“I’d sell my soul for total control...” Gina Healey molded her body into an S to The Motels’ new wave dirge “Total Control.” She was “scat dancing,” relying on her instincts, and not one bit of her — neither head nor toe nor in between — stood still. On that Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1980,…

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, a police officer fatally shot an unarmed, black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. Details remain in dispute. Eyewitnesses have said that Brown was compliant with police and was shot while he had his hands up. Police maintain that the 18-year-old had…

POLITICS, wrote the political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1936, is about “who gets what, when, and how.” If you want to understand the racial power disparities we’ve seen in Ferguson, Mo., understand that it’s not only about black and white. It’s about green. Back in 1876, the city of St. Louis…

Published on May 30, 2015 David D. Clark, an MIT scientist whose air of genial wisdom earned him the nickname “Albus Dumbledore,” can remember exactly when he grasped the Internet’s dark side. He was presiding over a meeting of network engineers when news broke that a dangerous computer worm — the…

Disponible en Español By the first days of October, the outdoor basketball court at the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, had become an open-air waiting room of despair. Pain emanated like heat. Under the court’s high, corrugated tin roof, the families of…

Peter Yang Smile at the customer. Bake cookies for your colleagues. Sing your subordinates’ praises. Share credit. Listen. Empathize. Don’t drive the last dollar out of a deal. Leave the last doughnut for someone else. Sneer at the customer. Keep your colleagues on edge. Claim credit. Speak first.…

I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept that distracted us for a few years while they settled into their roles as slightly different ways to text. He mentioned something,…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell A year ago, at the Cannes film festival, Leila Hatami, an Iranian movie star best known in this country for her role in “A Separation,” was walking the red carpet, wearing a gold-embroidered turban and a matching long-sleeved dress, when she encountered Gilles Jacob, the…

One afternoon just a month and a half after the Battle of Gettysburg, Christopher Spencer, the creator of a seven-shot repeating rifle, walked Abraham Lincoln out to a grassy field near where the Washington Monument now stands in order to demonstrate the amazing potential of his new gun. Lincoln had…

Problems in the relationship between Bangladesh and India are nothing new, but the controversy surrounding the chitmahals , or the Bangladesh-India enclaves, has proved particularly tricky for governments on both sides. A patchwork of about 160 microscopic states-within-states lies scattered across…

To her, it looked like a harmless piece of coal, about the size of her fist. She remembers passing it to a Chinese secret agent. She remembers later learning about the train, the bridge, the explosion. Sometimes she thinks she has suppressed many wartime memories, but even after almost 70 years,…

Most of September 17, 2012, has evaporated from my mind. I still have a few memories. I have the way the surgeon's voice shook. I remember my wife calling my name while she was still under sedation. And I have an image of the hospital floor, up close. I remember white tile and a hope: Maybe I will…

Share 2K Share Jump straight to a section Crafting the Citadel Into the toxic storm Through the canyon Delivering day for night The final chase The guitar gets it Arming Furiosa Shifting the skies The postvis process When George Miller looked to return to the world of Mad Max with his new Fury Road…

TAKEOFF As we push back from our gate at Heathrow Airport we light the Boeing 747’s engines in pairs, starting with those under the starboard wing. A sudden hush falls in the cockpit as the air flow for the air-conditioning units is diverted. It’s this, air alone, that begins to spin the enormous…

I recently met with the advanced design team of a Japanese client to discuss how autonomous mobility could play out. The following are behavioral musings/predictions based on research into practices across markets as diverse as the US, China, Japan and India. The elasticity of a vehicle: its…

Although most of our world is not white, the end of the world is always so. The math does not add up. Mad Max: Fury Road is making waves as a must-see “feminist” film, largely in reaction to calls for a boycott by so-called men’s rights activists (MRAs) based on analyses such as “[Charlize] Theron…

The first full shot we get of the escaping women shows them standing tall against a gorgeous sun-blasted horizon, wearing white muslin bikinis and other resort-wear, and looking exactly like supermodels posing for a Vogue shoot in the deserts of Namibia. Men’s rights advocates (MRAs) have been…

Years ago some feminist on the Internet told me I was "privileged." "THE F&CK!?!?" I said. I came from the kind of poor that people don't want to believe still exists in this country. Have you ever spent a frigid northern-Illinois winter without heat or running water? I have. At 12 years old were…

Games are grotesque. I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt , games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are…

Psilocybin may be useful in treating anxiety, addiction, and depression, and in studying the neurobiology of mystical experience. Illustration by Stephen Doyle On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick Mettes, a fifty-four-year-old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts,…

What’s News Turkey Crisis Rattles Currency Markets, Pushes Dollar Higher The Turkish lira plunged to its lowest level ever on worries about Ankara’s stability, sending tremors through Europe and emerging markets while the country’s leader and President Trump ratcheted up their war of words. 12…

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In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There he addressed some of the…

April 28, 2017 gluekit How a chicken farmer, a pair of princesses, and 27 imaginary spies helped the Allies win World War II. In the weeks leading up to D-day, Allied commanders had their best game faces on. “This operation is not being planned with any alternatives,” barked General Dwight D.…

The premise of Nemesis was simple. “ Nemesis is a reversal of the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark archetype,” its author Mark Millar told an interviewer just before the comic came out in 2010. “What if this genius billionaire was just this total shit, and the only thing that stood between him and a city…

On a typical sunny day at San Quentin State Prison, twelve miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, California, large flocks of geese settle in the prison yard. The prison is an oddly peaceful place, surrounded by a cluster of residential houses where mothers push toddlers in strollers…

As US audiences tire of big budget spectacle, Hollywood designs its blockbuster product for the ever-expanding Chinese market It matters that Superman is a white man, even though he’s not human but an alien from the planet Krypton. It matters that Batman, Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, and…

This article shares the first part of its title with the tagline for this iconic 1920s Soviet propaganda poster . Also considered were the taglines for this poster , issued during the space race, which reads “I am happy—this is my work joining the work of my republic,” and this one’s , “Glory to the…

The New York Times: A NYT reporter has been covering Ebola in West Africa for two months. Vigilance is essential: http://t.co/AA8yGCqagk

Boot up your computer. If you’re the owner of one of the more than two hundred million Macs sold, what’s the first thing you hear when you start or restart your machine? That sound tells you you’ve held down the power button long enough to get things going. And the fact that it’s there means you…

Adam Voorhes O n the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful…

U.S. Army / Flickr Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, the Taliban’s military leader for southern Afghanistan, sat stolidly, his great bulk sup­ported in an overstuffed chair to my left. It was October 2, 2001, and events had been hurtling forward since the terrorist attacks of September 11. President…

In Lahore, Pakistan, the city where I was born and where I once again live after two decades abroad, my experience of picking up my children from school has recently changed. As of this term, I can no longer enter my daughter’s kindergarten. I must show an ID card with her photograph at the…

Konstantin von Wedelstaedt/Wikimedia Commons I remember first hearing about the accident early in the morning after the airplane went down. It was October 31, 1999, Halloween morning. I was in my office when a fellow pilot, a former flying companion, phoned with the news: It was EgyptAir Flight 990,…

O. J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Timothy McVeigh—seeds of the present? Illustration by Concepción Studios; Clockwise from top: Michael Nelson / AFP / Getty (Simpson); Reuters / CORBIS (McVeigh); Barbara Laing / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty (Building); APTV / AP (Lewinsky) History is the…

Homes in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in the Coachella Valley. Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered a 25 percent statewide reduction in non-agricultural water use. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times By , Jack Healy and Nelson D. Schwartz LOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state…

A screen shot of a video released by ISIS showing militants destroying antiquities in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, February 2015 “We’re ridding the world of polytheism, and spreading monotheism across the planet,” an ISIS preacher recently said in a video recording. Behind him one could see the ISIS…