In what academics call neoclassical economics, human beings are largely rational, self-interested decision-makers. This stereotypical human, often referred to as Homo economicus, is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the…

By Kunal Jasty, producer at radioopensource.org Kunal Jasty Dec 21, 2014 In February 1996, David Foster Wallace came to Boston. He was the not-quite recognized writer of the massive book, Infinite Jest , which was just beginning to capture the attention of reviewers, readers and a generation of…

Getting spacecraft to Mars is quite a hassle. Transportation costs can soar into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even when blasting off during "launch windows"—the optimal orbital alignments of Earth and Mars that roll around only every 26 months. A huge contributor to that bottom line? The…

He was a war-hero fighter pilot. He was an MIT rocket scientist. He was a lot of impressive things, and then Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, which is maybe all you know about one of the most famous men on earth—a guy who's been frozen, like a footprint in lunar dust, in America's mind for forty-five…

Editorial Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses Dick Cheney. Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11,…

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rolling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations so banks can once again gamble with money insured by taxpayers

The communities clustered along the verdant banks of the Jari River in the Amazon basin present a study in contrasts: lush rainforest against the weathered boards of houses perched over the river on stilts. Immaculately kept homes atop mounds of waste and debris. Poverty on one side of the river and…

Washington's version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is much less exciting than everybody else's. It's called One Degree of Citigroup, and it's not much of a game since so many economic policymakers have worked at the banking behemoth. It's exactly the point Elizabeth Warren made in a big speech last…

33.3k Posted by u/[deleted] 4 years ago Archived 9 The FCC ignored hundreds of thousands of net neutrality comments (proof) Net Neutrality Update 12:51pm EST 12/22/2015: The FCC claims these comments weren't lost. See new thread:…

In 2008, I moved to Dallas to cover the oil industry for The Wall Street Journal. Like any reporter on a new beat, I spent months talking to as many experts as I could. They didn’t agree on much. Would oil prices — then over $100 a barrel for the first time — keep rising? Would post-Saddam Iraq ever…

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.'” Yet in both articles she was anonymous. The person described by both NBC…

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and…

One in four people, when buying an over-the-counter medicine to treat a headache, will go for a brand name product. Unless that person is a pharmacist. In that case, according to research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, they'll almost certainly buy a generic version. The pharmacists…

A new disease is plaguing thousands, but experts are in conflict over its origins—and whether it exists at all. Will Storr Mar 11, 2014 IT BEGAN THE WAY IT SO OFTEN BEGINS , so those that tell of it say: with an explosion of crawling, itching and biting, his skin suddenly alive, roaring, teeming,…

We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the Internet. Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person could be so vile? One afternoon this…

I t might sound strange to you, but a telescope is no less a vessel of exploration than the ones used by ancient explorers to discover new continents. Telescopes give us glimpses of places that are unlike anything we have seen before, and take us to places that seem impossibly bizarre. But these…

These students attend the University of Maryland in College Park. They were smart. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) Many parents whose kids have their eye on an exclusive, private college face a difficult question: Is it worth unloading your life's savings or having your child take on tens of…

Almost three years ago, millions of Internet users joined together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) , a disastrous bill that would have balkanized the Internet in the name of copyright and trademark enforcement. Over the past week, we've been tracking a host of revelations about an…

A Colorado man made history at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer when he became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs. Most importantly, Les Baugh, who lost both arms in…

Last Friday, The Verge published leaked documents revealing a secret legal campaign to discredit Google , coordinated by the MPAA on behalf of the major Hollywood studios. The documents show a continued focus on the power to blocking sites from the web — a central issue in the 2011 SOPA debates —…

How a trash heap in Thailand became the scene of a philanthropic turf war. MAE SOT, Thailand— Today, Fred Stockwell, a white-haired Englishman, is the only Westerner out on the landfill, patrolling the garbage in a dusty pickup. The squatters, migrants from Myanmar, just across the border, come out…

Santa’s workshop … 19-year-old Wei works in a factory in Yiwu, China, coating polystyrene snowflakes with red powder.Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex There’s red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist…

Sarah Koenig created the podcast “Serial.” (Meredith Heuer) Serial, the popular podcast that ends this week, is about a real-life teenage murder mystery. Reporter Sarah Koenig explores lingering doubts about the case of Adnan Syed, who, as a high-school senior, was convicted of the murder of his…

Gray Matter Why Save a Language? Credit Olimpia Zagnoli “TELL me, why should we care?” he asks. It’s a question I can expect whenever I do a lecture about the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people. For some…

Amy Bishop had been a high achiever since childhood. Her mother called her a “brilliant girl” who “just snapped.” Credit Illustration by Andrea Ventura Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting…

The glass and steel buildings that dominate contemporary skylines owe their silhouettes to a losing entry in a design competition that took place almost 100 years ago. How does a losing entry go on to influence an entire industry of artists and designers? What can we learn from this? Addendum: As a…

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists. Dan Everett Pirahã's doing fieldwork: "In the end, not a single one could count to ten." During one…

A Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile logo hangs under pink umbrellas at a trade show in Hanover, Germany. (Photo11: John MacDougall, AFP/Getty Images) If you're a T-Mobile customer, get ready for a refund. The carrier, known for making it easier for people to switch providers, agreed to fork over $90 million…

The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future by Victor Cha Bodley Head, 527 pp, £14.99, August 2012, ISBN 978 1 84792 236 6 The Choco Pie is a mouth-drying, individually wrapped slab of cake, marshmallow and chocolate, and in South Korea it is as important a part of childhood as Britain’s Mars…

Report December 18, 2014 The terms of citizenship and social life are rapidly changing in the digital age. No issue highlights this any better than privacy, always a fluid and context-situated concept and more so now as the boundary between being private and being public is shifting. “We have seen…

Washington, D.C. FBI National Press Office (202) 324-3691 Email Email December 19, 2014 Today, the FBI would like to provide an update on the status of our investigation into the cyber attack targeting Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). In late November, SPE confirmed that it was the victim of a…

Ancient Romans were masters of water manipulation. They moved fresh water around their vast empire with aqueducts and canals. Farmers shipped their wares across the seas to big cities such as Alexandria, Memphis and Rome. Trade routes allowed people to live on dry and infertile land, fed by grain…

Originally published December 17, 2014 at 6:37 PM | Page modified December 18, 2014 at 6:32 PM Share: Comments E-mail article Silicon Valley is pushing its way into every stage of the food-growing process, from tech tycoons buying up farmland to startups selling robots that work the fields to…

After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with “We all know we need police, but…” It’s a familiar refrain…

There is a mystery on Tiwai Island. A large wildlife sanctuary in Sierra Leone, the island is home to pygmy hippopotamuses, hundreds of bird species and several species of primates, including Campbell’s monkeys. These monkeys communicate via an advanced language that primatologists and linguists…