily utter an expletive? You probably didn’t give it much thought, but you might have been…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) Over the past five years, Vic Mensa has been involved with some of hip-hop’s biggest projects, but his solo impact on the genre is just beginning. His first studio album, The Autobiography , is out Friday. On the most recent episode on the Channel 33 feed, he…

Photo: Adult Swim A spoof is only a spoof until a character you care about gets hurt. I don’t mean slapstick-hurt. Emotionally hurt. After that, everything that happens has weight. You care. The outcome of the story isn’t of purely sporting interest anymore. Suddenly, you care nearly as much as you…

The New York Times likes to think of itself as a family newspaper . It is also the self-described paper of record . It may not be either, but it’s definitely not both all the time. Take, for example, the moment when the Times had to choose whether to quote the new White House communications director…

Russians are fond of a proverb, “besplatniy sir biyvaet tol’ko v mishelovke”: “Free cheese can be found only in a mousetrap.” Having long considered the United States its main enemy, the Kremlin deploys a full quiver of intelligence weapons against America and its national security agencies,…

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin announced Sunday that the American diplomatic mission in Russia must reduce its staff by 755 employees, an aggressive response to new American sanctions that seemed ripped right from the Cold War playbook and sure to increase tensions between the two capitals. In…

WASHINGTON — A newfound memo from Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton sheds fresh light on a constitutional puzzle that is taking on mounting significance amid the Trump-Russia inquiry: Can a sitting president be indicted? The 56-page memo , locked in the…

The new White House communications director has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. Photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony…

This article has been updated. At the end of a Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday morning, someone sitting near Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) didn’t switch off a microphone. Collins was recorded discussing the federal budget and President Trump’s lack of familiarity with the details of…

Zak Ziebell Maps, as I've written before , are inherently subjective—no matter how detailed or scientific, they reflect our worldview and the age in which we're living, not to mention the difficulty of projecting a spherical globe onto a plane surface. Now compound these challenges by asking 30…

In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of…

It is no longer sufficient to brand Donald Trump as abnormal, a designation that is surely applicable but that falls significantly short in registering the magnitude of the menace. The standard nomenclature of normal politics must be abandoned. What we are witnessing is nothing less than an assault…

Log in with Twitter news tech & science social media business entertainment life sports Listen | Print By Jul 21, 2017 in Technology An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient.…

Coupland warns that the work routine as we know it is coming to an end: ‘There will be no more weekends.’Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian Douglas Coupland has always been one of the sharpest critics of the modern workplace. His literary works – such as Generation X, JPod and Microserfs –…

HYRYNSALMI, Finland — There’s something strange going on in Finland. Over the past few decades, as it has all but disappeared from the global sports stage, this humble Nordic nation has sort of lost its sports mind. More than 2,000 people ventured to the remote backwaters of central Finland recently…

AP / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Marion Tinsley—math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world—sat across a game board from a computer, dying. Tinsley had been the world’s best for 40 years, a time during which he'd lost a handful of games to humans, but never a match. It's…

The profoundly dusted follow-up to the Beastie Boys’ landmark, diamond-selling, tongue-in-cheek party record, Licensed to Ill , starts off with the Boys dropping the needle on an Idris Muhammad record, “ Loran Dance ” (1974). Over booming bass and dreamy key strokes courtesy of Bob James, Adam “MCA”…

Do you think of yourself as lazy ? If so, do you think that's a good thing ? It just might be the key to success . That's according to Michael Lewis, author of the bestsellers Moneyball , The Big Short , and many more. Lewis was a keynote speaker at the 2017 Insight Summit put on by online survey…

Transportation Without sustainable power production electric cars are not that great. Charging an 85kWh Tesla would still burn the equivalent of 10 gallons of oil at the power plant (see the footnote at the original post for the numbers behind this calculation). With a range of 265 miles the Tesla…

Building a solar micro-grid in my bedroom with parts from Amazon The problem Apartment renters need the landlord’s permission to install anything on their rooftops. This makes installing solar difficult for people who rent. Because most of the world lives in urbanized areas where renting is common,…

ID: “TRUMP” spelled out in scrabble tiles, on top of blank tiles (CC0 Public Domain) Hi. If you’re a cisgender person angrily sharing the news about Trump’s ban of transgender people in the military, consider the following. - This is not a future hypothetical in which we need to protect people who…

5 Ways to Seriously Battle Traffic Laura Bliss Jul 25, 2017 So long as cars are among us, road pricing, ramp meters, and diamond-shaped intersections can mitigate horrendous commutes, a new video explains. In 2004, the American Highway Users Alliance dubbed the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, the…

When Microsoft unveiled the first Surface tablet five years ago, it was a spectacular failure. At the time, the Apple iPhone was well on its way to conquering the technology industry, and the iPad appeared set to lead an even more devastating invasion of Microsoft’s office-worker kingdom. Microsoft…

Lawfare In what will probably go down as the single most important decision of his professional life, the attorney general made the right call. By | WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 13: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions listens during a news conference to announce significant law enforcement actions July 13,…

Lamar’s delivery in a recent concert at the Barclays Center is a testament to the enduring power of an unvarnished rap performance. Photograph by Ollie Millington / Redferns / Getty At the start of his popular ascendance, Kendrick Lamar made a point ofhiding. In the 2012 video for “Money Trees,” he…

Everlane, which is billing itself as the first major lifestyle brand to be built entirely online, offers “luxury essentials”–T-shirts, ties, bags–at H&M prices. It’s all made possible because Everlane eschews any sort of physical presence; because Everlane sells direct to the consumer and doesn’t…

A few years ago, Ido Leffler , a Bay Area-based entrepreneur and founder, woke up in the middle of the night, suddenly bothered by a system he’d been participating in his whole life: the inflated cost of consumer packaged goods. “It just hit me: Why were we spending $15 or $20 on things that cost…

Ridiculed for failing to have the ideal “cute celebrity pregnancy,” Kardashian called attention to the constrictive ways women are now expected to perform pregnancy in public. An excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen's Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman . Kiersten…