Unbuttoned Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times I wanted it to work. I wanted to fall in love, like so many of my friends. “It takes a while,” they said. “Don’t expect a coup de foudre. Let it build over time.” So I did. I knew other people looked at what I had with envy. But a month and a half…

Subscribe My Account Lapham’s Quarterly About Magazine Current Issue All Issues Preamble Essays Voices in Time Contributors Charts & Graphs Conversations Miscellany Maps Quotes Blogs Roundtable Insight and analysis from renowned writers and thinkers. Déjà Vu Is history repeating itself? the Déja Vu…

Credit: SpaceX Entrepreneur extraordinaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has requested permission from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to test a project to beam high-speed internet via satellite, reports The Washington Post . Musk first made his plans known in January at a SpaceX event…

“SourceForge are (sic) abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past,” according to the GIMP project . Since 2013, SourceForge has been bundling junkware along with their installers — sometimes without a developer’s permission. Update : Since the writing of this…

When a cybersecurity firm discovered it had been hacked last year by a virus widely believed to be used by Israeli spies, it wanted to know who else was on the hit list. The Moscow-based firm, Kaspersky Lab ZAO, checked millions of computers world-wide and three luxury European hotels popped up. The…

A tablet of flibanserin, a drug to increase sexual desire in women. The medicine had been rejected twice by the F.D.A. before being recommended for approval by an advisory committee. Credit Allen G. Breed/Associated Press After an intense lobbying campaign, a federal advisory panel recommended…

“What happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Oh come on, I know you know what I’m talking about. Legos were simple. Something happened out here while I was inside. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I mean I’m not saying it’s bad, I just wanna know what…

Irena wears a necklace that changes color based on signals from Kevin’s nervous system. (Photo: Kevin Warwick) We all know couples who seem to communicate telepathically. They order for each other at restaurants; their raised-eyebrow language is indecipherable to outsiders; they disappear from…

Chris Winiarz, a 31-year-old money manager with a Northwestern MBA, jumped at a student-loan deal of a lifetime. A startup called SoFi offered to refinance his $45,000 in federal debt, slashing his interest rate to 2.69 percent from 6.55 percent. Winiarz will pay off his obligation three years…

Fake mobile towers that scoop up data from passing phones are routinely being used in London, an investigation by Sky News suggests. Working with German security company GMSK Cryptophone, it claims to have uncovered direct evidence, the first in the UK, of at least 20 instances of the use of these…

Ayman al-Zawahiri is isolated, scholars allied to him say.Photograph: AFP/Getty Two of al-Qaida’s most important spiritual leaders have told the Guardian that the terror group is no longer a functioning organisation after being ripped apart by Isis. In a wide-ranging interview, Abu Qatada , a…

The Counted is a project by the Guardian to report and crowd-source names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year.Photograph: Guardian The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 on Wednesday, according to a…

Yesterday morning I got an email from a young aspiring journalist who wanted to know if a master's degree was worth it. His plight was pretty familiar: Go deeper into debt in a gamble to give your career a push, or keep on the same path, working a job while trying to cobble together a real-world…

Illustration by Giacomo Gambineri L uis Parada’s office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington’s lobbying row – a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the “road to riches”, when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a…

The Obama administration is preparing to send hundreds of extra troops to help bolster the Iraqi army in its fight against Islamic State. Barack Obama authorised “up to 450 additional military personnel” to be deployed to the eastern Anbar province, the White House announced on Wednesday. The…

Below is a list of one of the best hidden 101 Computer tips and tricks to impress your friends which you have been unaware of so far in life. Here you go. You can search Google timer in Google for a timer with alarm Search This in Google for Direct Mp3 Links intitle:index.of?mp3 Your song name here…

X Story Stream recent articles The subreddit AskScience is an intellectual gold mine. Curious folk of all ages pose rousing scientific questions to be answered by scientists and experts. Often, the queries deal with peculiarities of how the world and universe function, or the psychological oddities…

Loney Abrams Author "If we were to project what TV would be like 10 years from now, we would still get more wrong than right," said TV Guide in 1995. Speculating on the future of television technology, writer Greg Fagan described the DVD as an "advance in digital wizardry," television as "a garden…

How do you do, fellow kids? I’d like to talk to you about how stupid full-time employment is. In today’s economy, extremely profitable corporations will let you compete to give your services to them for pennies on the dollar. Pretty cool, am I right? I, for one, think all millennials should do it!…

Last week was a bad week for supporters of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA), a proposed piece of legislation that would offer legal immunity to corporations that share customer data with federal agencies like the National Security Agency. On Thursday, the New York Times and…

In the fall of 1943, the eminent quantum physicist Niels Bohr managed a dramatic escape from occupied Denmark, arriving first in Sweden, then going to the United Kingdom. He was quickly assimilated into the British part of the Manhattan Project, then well underway. Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen had…

Photo by Flickr user Shardayyy When Falah Liang was five, she began to sense the presence of a man named Lark in her mind. She could almost see him. His frame was birdlike, he had gray hair, and his company soothed her. As Falah entered her teens, Lark's presence grew and solidified. He took on a…

Jason Davis • June 9, 2015 The Planetary Society’s LightSail test mission successfully completed its primary objective of deploying a solar sail in low-Earth orbit, mission managers said today. During a ground station pass over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that began at 1:26 p.m. EDT (17:26 UTC), the…

Stanford Report, June 8, 2015 Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his students have developed a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets. Their goal is to design a new class of computers that can precisely control and…

The American people are very right. The American people are also very wrong. 96 percent of Americans agree that it is important to reduce the influence of money in elections. This is a no-brainer. Just about the only people who disagree are five Supreme Court justices and the corrupt Congress who…

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” ~ Mark Twain, 1897 In August of 2010, communications specialist Judy Rivers went to her local bank to open a new account. As the clerk input Rivers’ personal information, everything seemed to be going smoothly -- but then the woman behind the desk…

A brief history of ultramarine. Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring , ca. 1665. Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment , the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat,…

Hewlett-Packard has lowered expectations for one of its biggest bets, called the Machine. The new version may actually be more promising. HP, which is splitting into two separate companies on Nov. 1, last year announced the Machine with great fanfare. The company posited that the Machine would be a…

U.S. companies will likely lose more than $35 billion in foreign business as a result of the vast NSA -surveillance operations revealed by Edward Snowden , according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). “Foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies,” the…

The DoneDone Blog | Jun 9, 2015 The overlooked benefits of making yourself busy About a year ago at this time, I was really busy. I was in the home stretch of wedding planning, preparing for a cross-country move from Chicago to San Francisco, and managing the usual full-plate I have at work—writing…

If you borrowed to earn three degrees at Columbia University, you don’t get to complain about it afterward. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images Lee Siegel is an award-winning critic and an unrepentant leech. After pursuing not one, not two, but three degrees from an Ivy League university, he chose to…

Government spending to fight the worst U.S. bird flu outbreak and compensate farmers for their losses will exceed the $410 million so far budgeted and may top a half-billion dollars, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said. While the outbreak of avian influenza, which sent egg prices to record highs,…

Cattle stand in floodwaters at 44 Farms in Cameron, Texas. The water demolished fences and ruined crops planted as feed. Katlin Mazzocco/44 Farms The drought finally broke for Texas ranchers late last year. The range and pasturelands on which cattle graze began to recover. Then came the spring. In…

A while back Jeremy Druin asked me to be a part of a password cracking class along with Martin Bos. I was to cover the very basics, things like “What is a password hash?”, “What types are there?”, and “What is the history of passwords, hashes and cracking them?”. This got me thinking about a paper I…

One day last year, at the height of the Ukrainian revolution, Mark Howard spotted something interesting on television. In the background, a protester was holding up a poster with an instantly recognizable logo: A “B” with two vertical bars, the symbol for the digital currency bitcoin. Mr. Howard is…