John Herrman Co-editor, The @Awl The Awl Be less stupid.

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in February, confusion began to swirl surrounding the future - or lack thereof - regarding RadioShack's brand name and the sensitive customer data the tech seller has accumulated over the years. Yesterday, the auction for those assets ended and New…

InvestigateWest InvestigateWest - Investigative journalism for the Pacific Northwest InvestigateWest (http://www.invw.org/series/portland-housing/) Membership Support InvestigateWest’s Award-Winning Journalism Staff Subscribe Portland Housing Reporting on the new reign of cash in the Portland…

Amrit Apr 28, 2015 Answer to the most frequently asked question after the 7.8 Magnitude earthquake. Now you can do something from over there. Overview: Donate money to credible organizations (list below), or donate supplies to local drives in your area. Don’t forget about us in Nepal. It’s easy to…

“Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco’s unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night. “You know he rebuilt Yo’s backend. He’s baller.” We watched the sun set over Twin Peaks, and Matin told me about his high school dropout friends like Latta, 17, who…

We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays on the muddy shores of Lakeshire. There were 40 of us, alternatives in tow, laughing, buffing, flaunting. We exorcised our pre-raid jitters as best we could. North of Lakeshire lay the sinister Burning Steppes, home of Blackrock Mountain and home of our hopes and…

Smiles all round: ‘Human happiness, an abstract concept since the time of the ancient Greeks, is now a commodity.’ Illustration: Rob Biddulph T he happiest man in the world is a 67-year-old Buddhist monk called Matthieu Ricard . He starts his day sitting in a meadow in front of his hermitage in…

OpenStreetMap Another Way to Help Humanitarian Efforts in Nepal: Start Mapping Laura Bliss Apr 27, 2015 Citizen cartographers around the globe are tracing and checking roads, buildings, and open spaces to assist people on the ground. You can help. The numbers keep rising from the massive earthquake…

S ometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” 1 Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any…

In his book Derailed , about his fall from academic grace, the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel explained his preferred method for manipulating scientific data in detail that would make any nerd's jaw drop: "I preferred to do it at home, late in the evening... I made myself some tea, put my…

It’s a long, hard road to understanding the human brain, and one of the first milestones in that journey is building a … database. In the past few years, neuroscientists have embarked on several ambitious projects to make sense of the tangle of neurons that makes the human experience human, and an…

Now that Bill Clinton has become a vegan , he is a member of two very small minority groups — living ex-presidents and people who do not consume any animal products. True, there are more vegans than ex-presidents. But the number of vegans is also quite small — less than 0.8% of the U.S population.…

Published: May 2015 Quest for a Superbee Can the world’s most important pollinators be saved? How scientists and breeders are trying to create a hardier honeybee. By Charles C. Mann Photographs by Anand Varma Brother Adam must have known he had become a beekeeper at an unlucky time. It was 1915, and…

in History, Letters , Literature | May 13th, 2015 9 Comments Advertisement Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker , right?—even if we haven’t…

This story has been updated. It’s one of the most basic biology facts we’re taught in school growing up: Birds and mammals are warm-blooded, while reptiles, amphibians and fish are cold-blooded. But new research is turning this well-known knowledge on its head with the discovery of the world’s first…

MANAGEMENT consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world’s best universities. They offer starting salaries in excess of $100,000 and a chance of making many multiples of that. They also provide a…

Read part I of this story here . “I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.” —home/frosty/documents/ journal/2012/q1/january/week1 The descent was stunning. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was…

Everyone is freaking out over San Francisco astronomically high rent prices right now when Seattle real-estate isn’t that far behind. I was walking down the street once in the university district around the University of Washington when I saw construction being built. And then more construction. And…

Harry Shearer, who voices Ned Flanders and Mr Burns in The Simpsons, is to leave the show after more than 25 years following a dispute with producers. Executive producer Al Jean said in a statement to the New York Times that Shearer had turned down a new pay deal. The show "will go on" and the…

Via David Roy; Wood That Works David Roy’s kinetic wood sculptures are a symphony of movement. Set into motion by a few cranks of a knob, intricate orbs spin, twist, and bob to create trance-inducing patterns. Constructed only from birch plywood, a few springs, and a pulley, the sculptures run…

T he Greeks were obsessed with the mathematically perfect body. But unfortunately for anyone chasing that ideal, we were designed not by Pygmalion, the mythical sculptor who carved a flawless woman, but by MacGyver. Evolution constructed our bodies with the biological equivalent of duct tape and…

By | May 14, 2015 Illustrations by The Red Dress SpaceX started with a plan to send mice to Mars. It got crazier from there. In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile. He brought along Jim Cantrell, a kind of international aerospace supplies fixer,…

Balazs Zsedely May 14, 2015 Yesterday I was trying to put my phone on my Macbook Pro (Retina) to read its screen and enter an URL to my desktop’s browser. Well, I couldn’t. My Nexus 5's screen started to behave weirdly, making it impossible to read the given URL. As I put my phone near (a certain…

In the summer of 1987, my father tried to murder me with an alligator. He was always doing fun stuff like that, to see if we would die. Sometimes, he tried to murder us with other things, like gasoline, when we’d say to our Pop, "The leaves won't burn." In rural Mississippi, my brother and I were…

Hacker culture is dying. A scene that used to be replete with anticorporate sentiment and profreedom ideals is being sold out by cybersecurity capitalists more concerned with making a quick buck selling ways to exploit computers , websites and phones than actually protecting Web denizens. That, at…

Angel Perez, a Chicago film-maker, is currently bringing an abuse case against the Chicago police department.Photograph: Alyssa Shukar for the Guardian F or psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square , a warehouse…

Most Chrome users can relate to this: you have a bunch of important tabs open, your laptop’s fans start to sound like a rocket taking off, your computer slows to a crawl, and finally it crashes, losing everything. When Chrome debuted for the first time in 2008 it was the fastest browser on the…

the chances of one or more oil spills occurring as a result of drilling in the Arctic over the next 77 years are 75%.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Ross D. Franklin/AP Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. The National Football League paid its commissioner, Roger Goodell, a staggering $44.1 million in 2012. The year before, he took home $29 million . The year before that, $11 million .…

When it comes to knowing what apps do and don't do on Android, there is little that average users can find out in advance or after installation. While the requested permissions may provide information about data the app may access or modify, and also about network or Internet connections it may…

Before movie Terminators are stalking our streets, they’ll probably be shooting our movies. One of the reasons that I’ve moved over from animation - after 20 years, dozens of shorts and an animated feature film - to live-action is that live-action filmmaking seems to have hit a tipping point. Better…

Be careful who you trust with that stool sample; it could be used to identify you. Researchers say they’ve found a way to tell people apart based on the population of bacteria in their poop. They say it works about 86 percent of the time, at least among a relatively small group of test subjects.…

iStock We all know about some of the more obvious consequences of warmer weather — like heat waves. But poorer math performance, at least in the short term when kids take tests on particularly hot days? That’s a surprising finding from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by…