Attacks on Mormonism by liberal wits and their unlikely partners in ridicule, conservative evangelical Christians, instantly filled me with resentment, particularly when they made mention of “magic underwear” and other supposedly spooky, cultish aspects of Mormon doctrine and theology. On the other…

How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports.

Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time. The world’s most spectacular border ceremony takes place every day before dusk at Wagah. Roughly halfway between Lahore in Pakistan and Amritsar in India, Wagah is where the Grand Trunk Road [1] intersects with the so-called Radcliffe Line,…

The following was delivered as the commencement address at Williams College on Sunday, June 3rd. We had a patient at my hospital this winter whose story has stuck with me. Mrs. C. was eighty-seven years old, a Holocaust survivor from Germany, and she’d come to the emergency room because she’d…

15 years on, Winamp still lives—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping.

B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer,…

4. Break big problems down into smaller tasks Throughout his life, Turing demonstrated a talent for making seemingly insurmountable problems more manageable by carefully chopping them down into smaller tasks. If most of us were asked by the British government to try to crack communications…

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai — the MIT lecturer who invented e-mail — had spent years blasting the struggling United States Postal Service for its failure to embrace the revenue potential of his creation. So when he was recruited to help save the U.S. Mail earlier this year, Ayyadurai made headlines and was…

Installing Windows (and everything else) Now that you’ve diligently done all of your prep work, the actual installation of Windows isn’t terribly difficult even if you’ve never done it before. Take the DVD or USB stick you made from the downloaded ISO, put it in (or connect it to) the computer,…

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation. The malware, discovered by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit…

Originality is a relative concept in literature. As writers from T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom have pointed out, ideas are doomed to be rehashed. This wasn’t always regarded as a problem. Roman writers subscribed to the idea of imitatio: they viewed their role as emulating and reworking earlier…

John P. Kelly/Getty Images Can brief bursts of exercise improve your health? While many of us wonder just how much exercise we really need in order to gain health and fitness, a group of scientists in Canada are turning that issue on its head and asking, how little exercise do we need? The emerging…

Then came Prohibition, followed hard by industrialization. Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it. A generation raised on Coca-Cola had a hard time readjusting to beer’s bitterness, and…

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like…

And so goes a night on the front lines of southern Africa’s ruthless and murky rhino war, which since 2006 has seen more than a thousand rhinos slaughtered, some 22 poachers gunned down and more than 200 arrested last year in South Africa alone. At the bloody heart of this conflict is the rhino’s…

"It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that…

Schalk van Zuydam/AP Images A vigil against South Africa’s Secrecy Bill in front of Parliament, Cape Town, September 2011 The regime of racism in South Africa was maintained not only by brutality—guns, violence, restrictive laws. It was upheld by elaborately extensive silencing of freedom of…

Jens Ulrich Koch/Getty Images Books at an Amazon logistics center, Bad Hersfeld, Germany, October 23, 2007 So far discussion of the Justice Department’s suit against Apple and several major book publishers for conspiring to fix retail prices of e-books has omitted the major issue: the impact of…

Incredible as it may seem, and there may be no greater anachronism on earth, there are still “wild” human beings living in some of the remotest corners of the tropics. Known or suspected locations of “uncontacted” groups are mapped and identified at www.uncontactedtribes.org (click on “Where are…

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty : The New Yorker

Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment. Carlos DeLuna (Corpus Christi Police Department) THE JUDGE Even for Justice Antonin Scalia, the crassest of the…

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of…

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping…

I first heard about nuclear diving while I was getting my hair cut in downtown Manhattan. My stylist seemed out of place in an East Village salon, so I asked her where she lived. Brooklyn? Queens? Uptown? “Upstate,” she answered. “I commute two hours each way a few times a week.” I asked her why,…

Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether. Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries…

Buoyed by advances in molecular biology, a handful of researchers in labs around the US and Canada are homing in on strategies that could eliminate not just individual viruses but any virus, wiping out viral infections with the same wide-spectrum efficiency that penicillin and Cipro bring to the…

Ralf Herrmann, on the design of his (excellent, to my eyes) signage typeface Wayfinding Sans Pro - DF