Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America. As with many religions, complete unthinking devotion is required from its practitioners. Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children, and we must never speak a…

Mike McQuade EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn’t, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don’t. I’m a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although…

For Apple, it’s been the best of times; it’s been the worst of times. On the plus side of the ledger : 4 million iPhones pre-ordered, 10 million sold in the first weekend. iOS 8 on about 1/3 of devices, literally hundreds of millions, with an important update already shipped. Tim Cook confidently…

Sedki Alimam fled Syria in 2011 and came to Sweden in January 2014. A graphic designer, he lives in a small apartment in Uppsala, and is looking for work. Martin Edstrom for The New York Times THE narrow victory of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party in Sweden’s elections last Sunday marked a…

Michael B. Johnson: Holy shit… RT @newsycombinator With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce http://t.co/nbQaECdSWa

WASHINGTON — Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner…

While some tech parents assign limits based on time, others are much stricter about what their children are allowed to do with screens. Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images When Steve Jobs was running Apple, he was known to call journalists to either pat them on the back for a…

Ben Thompson: Drinking is good for you, even in excess. American Puritanism, not so much. http://t.co/dTFZ29K71E

Medium: “The dirty little secret behind discount and outlet stores” —@BrassClo https://t.co/2Q7V7u95p1

The New Yorker: .@nickschmidle on what happened when the U.S. tried to save James Foley and Steven Sotloff: http://t.co/K44vX0hmY7

The Good Boy, 1837. How to Be Polite Most people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly…

The New Yorker: After the Crash http://t.co/dlU7nEv646

kellan: Two recent different looks at Etsy culture from Etsy engineers https://t.co/wUrbWXLqy8 http://t.co/2mHHa2Mr3u @mikebrittain @ansate @rafeco

Apple CEO Tim Cook. Credit: Macworld/TechHive Tim Cook’s instruction from Steve Jobs was clear: Don’t let Apple become paralyzed like Disney did in the wake of Walt Disney’s death, endlessly asking what the esteemed founder would do in any given situation. The only directive from Jobs’s tenure that…

Stanford University network engineers have unveiled a refreshingly enlightened password policy. By allowing extremely long passcodes and relaxing character complexity requirements as length increases, the new standards may make it easier to choose passwords that resist the most common types of…

Ellen Chisa: Happy to see @github's follow up post on the investigation: https://t.co/I0k4swdTXP. These are the hard conversations we need to have.

Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng mourns the lack of patent trolls willing to challenge him: "I never get invited to parties anymore." Newegg MacroSolve is a company that got a lot of (generally negative) attention when it turned full-blown "patent troll" in 2011, suing dozens of companies…

Ben Thompson: Wonderful piece that really captures the power of messaging. http://t.co/Nk56Odsbrr

The Great Divide is a series about inequality. In the face of congressional inaction, the debate on raising the minimum wage is moving to the local level. As more cities and counties consider setting their own wage standards, they can learn from the policy experiments already underway. Since the…

The New Yorker: Masha Lipman explores how Putin plays with the law http://t.co/rXUkrSKJYu

SARAH (December 12, 2009) Fuck you, body, I think as I get out of bed. My head is a balloon filled with water, my shoulders are slack and lifeless, and my eyes feel like glass. I slowly pull on my pants, walk three steps to the sink, and drink two cups of water. My stomach makes an ugly sound, so I…

Ben Thompson: ❤️ LEGOs http://t.co/JtDbPJbnXS

Jason, Dan, Chris, and Phil talk about the new book about the post-Steve Jobs Apple. If Yukari Iwatani Kane’s Haunted Empire teaches us anything, it’s that a dogged newspaper reporter who wants to write a book about Apple needs a narrative hook to hang the story on. In Kane’s case it’s right there…

The jewelry market has been flooded with synthetic stones over the last several years; not just lab-grown gems but flat-out fakes. Here's how to tell if your rock is the real McCoy and not just a shiny bauble. Real Diamonds: Natural vs Lab-Grown Until the mid-1950s, the only way to get your hands on…