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…

The following are excerpts, as prepared and released on Thursday by the White House, from a conversation aboard Air Force One between President Trump and members of the press corps as they flew to Paris on Wednesday night. The conversation was initially thought by the journalists to be off the…

Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing. The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted legal dispute between the…

Over the past three years, I have been publicly making the case for moving beyond the war on drugs in places as disparate as Baltimore, Medillin, Sydney, Paris and Buenos Aires – and everywhere, I ask the defenders of continuing the drug war one question. Can you name one place, anywhere in the…

T here’s an empty stretch of field off highway 141 in Colorado that used to be the perfect American town. Small houses with white picket fences boasted big flower gardens. Kids played kick the can in the streets, rode their bikes, splashed in swimming pools. On Sundays, they might have watched an…

Fun for all the family? Crate-diggers on Record Store Day.Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/for the Guardian I am writing this review at my teenage record store in Boise, Idaho. According to Google Maps I am approximately 5,147 miles away from my current home in Berlin, Germany, and 2,468 miles away…

The Arc Of Stanley Kubrick: From ‘Killer’s Kiss’ to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’by Noel Murray Stanley Kubrick made just 13 feature films in his nearly 50-year career, and from the ‘60s through the ‘90s—the era in which “a Stanley Kubrick picture” had a meaning—each new project went through more or less the…

AHMED BEST HAS MADE PEACE WITH THE REVILED CHARACTER THAT ONCE DEFINED HIS PAST. 07.15.17 The call from George Lucas came in the summer of 1999, while Ahmed Best was out for a walk in New York City’s Washington Square Park. It was like a lifeline. At that moment, the then-25-year-old actor and…

Jacqui Shine | Longreads | July 2017 | 23 minutes ( 5,700 words) Percy Ross was a trash-bag tycoon, a serial entrepreneur who had made millions in plastics in the 1960s and relished spending it. But in 1977 he staged an astonishing reinvention. Ross would become a philanthropist — and not just any…

At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here. It may sound like a strange juxtaposition: hardened, tattooed offenders donning the cloaks of fantasy characters. Yet both former inmates and correctional…

Swidget has the right idea with swappable smarts for its outlet. Smart homes generate a lot of clutter. I look around my home today and each room has its cluster of white or black devices with glowing LEDs. Most of my outlets sport an unsightly transformer blob that acts as a repeater, a doorbell…

WASHINGTON — Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s new communications director, vowed on Tuesday to purge the White House staff of disloyal aides in an effort to crack down on leaks, as another member of the press staff resigned from a West Wing reeling from an unfolding shake-up. “I’m going to fire…

With the production of Tesla’s mass-market Model 3 now underway, and first deliveries due on Friday, electric cars are about to hit the mainstream. For people driving EVs, it means a raft of changes: plugging in at night instead of hitting the gas station, keeping an eye on a battery meter instead…

AOL Adobe announced today that it is ending support for and development of Flash in 2020. The company cited declining usage statistics (80 percent of Chrome users visited a site with Flash daily in 2014, as compared to 17 percent today) and a plethora of alternatives as the reason for the…