Rare is the public policy panel where someone does not bring up the fading grandeur of America’s middle class, and when they do, rare is the participant who does not sorrowfully nod and agree that yes, living standards are bad and getting worse, and today’s children are the first generation in our…

Illustrations by Skip Sterling H e’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go…

Allergies such as peanut allergy and hay fever make millions of us miserable, but scientists aren’t even sure why they exist. Carl Zimmer talks to a master immunologist with a controversial answer. For me, it was hornets. One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a…

The Snake That’s Eating Florida

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / RSS Mercatus Center Apr 6, 2015 In the first episode of this series, Peter Thiel talks with Tyler Cowen about stagnation, the Bible, company names, chess, favorite TV shows, and even the “Straussian Christ.” Listen the full conversation Read the full transcript…

Jennifer Domenick/The Washington Post For years, the federal government has advised Americans that they are eating too much salt, and that this excess contributes yearly to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. But unknown to many shoppers urged to buy foods that are “low sodium” and “low…

While most people slept, a trio of artists and some helpers installed a bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Brooklyn on Monday morning. The group, which allowed ANIMAL to exclusively document the installation on the condition that we hide their identities, hauled the 100-pound sculpture into…

This post has been corrected. How much luxury retail does one city need? Bangkok seems determined to find out. The Thai capital’s newest high-end mall, EmQuartier, opened March 27 featuring brands including Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Prada, Cartier, Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany, Fendi, and Balenciaga.…

How to survive an atomic bomb Posted on March 29, 2012 The Associated Press reports something that anyone with a passing familiarity with nuclear weapons already knows: D.C. Nuclear Blast Wouldn’t Destroy City, Report Says This is what the U.S. government imagines would happen if terrorists set off…

The increased seismicity is likely due to changes in the way oil and gas are produced. Credit Illustration by Shout In the fall of 2011, students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in anticipation of a football…

The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

The International Banking Corporation, in Bahrain, generated billions of dollars while issuing a series of fake loans. Credit Illustration by Shout When Glenn Stewart enrolled at the University of Oxford, in 1975, he was not a typical first-year student: a twenty-year-old American with mediocre…

WORLD India says many militants killed in Kashmir retaliation strike India said Feb. 26 its warplanes launched a strike on a militant camp that killed a "very large" number of fighters preparing an attack, in a move that worsens tensions with arch-rival Pakistan over disputed Kashmir. ECONOMY EBRD…

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in 2007, just before the Iowa caucuses in the 2008 presidential election.Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images T hey called it “the Chelsea effect”. Senior advisers to Barack Obama coined the phrase during his 2008 campaign for president, after they noticed a surprising…

Across the board, the more CEOs get paid, the worse their companies do over the next three years, according to extensive new research . This is true whether they’re CEOs at the highest end of the pay spectrum or the lowest. “The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years,…

In Japan, it’s a familiar refrain: “Men have it easy — especially foreigners. They are males in a highly conservative patriarchal society, so they enjoy all the benefits: status, money, career. On top of that, foreigners often attract a lot of Japanese girls. “These Western men do not really have to…

1 “Like Eating With Saran Wrap on Your Tongue” In 1993, Danny Resnic was having anal sex during a casual hookup in Miami Beach when his partner’s latex condom broke. Resnic had been using condoms ever since the man he describes as “my best friend and love of my life” died from AIDS in 1984. “I have…

Being middle-class often seems as American as apple pie or baseball. Even though the middle class has technically shrunk since the financial crisis, Americans are still more likely to identify as middle class than any other stratum, whether they make $20,000 or $200,000 a year. In 2012, nearly half…

Jay Malone is capitalizing on Germany's push to recruit international students by helping Americans who want to study there. - Photo by Mallory Noe-Payne/WGBH Despite the high cost of college in this country, most American students will choose to go to school here. But a growing number of students…

Lagos, Nigeria, is Africa’s most populous metropolitan area—with an estimated 21 million inhabitants. It also boasts the biggest economy of any city in Africa, housing some of the richest people on the continent, as well as huge numbers of poor. Robin Hammond photographed life in Lagos for the story…

O n April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America , wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been a normal, if handsome, 25-year-old trying to make it in public relations. Then on March 31, he was photographed amid…

Hi, Martin from Testmunk here. I was at a Calvin Harris concert recently, and noticed as Harris took the stage that a large number of the young people in the front row had their phones out and were taking videos or photos in order to post them online to friends. One of the reasons this caught my eye…

A few weeks back I wrote an update on the Truecrypt audit promising that we’d have some concrete results to show you soon. Thanks to some hard work by the NCC Crypto Services group, soon is now. We’re grateful to Alex, Sean and Tom, and to Kenn White at OCAP for making this all happen. You can find…

Democracy v Psychology: why people keep electing idiots

It takes a gallon of water to produce one almond. And that’s not the most insane fact about the mad dash to plant the thirsty trees in the middle of a catastrophic drought. Tom Philpott Jan 21, 2015 Words by Tom Philpott; Photos by Matt Black Learn more about photographer Matt Black’s project…

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Wednesday allowing the use of economic sanctions for the first time against perpetrators of destructive cyber-attacks and online corporate espionage. That will let the Treasury Department freeze the assets of people, companies or other entities…

55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, said to be the headquarters of Russia’s ‘troll army’.Photograph: Shaun Walker for the Guardian Just after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina Street, a modern four-storey office complex with a small sign outside that reads “Business…

DARK HORSE THE STORY OF A RECORD-SHATTERING, ALL-ELECTRIC ’68 MUSTANG

Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?

Ollyy/Shutterstock On April 2, 2012, the editor of The Daily Free Press , Boston University’s student newspaper, issued a letter of apology to “the Boston community and whomever else it may concern.” The note addressed a joke the paper had printed in its April Fool’s Day issue—one jokingly…

Facebook's new nostalgia feature is already bringing up painful memories

Google Google is cracking down on ad-injecting extensions for its Chrome browser after finding that almost 200 of them exposed millions of users to deceptive practices or malicious software. More than a third of Chrome extensions that inject ads were recently classified as malware in a study that…

An image from a series titled Out my Window.Photograph: Gail Albert Halaban A t the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be…

In early 2013 , Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: It didn’t say what he would be doing. So intense is Apple’s secrecy that all Lynch knew was his vague title, vice president of technology, and that he’d be working on something completely new. ¶ It was odd that…

Essay CONNECTION Ketteline Pierre, a 19-year-old high school student and street vendor, text-messaging in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, months after the 2010 earthquake. Credit Natasha Fillion/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Here is what life is like for a woman with no bank account in a developing…

A comprehensive bill introduced in the House of Representatives Tuesday aims to deal a significant blow to the federal government's long-running war on medical marijuana. The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States (CARERS) Act , introduced by Reps. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Don…

Cyrus Farivar An Immigrations and Customs Agency (ICE) special agent, who previously was involved with the investigation into Mt. Gox, has issued a subpoena to reddit in an attempt to learn more about five redditors active on /r/darknetmarkets . That subreddit has been very active as a “clearnet”…