Cynthia’s face remained completely blank, wearing that same empty stare at the theater, Bergdorf’s, a private dinner party, and even her regular hair salon. Everywhere she went, Cynthia tantalized the paparazzi and her adoring public—always seen on the arm of the fashionable Lester Gaba, wearing the…

A few people have forwarded me MIT professor Scott Aaronson’s post about nerd trauma and male privilege ( link here , it's comment #171) It's part of a larger discussion about sexism in STEM subjects, and its essence is simple. Aaronson's position on feminism is supportive, but he can’t get entirely…

As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television. I’m an American ex-pat living in Slovenia, and I know next to nothing about Croatia, besides the fact that it’s Slovenia’s southern neighbor, a fellow ex-Yugoslav republic, and that the language resembles Slovene…

George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wants to pay off bonds for debt from the 18th and 19th centuries. LONDON — Share prices went through the roof, speculation ran wild and money poured into ill-fated ventures before the boom turned, inevitably and catastrophically, to bust. After that…

A custom M4, similar to the one used by infantry today. The M4 is a lighter version of the M16, which killed so many of the soldiers who carried it in Vietnam. Adam Voorhes One afternoon just a month and a half after the Battle of Gettysburg, Christopher Spencer, the creator of a seven-shot…

AP/dpa US and British intelligence agencies undertake every effort imaginable to crack all types of encrypted Internet communication. The cloud, it seems, is full of holes. The good news: New Snowden documents show that some forms of encryption still cause problems for the NSA. When Christmas…

Companies and institutions track us almost indiscriminately. Is this the world we want to live in? Julia Angwin Dec 23, 2014 Unlisted By Julia Angwin Who is watching you? This was once a question asked only by kings, presidents, and public figures trying to dodge the paparazzi and criminals trying…

A whole wing of the Internet just got added to our collective conscience, like websites by Google or knowledge by Wikipedia before it. Yet the news cruised by with analysis focused simply on what Facebook’s new keyword post search does today. Yes, any post by you or any of your friends can now be…

(Adds State Department comment in paragraphs 7, 8 and 9) By Paul Carsten BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Google Inc’s Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world’s biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame. Large numbers of…

Top 100 donors give almost as much as 4.75 million small donors combined. The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance filings found. And the…

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As we near the end of 2014, here’s a look back at the top 10 most popular segments of the year on BillMoyers.com. 1. What the 1 Percent Don’t Want Us to Know Bill talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman , about a new book that’s the talk of academia and the…

Geek Love has inspired a sprawling universe of fan art, including this oil and watercolor by Brandon Zimmerman that depicts the novel's conjoined twins, Electra and Iphigenia Binewski. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were fans. Terry Gilliam—former Monty Pythonite and the director of Time Bandits ,…

Getty Images Free software isn’t free. Someone’s got to shell out for the expensive development, maintenance, bug fixes and updates for programs that so many of us who live online have come to see as almost natural resources. And increasingly, those taken-for-granted tools have become vital for the…

In a rural central Ugandan village, 17-year-old Sulaina sits on the mud floor of the tiny home she shares with her mother and younger brother and sister. She wants to help provide for her family. But she can't. She can barely leave her house. Wherever she goes, a sickly smell follows her. That's…

What explains the spike? Scientists and lobstermen credit a combination of factors, from warmer waters to the disappearance of predators to voluntary conservation measures. “It’s one of those complicated stories without a single explanation,” says Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine…

An explosion rocks the Syrian city of Kobane during a reported suicide car bombing by the Islamic State, as seen from the Turkey-Syria border, on Oct. 20, 2014. The small picture is very bad, but the big picture of violence around the world is about as good as it’s ever been. Photo by Gokhan…

Munich Journal A centuries-old Christmas tradition called the Krampus Run returns to Bavaria where monsters roam the streets in search of bad children. MUNICH — Long before parents relied on the powers of Santa Claus to monitor their children’s behavior, their counterparts in Alpine villages called…

Farm Fresh? Natural? Eggs Not Always What They're Cracked Up To Be

THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working…

The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 1827. New York’s first free Black settlement, Five Points was also a destination for Irish immigrants and a focal point for the stormy collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain control over…

Michael Snyder | Lucky Peach | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,960 words) Lucky Peach Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Michael Snyder and Lucky Peach —a trip into the Sundarbans, where groups of honey hunters risk their lives in the forests to follow the ancient practice of collecting honey.…

Thelma the snake confused then astounded her keepers. This 6m long (20 ft) python had spent four years alone in Louisville zoo in the US, without ever having met a male of her species. But, somehow, she laid over 61 eggs, producing six healthy babies. Perhaps she’d managed to secretively mate with a…

Government officials have claimed that attacks against Sony were retaliation for “The Interview,” a feature film about two bumbling journalists hired by the C.I.A. to assassinate North Korea’s leader. Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press A number of private security researchers are increasingly…

Courting Favor: 'The People's Lawyers' Emails detail interactions between the office of Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida and a law firm trying to sway her. When the executives who distribute 5-Hour Energy, the popular caffeinated drinks, learned that attorneys general in more than 30 states…

Photo A hack attack affected JPMorgan Chase this summer. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters The computer breach at JPMorgan Chase this summer — the largest intrusion of an American bank to date — might have been thwarted if the bank had installed a simple security fix to an overlooked server in its vast…

Chuck Tesla Dec 20, 2014 In our analysis of the rapid changes in the robotics industry we mentioned that experts such as Frey and Osborne of Oxford University, have suggested that approximately 47 per cent of all American jobs have the potential to be automated in “a decade or two”. The potential…

First we thought North Korea was behind the Sony cyberattacks. Then we thought it was a couple of hacker guys with an axe to grind. Now we think North Korea is behind it again, but the connection is still tenuous. There have been accusations of cyberterrorism , and even cyberwar . I've heard calls…

On a frosty December morning in 1783, some 400,000 people gathered in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to see the world’s first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon. Jacques Charles and his assistant, Nicolas-Louis Robert, ascended 1,800 feet into the sky accompanied by a mercury barometer, some…

After cutting its teeth as a domestic broadcaster, the BBC is spreading its products all around the globe. Shows like Top Gear have done extremely well overseas and the trend of exploiting other shows in multiple territories is set to continue. As a result the BBC is now getting involved in the…

The U.S. government canceled one of its most ambitious health research projects, an effort to follow 100,000 children from before birth through adolescence, after spending about $1.3 billion since 2007 without it ever really getting off the ground. Run by the National Institutes of Health, the study…

President Obama has done his best to tamp down fury at North Korea for hacking Sony--"I don't think it was an act of war," he said Sunday on CNN , but "cybervandalism"--but to find true skepticism about North Korea's role in the attack, you have to turn to the professional hacking and anti-hacking…

SO A GUY FROM Boston walks into a bar and offers to sell the owner a chunk of ice. To modern ears, that sounds like the opening line of a joke. But 250 years ago, it would have sounded like science fiction—especially if it was summer, when no one in the bar had seen frozen water in months. In fact,…

A small stone artifact recovered from a Paleo-Eskimo site on Baffin Island is important evidence of a Viking presence in Arctic Canada around 1000 CE, says a team of scientists led by Dr Patricia Sutherland of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Three views of the crucible from Nanook site, Baffin…

Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the University of Texas at Austin and Origins (Ohio State University). Check it out here: historymilestones.tumblr.com O n September 8, 1404 , the Castilian diplomat Ruy…

When you’re the size of a human, you worry about lions and tigers and bears. But if you’re a bacterium, a tiny nematode worm, just a millimetre long, can be a vicious predator. Nematodes are among the most common animals on the planet, and many of them hunt bacteria in soil and water. The microbes,…

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese Internet activist and academic is challenging a new state secrets law by setting up a website aimed at making it easier for government officials to leak sensitive information to the media without getting caught. The website, unveiled on Friday, uses an open source…