BEIRUT, Lebanon — As the extremists of the Islamic State rampaged across Syria and Iraq, the Twitter user @ShamiWitness was among their most prolific and widely followed English-language supporters. In a near-constant barrage of posts, he cheered the group’s advances, disparaged its enemies and…

Against the Grain Should you go gluten-free?

We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like…

The dogs wouldn’t jump. All they had to do to avoid electric shocks was leap over a small barrier, but there they sat in boxes in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, passive and whining. They had previously been given a series of mild shocks and learned they could do nothing to stop them. Now,…

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of…

The Illinois General Assembly just passed a bill that would prevent citizens from recording the police. Earlier this year, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a state eavesdropping law that made it a crime for citizens to record conversations with police or anyone else without the other person’s…

New Aluminum ‘Foam’ Makes Trains Stronger, Lighter, and Safer

Flickr.com/Share Conference/CC By SA 2.0 This is a guest post written by Peter Sunde, original co-founder of The Pirate Bay and more recently Flattr. There's a few big moments in life where you feel that something moves you deeply. Graduating school. Getting your first kiss. Writing that first book,…

Google CEO Larry Page at Google headquarters in New York on May 21, 2012. Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/GettyImages This post originally appeared in Business Insider . One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them. It was just five years since Page, then a…

Judge Katherine B. Forrest. Elizabeth Williams/AP When alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht’s trial begins in less than a month, he’ll face charges of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering, and computer fraud—not murder. But the specter of violence is creeping into Ulbricht’s trial…

THE store camera tells a harrowing tale. John Crawford was standing in a Walmart in Ohio holding an air rifle—a toy he had picked off a shelf and was presumably planning to buy. He was pointing it at the floor while talking on his phone and browsing other goods. The children playing near him did not…

LA DailyNews/Corbis I was nine years old when Asteroids came out. This was after Pong and after Space Invaders. The dawning of the Gamer Age. I remember the rush when I even got close to an Asteroids game in an arcade or a pizzeria. What a sensation it was. Looking back now, those clunky arcade…

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. H. R. 4681 Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015. Passed with 325 votes to 100. Yep, it's pretty onerous and Orwellian, as is usual. It has slipped though Congress with scant attention and virtually no…

Op-Ed Contributor College for Grown-Ups Credit Jessica Svendsen STANFORD, Calif. — A CRUEL paradox of higher education in America is that its most coveted seats are reserved for young people. Four-year residential colleges with selective admissions are a privileged elite in the academic world, but…

No one who gets a postgraduate degree in Hobbit Studies ever imagines they’ll be sued by the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. I certainly didn’t expect to wind up in court against Christopher Tolkien and his lawyers, like Frodo Baggins facing down the Nazgûl on Weathertop. Little did I know I was heading…

Cops scan social media to help assess your ‘threat rating’

Despite its new-found legality at the state level, the buds you buy in medical marijuana dispensaries aren't that different than the dime bags you used to score on the street corner—they share the same wild swings in potency, chemical content, and fungal and pesticide contamination. That's very not…

[not python] With The Pirate Bay in ruins, and with its founders denouncing it for all that it has become (ridiculous porn ads and profiteering), one wonders what a replacement that doesn’t suffer the same fate might resemble. While leafing through Hacker News it occurred to me the Bitcoin…

F ew topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that were in doubt) and…

THE BROTHERHOOD OF RECOVERING ADDICTS

Consider the New Kingdom Egyptian. He can be forgiven for thinking his state sits at creation’s centre, a kernel of order anchoring the known world. If he lives during the reign of Ramses II, his Egypt has already governed Northeast Africa for the better part of 2,000 years. Trouncing Hittites at…

Credit Viktor Koen When Jimmy Fallon handed the actress Shailene Woodley a mug of coffee blended with butter on “The Tonight Show” in October, she didn’t recoil. Instead she raved to the audience about the cup of saturated fat: “It will change your life!” “It’s the most delicious thing ever,” Mr.…

It seems that Facebook quietly removed Bing as its primary search provider over the weekend, announcing plans to debut its own search tool on Monday, according to Reuters . The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other…

F ive World War II bombers took off from a Florida airfield on Oct. 5, 1967 to bomb the American South. An article that ran that morning in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that three B-17s and two PV-2s laden with 10,000 pounds of death-dealing cargo each would carry out their missions “with the…

At the end of the day, Roma tomatoes are ready for transport in Cristo Rey in the state of Sinaloa. Half the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. come from Mexico. T he tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers arrive year-round by the ton, with peel-off stickers proclaiming "Product of Mexico." ADVERTISEMENT Farm…

This post was written yesterday and has an update at the bottom. Today, I will delete my LinkedIn account. I say I will instead of I have because I do not know how LinkedIn’s account settings work; deleting my account may require substantial effort on my part, it may not even be possible at all. The…

Before MySpace, Napster, Spotify or Soundcloud, there was IUMA. Caleb Garling Dec 11, 2014 Unlisted Jeff Patterson wanted everyone to try Zima. It was the early 1990s and he’d brought a few six-packs into the offices of the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA). IUMA, co-founded by Patterson,…

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Photograph: Judith Haeusler/Getty Images I n July 2013, Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer living in a Rio de Janeiro favela, was arrested by police in an operation to round up drug traffickers. He was never seen again. De Souza’s disappearance was taken up by protesters in street demonstrations, which…

Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life…

Frederic Filloux Dec 8, 2014 By Frédéric Filloux Seeing a threat to their ecosystem, French publishers follow their German colleagues and prepare to sue startup Eyeo GmbH, the creator of anti-advertising software AdBlock Plus. But they cannot ignore that, by using ABP, millions of users actively…

Reuters This is your brain on shopping, and it's not very smart. You walk into a Starbucks and see two deals for a cup of coffee. The first deal offers 33% extra coffee. The second takes 33% off the regular price. What's the better deal? "They're about equal!" you'd say, if you're like the students…

Albert Einstein is the world-famous physicist. This article was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949). It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of MR ‘s fiftieth year. — The Editors Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on…

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 More... Share on print Illustration: Marcia Underwood Published 12/12/2014 Leslie and Mark's Old/New Idea The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. It’s…

The brain is really little more than a collection of electrical signals. If we can learn to catalogue those then, in theory, you could upload someone's mind into a computer, allowing them to live forever as a digital form of consciousness, just like in the Johnny Depp film But it's not just science…

A purple-haired sorceress holding a fireball. A three-headed dragon wrapping its claws around the world. A great raptor emerging from the flames. Related Content Test Your Smarts With the British Spy Agency's Christmas Card Puzzle The Weird World of Standard Reference Materials, From Peanut Butter…