In a country with crumbling infrastructure, cargo barges are vital for ferrying goods and unofficial passengers along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s aquatic superhighway. ON THE CONGO RIVER, Democratic Republic of Congo— It begins with shouting. Almost everything here seems to. This time they…

Instead of functioning via a standalone app, the money-saving tool Digit uses text messaging to communicate with its customers. Source: Hello Digit, Inc. Source: Hello Digit, Inc. In his rush to get his latest startup off the ground, Ethan Bloch didn’t want to waste time designing a smartphone app.…

Building 5 is part of the cluster of buildings that were among the first erected at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters 13 miles east of downtown Seattle—so I’m told, on a recent trip here. That would have been back in the late ’80s, when perhaps only a few prescient people could have predicted how the…

Dr. Frederick A. Murphy / CDC Ian Lipkin , a virus hunter from Columbia University, recently received a blood sample from colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. They came from a man who had received a bone-marrow transplant and had fallen mysteriously ill, with evidence of severely…

I am unpacking my library. The initial author of that line, Walter Benjamin, understood that a book collector’s passion “borders on the chaos of memories.” Had I stuck with Benjamin, I might have gotten on with the long-deferred task of shepherding my books from their basement bunker to the places…

For a while now I’ve been kind of meaning to write a long, in-depth post about 4chan . With the recent controversy between them and some significant feminist figures in the gaming industry, I think it’s important that I finally go ahead and do this. Since, let’s be honest: any time there’s a big…

Before Chinese President Xi Jinping visits President Obama, he and Chinese executives have some business in Seattle: pressing U.S. tech companies, hungry for the Chinese market, to comply with the country’s new stringent and suppressive Internet policies. The New York Times reported last week that…

The Stack Archive World Facebook and Disney finally deliver on the VRML dream with Star Wars ‘pannable’ 360 video Thu 24 Sep 2015 Share 8 Share 3 40 Shares Facebook has launched its much anticipated 360 video feature in about as spectacular a fashion as could have been imagined, by releasing an…

China’s proposals for a “social credit system” don’t seem that radical when you read the dry, official plan posted by the government last year. As befits circulars from a socialist regime, the language is aggrandizing but unspecific: Accelerating the construction of a social credit system is an…

The Vegetable Detective, Take Two Issue: Fall 2015 Author: Todd Oppenheimer Locations: California Masters: Ernie Hubbard: Vegetable Detective A California biologist finds toxic metals in kale, gets slammed for it on the Internet, and then finds evidence that this metal could be more troublesome than…

Getty Images Professor Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution for how information might be able to escape a black hole. The problem has confounded physicists for decades; quantum mechanics says when objects fall beyond the event horizon -- the boundary where even light cannot escape from a…

No Place to go but South

California Diocese Sells Premium Wine Made from Cemetery-Grown Grapes

In the spring of 1948, I was dispatched to Havana on the ridiculous mission of asking Ernest Hemingway to write an article on “The Future of Literature.” I was with Cosmopolitan , then a literary magazine, before its defoliation by Helen Gurley Brown, and the editor was planning an issue on the…

Musicians aren't likely to get rich from selling records today, unlike their 20th Century predecessors - and one man saw it all coming a long time ago. So singer-songwriter Sam York went to ask him if the future will be better for musicians, or worse. Back in 1976, the music business looked…

THE man who calls himself Jack is a caricature of a small-time gangster. Sporting a chunky Louis Vuitton belt, a gold necklace and gold-rimmed sunglasses, he chomps on a Cuban cigar. He says he has come to a pawnshop across the street from the Ponte 16 casino in Macau, a gambling Mecca and former…

By day, Michael Bunker lives an agrarian life, raising crops and tending livestock on a 40-acre farm in central Texas. He has no running water in his home. Or electricity. When he bought the farm 10 years ago, there wasn’t even a house, so he and his wife lived in a tent. With their four children.…

‘SEA SLAVES’: THE HUMAN MISERY THAT FEEDS PETS AND LIVESTOCK

When we started out, our lack of traffic threatened to crush us. Here’s how we fixed that. 1,000. That’s how many unique visitors we had in the first month after we released Groove. It’s not bad if you’re launching a new blog and want to share your thoughts with a small group of people. But if…

I n the spring of 1964, as fighting escalated in Vietnam, several dozen Americans gathered to play a game. They were some of the most powerful men in Washington: the director of Central Intelligence, the Army chief of staff, the national security advisor, and the head of the Strategic Air Command.…

Acknowledging their failure to stem a surge in homelessness, Los Angeles' elected leaders on Tuesday said they would declare a "state of emergency" and devote up to $100 million to the problem. But they offered few details about where the money would come from or how it would be spent, leaving some…

For months, thousands of firefighters have been battling raging wildfires in the tinder-dry forests of drought-stricken California. Most are employees of the state's fire service, but more than a third are prisoners, who earn money and early release in return for doing an exhausting, dirty and…

Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system in China, but the government is trying to encourage homegrown replacements. The most popular one is called NeoKylin. We gave it a whirl to see how the hottest China-made OS looks and feels. NeoKylin is developed by China Standard Software, based in…

@MonaChalabi Quick question for you Mona: What is the total amount of faces and names an average person can remember? — Joe Callingham (@AstroJoeC) September 1, 2015 Dear Joe, First up, let me try to look at faces. It’s generally accepted that people are better at remembering faces than names…

Netflix crunched cold, hard viewing data for more than two dozen TV shows and says it has determined which specific episode grabbed most subscribers to the point where they watched the entire first season. However, none of the shows Netflix looked at, which included originals and licensed series,…

The B10 house in Stuttgart, Germany, is a so-called active house that can set room temperature, switch on the lighting, and open or close the windows. Credit Zooey Braun STUTTGART, Germany — In 1927 a pioneering new estate opened its doors on a hillside overlooking the German city of Stuttgart. It…

FBI Director James Comey speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington earlier this month. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg) An Obama administration working group has explored four possible approaches tech companies might use that would allow law enforcement to unlock encrypted…

I was feeling lonely one recent weekend. I craved company, but friends and family all seemed to be on vacation or busy. So I arranged to chat with a friend who lives in another city, signed up for a group kayak outing, and decided I’d take myself to Sunday brunch at a new restaurant nearby. Then I…

About New York A Columbia University law professor stood in a hotel lobby one morning and noticed a sign apologizing for an elevator that was out of order. It had dropped unexpectedly three stories a few days earlier. The professor, Eben Moglen , tried to imagine what the world would be like if…

KUNMING, China—The email attachment would tempt anyone following the diplomatic standoff between China and other countries in the South China Sea. The Microsoft Word document contained text and photos depicting Thai naval personnel capturing Vietnamese fishermen and forcing them to kneel at…

C asey Shehi’s son James was born in August 2014, remarkably robust even though he was four weeks premature. But the maternity nurse at Gadsden Regional Medical Center seemed almost embarrassed, and as she took the baby from his exhausted mother’s arms, Shehi felt a prick of dread. “She said they…

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Story highlights A combination of a supermoon and a eclipse will be happening Sunday, September 27 The total lunar eclipse will be visible in the United States and much of the world Will you be watching the supermoon eclipse on Sunday? Share your photos with CNN iReport. (CNN) Stargazers, night owls…

Meet the People Who Ritualistically Suspend Bodies From Hooks

WASHINGTON — Just a day before the arrival of President Xi Jinping here for a meeting with President Obama that will be focused heavily on limiting cyberespionage, the Office of Personnel Management said Wednesday that the hackers who stole security dossiers from the agency also got the fingerprints…

There are so many things you’d rather be doing than what you ought to be doing and what happens is that you delay doing what you ought. All the evidence shows that this procrastination is bad for you, for your productivity, your school grades, for your health. But still we keep putting things off.…

In 1996, an art dealer named Glafira Rosales approached Ann Freedman, the president of New York’s Knoedler Gallery, which sold artwork to wealthy collectors for over 150 years. Rosales offered to sell Knoedler paintings by masters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at bargain…