Yuichiro Sugahara, whose company delivers bento lunchboxes, mostly through fax orders. Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times TOKYO — Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet…

Messaging is the center of mobile, and Facebook wants ads in front of all those eyes. After seeing “promising results from Australia and Thailand,” Facebook Messenger is expanding its display ad beta test that lets businesses buy space between your chat threads. Later this month, a small percentage…

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) ___________ pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-| noun the action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination . Who would have thought that after…

A giant iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg has broken off an ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula and is now adrift in the Weddell Sea. Reported to be “ hanging by a thread ” last month, the trillion-tonne iceberg was found to have split off from the Larsen C segment of the Larsen ice shelf on…

How to make people love the product The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias that can influence the outcome and perceived value of products to a big degree. People tend to place high value on products they partially have created. Hence, the name IKEA effect. It is derived from the Swedish furniture…

Editors’ note: We’re resurfacing this story from the archives because who wouldn’t want to master their emotions? LAST month, in San Jose, Calif., 21 people were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called Unleash the Power Within, starring the motivational…

U2 has often played for broad audiences that do not uniformly embrace the band’s progressivism. Throughout a recent concert at the Meadowlands, Bono made attempts at inspiration and conversion. Photograph by Taylor Hill / FilmMagic / Getty Love for a band, like love for a person, can move in…

Since the nineteen-sixties, the science of thermal comfort has tended to neglect women. Illustration by Tomi Um Even before Adam and Eve picked and ate the fatal fruit of the tree of knowledge, condemning humanity to lives of sweat-soaked toil, they knew the meaning of good thermoregulation. Halfway…

Officially, the NES died in 1995, some nine years after its launch. Unofficially, though, dedicated fans are keeping Nintendo's retro console very much alive. Today, the most prolific and respected NES developers are people such as Kevin Hanley , from Crestview, Florida. Since 2009, Hanley has made…

Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. Editor Tim Herrera emails readers once a week with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Monday morning. We’re all a little lazy sometimes. If you’re anything like me, you’re reading this on…

Tumi luggage trackers put your pricey luggage on the map. Bear with me you guys, because I am about to write an entire essay about a connected suitcase tracker. It’s not because summer is a slow news time, or that travel stories do well in the summer months. It’s because Tumi just launched a $200…

Lieutenant-General (retired) Roméo Dallaire is the founder of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative. Alex Neve is secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada. It is close to 15 years since the July 27, 2002, firefight in Afghanistan that killed a U.S. soldier, injured another, and left…

Village Underground – part creative community, part arts venue – occupies a dramatic site next to the city’s suspension bridge.Photograph: Village Undergound I n Lisbon people keep telling me about the surfing. It’s great. The beaches are 20 minutes from the beautiful, historic and lively centre of…

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: They were known as the holdouts, Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender after the end of World War II. Dozens fought on from their jungle strongholds, refusing to believe that the Japanese empire had been defeated. One of the last to surrender was Hiroo Onoda who spent 30…

Illustration by Stephen Skalocky Nearly a quarter century ago, the mischievous developers at Midway created NBA Jam , marrying video games and sports in a way never seen before. SI gathered those involved—behind the scenes and on the screen—to reminisce about the iconic coin-gobbling arcade game By…

You know it’s a racket, but you click anyway. You already know what it’s going to say: Showing less skin is ultimately sexier than wearing something too short or too low-cut, and a natural beauty look is more appealing than obvious contouring. Blue jeans, an off-the-shoulder top, a little red…

I got my first mobile phone when I was in high school. It was 2005, and the feeling of “cool” overwhelmed me. Text messaging was something sacred in those days. I was allotted 200 messages per month. I powered off during classes, and charged my phone three times a week. Today, I use my smartphone so…

The 1996 book “Under the Tuscan Sun” turned a region of Italy into a shorthand for a certain kind of bourgeois luxury and good taste. Photograph from Touchstone / Everett I have sat on Tuscan-brown sofas surrounded by Tuscan-yellow walls, lounged on Tuscan patios made with Tuscan pavers, surrounded…

Why did the chicken cross the road? It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still. - - - “Knock knock.” “Who’s…

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Editor’s Note: Hey all! My pal Andrew Egan, last seen writing on Tedium about the art of the DVD commentary , has a few thoughts on photo-developing technologies—and how they took pictures mainstream. It’s a lot to reflect on. Check it out! Today in Tedium: From Kodak and Canon to Facebook and…

Editor's note: Back again for another round is Andrew Egan, who most recently brought us the story of Scatman John . Tonight, he tells us about his time digging in the menus on random DVDs. (By the way, a quick shout-out to Kenn Messman, who recently made a big donation to the site. Thanks!) Today…

When you go online on July 12, you’re going to be bombarded with reminders that the Trump administration has promised to soon kill net neutrality, laying the groundwork for an internet chopped up into fast and slow lanes. In what’s shaping up to be the most visible online protest in five years, some…

What do a fragrance designer, New York City cop, bed-and-breakfast manager and youth hockey coach have in common? Each of them recently applied for an account director position at my public relations firm, along with 500 others whose experience and skill sets ranged from vaguely on-point to…

I like to think I take an above average amount of steps to secure myself online: I use a password manager, unique passwords as complex as the site will allow, and turn on 2-factor authentication when possible. A true security expert will likely find some sort of flaw in my setup, but I'll argue that…

— Creating the First Usable Mouse — Europe China Japan USA Work Blog Tools About Contact Jobs News Big Questions Work IDEO designs the original mouse for Apple Apple The Challenge Create a new kind of computer navigation device that is less expensive and more reliable than any other on the market.…

Illustrations by Alicia Pompei, Communications Designer @IDEO You may know IDEO’s role in shaping the process known as design thinking and how that informed the first Apple mouse , the shopping cart , and the insulin pen for Type-1 diabetes . But fewer know about business design , a discipline at…

These erasable tiles enable teams to visualize the flow of goods and services in a business What “Good” Looks Like Illustrated by Ina Xi When I first joined IDEO as a business designer, I had no idea what the role would look like day-to-day. To start figuring it out, I turned to some of our veteran…

The Oregon Trail is, by most measures, the most successful education computer game of all time. Many versions of the game were created over the years, dating all the way back to 1971. However, the version that many people assume is the “original” — the version that constantly appears in memes and…

I f Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s readout of Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin is a preview of the Trump administration’s approach to Russia, it’s going to be a rough three and a half years. In a diplomatic depantsing that will have repercussions far beyond Russia, Tillerson’s comments…

An airplane is the perfect, and perhaps the only, place to actually read the globe-trotting lifestyle magazine founded in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian editor and erstwhile war correspondent. Its logo, an “M” with a twisted loop inscribed in a circle, lurks at airport terminal bookstores all over…

Eternify As this week's back-and-forth between Taylor Swift and Apple has shown, the debate over whether or not artists can get a fair deal from music streaming is far from over . However, if your favorite band doesn't have the cultural clout of Miss Bad Blood herself, then you might want to…

Getting people to have sex with you is like exercise: when you're doing it all the time it feels super easy and fills you with endorphins, but if you stop for a couple of months it's basically impossible to start again. We've all had dry spells, but what does it feel like when you find yourself in a…

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain Whether you're longing for a threesome with your neighbours or want to fuck a stranger while riding a horse in the surf, most of us have at least one sexual fantasy. And while it's important to follow your dreams, I like to think that it's better for…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was Carrie Underwood’s time . It was the age of wisdom, but also of low-rise jeans. It was only just over a decade ago, but oh, how things have changed since 2005. The dating site OkCupid had launched the previous year, and it’s been asking its…

Emma Stone at the Academy Awards in February. She told Billie Jean King that male co-stars have taken pay cuts to level the gap in their Hollywood salaries. Patrick T. Fallon for The New York Times Emma Stone has become the latest woman in Hollywood to speak out about gender pay inequality, saying…

The “travel screen” from The Oregon Trail is an iconic image, instantly recognizable to millions of people — a small, blocky representation of an ox pulling a covered wagon across an abstract landscape. The scene is so familiar that it has permeated our culture, featured in countless internet memes.…

What??? I can only carry 100 pounds of meat back to the wagon!?! And why do those dead buffalo stick their legs straight up in the air? Have you ever wondered how the designers of the classic versions of The Oregon Trail came up with decisions such as these? If so, then you have come to the right…