‘One coward may lose a battle, one battle may lose a war, and one war may lose a country.’ This was Rear-Admiral and Conservative MP Tufton Beamish speaking to the House of Commons in 1930, giving voice to an idea that must be as old as war itself. Caring only for his own safety, blowing cover,…

The Obama administration is establishing a new agency to combat the deepening threat from cyberattacks, and its mission will be to fuse intelligence from around the government when a crisis occurs. The agency is modeled after the National Counterterrorism Center, which was launched in the wake of…

OCT. 24, 2012 Stamatis Moraitis tending his vineyard and olive grove on Ikaria. Andrea Frazzetta/LUZphoto for The New York Times In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and…

Johnny in Topeka can’t read, but Janne in Helsinki is effortlessly finishing his storybooks. Such a disparity may be expected by now, but the reason might come as a surprise: It probably has much less to do with teaching style and quality than with language. Simply put, written English is great for…

Ever since Star Trek first aired, we’ve held unreasonable expectations over computers. Not only do we expect them to work for free, but we expect them to listen to all of our problems. Hey Siri, what’s the temp? Calling “mom”. No. Cancel. … Siri, cancel. Stop. Siri stop. Siri eat a dick. Hello? Hi…

Qualcomm Inc. was fined $975 million by Chinese antitrust regulators, who set new terms for smartphone makers to license the chipmaker’s technology, ending an inquiry that threatened the U.S. company’s growth in the biggest mobile market. China’s National Development and Reform Commission issued a…

I t’s one of my favorite Darwin quotes—"He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke"—scribbled furtively in a notebook between visits to the London Zoo in the summer of 1838. Twenty-one years would pass before On the Origin of Species would shock the world, but Darwin…

Flu season isn’t over yet. It still has a few weeks until it ends, and thousands of Americans have been afflicted with the fevers and sneezes that come with this year’s nasty H3N2 strain. For acute cases, doctors typically recommend bed rest, but what that really means can be confusing to patients.…

Images from Eric Harroun’s iPhone, which he took with him into Syria. In a video, he warned, “Assad, your days are numbered.” Credit Images courtesy Ann Harroun and via Facebook In December, 2012, an itinerant American named Eric Harroun checked into a youth hostel in Istanbul. A thirty-year-old…

First it mounted a laser aboard a ship in the Persian Gulf. Now the Navy has publicly unveiled another futuristic weapon: the electromagnetic “rail gun.” In development for years, the weapon would be able to fire a projectile at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound, hitting targets 110 miles…

It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly. Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with…

Kino Lorber Alexei German’s Hard to Be a God , 2013 “The Renaissance didn’t happen here,” the voice-over declares, in the opening minutes of Alexei German’s Hard to Be a God . In this final film of his career—now receiving a belated American release at Anthology Film Archives in New York—the late…

Loading... Managing yourself COMMENT 8.95 BUY COPIES Loading... Some people seem to have an amazing ability to stay rational no matter what. They efficiently make good, clear decisions while the rest of us waste energy doing things like panicking about upcoming tasks, ruminating pointlessly, or…

The letter S appears nowhere in the word “dollar”, yet an S with a line through it ($) is unmistakably the dollar sign. But why an S ? Why isn’t the dollar sign something like a Đ (like the former South Vietnamese đồng , or the totally-not-a-joke-currency Dogecoin )? There’s a good story behind it,…

The heat that afternoon was intense. Weather maps across Iowa were deep red, and warnings flashed across the screen. A high school football player on the other side of the state had died from heat exhaustion the week before. Cornfields wilted and shrank into hills of despondent brown. I was running…

[Photographs: Vicky Wasik] More How I Built a Barbecue Restaurant in Brooklyn More tales from the restaurant industry There are many reasons why a restaurant can die. The building's structure is unsafe. The Department of Health closes you down. Storms damage your equipment, crippling your cash flow.…

Zacarias Moussaoui WASHINGTON — In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down…

Grand thinking created the Internet, small thinking won’t save it. Marc Goodman Jan 21, 2015 Unlisted Though we’re racing forward at break neck speed to connect all the objects in our physical world — the tools we need to run our society — to the Internet, we still fundamentally do not have the…

Last year, a collaborative group of anonymous Tumblr scribes rewrote William Shakespeare’s most iconic play, Romeo and Juliet , in a familiar animal language: What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet. What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose… The language of the translated Romeo…

The legal challenge was the first of dozens of GCHQ-related claims to be examined in detail by the IPT. Photograph: Ho/Reuters The regime that governs the sharing between Britain and the US of electronic communications intercepted in bulk was unlawful until last year, a secretive UK tribunal has…

Carlos Lezama, Victor Hernandez, Henry Lezama and Manuel Escobar of Roca Mia Construction finishing a job in Far Rockaway, Queens, in June of 2014. Courtesy Roca Mia When Henry Lezama joined Roca Mia Construction, his new colleagues were still in the process of deciding what kind of business,…

Last month, two states voted to legalize recreational marijuana. A bunch of others states have already legalized medical marijuana. Not surprisingly, there are legitimate, legal (at least under state law) marijuana entrepreneurs trying to start businesses around the country. On today's show, we…

Times Video Log In Channels U.S. International Times Documentaries The Daily 360 New York Op-Docs Opinion Business Culture Technology Style T Magazine Health Food Travel Sports Real Estate Science Magazine Obituaries Playlist Up Next in Marijuana U.S.A. New York 0:47 Legalize Recreational Marijuana…

Andrew Sullivan 1 is, as undoubtedly you’ve heard, leaving his eponymous blog : I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped…

Peter Boehringer hates the word “conspiracy.” It implies something crazy, and if you spend even a little time with the 45-year-old German, it becomes clear he’s driven by a desire for order. On a recent morning in Munich, he’s dressed in a cobalt blue shirt that matches his blue tie and blue eyes.…

Hate to break it to you, Bible thumpers: Parents who raise their kids without religion are doing just fine, studies say, possibly even better. Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly. And their kids care less…

If you’re a fan of automotive personality Matt Farah and/or his show, “The Smoking Tire”, you probably know that Matt recently bought a 1996 Lexus LS400 with 897,000 documented miles on the clock. That’s right. Do not adjust your television. That’s nearly a million. You might also know that “The…

Ethan Siegel Feb 4, 2015 Saturn’s Iapetus looks like nothing else we’ve ever seen. What made it so? Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Cassini. “The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the…

When Stellar launched last summer, Joyce Kim like any other startup exec wasn’t getting much sleep and found herself trolling Twitter in the middle of the night, San Francisco time. In September, Kim, the co-founder and executive director of the Stellar Foundation, posted a tweet, asking if anyone…

To drive through California's Central Valley is to witness farming on a baffling scale. For hundreds of miles along either side of Highway 99—which splits the valley from the college town of Chico in the north to the sprawling, boxy city of Bakersfield in the south—are orderly corridors of…

Several readers called my attention to a new paper by J. William Schopf and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (reference below; free download at link), a paper that has also gotten a great deal of attention in the press. Last week a journalist asked me to comment on…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration is considering whether to declassify still-secret sections of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks which examined Saudi Arabian support for Islamist militants, the White House said on Thursday. White House Press Secretary Josh…

At first glance, Jeff Huber looks like a typical Y Combinator entrepreneur. He’s a 25-year-old mechanical engineer who dropped out of North Carolina State University in 2011 to start Knowit, an online education company. Knowit failed to catch on, but Huber was hooked on startups anyway. “We…

Hannelore Foerster/Getty Images Something really weird is happening in Europe. Interest rates on a range of debt — mostly government bonds from countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany but also corporate bonds from Nestlé and, briefly, Shell — have gone negative. And not just negative in…

Investigators of Anthem Inc.’s data breach are pursuing evidence that points to Chinese state-sponsored hackers who are stealing personal information from health-care companies for purposes other than pure profit, according to three people familiar with the probe. The breach , which exposed Social…

AUSTIN, TEXAS—The chances are you have never heard of—nor, until looking at this page, ever seen—John Bannister Goodenough. But you know his work. In fact, you almost certainly own some. Consider the last six or seven decades of technological and scientific leaps: the polio vaccine, space rocketry,…

The number of women and girls dealing with the consequences of female genital mutilation in the US is more than three times greater than previously thought, the Guardian can reveal. Figures showing more than 500,000 women in the US are estimated to be at risk of or have been subjected to the…