So 15 of the 30 cities with the highest rents in the country are all in the San Francisco Bay Area, with Palo Alto topping the list, according to this lovely report from Lovely that came out last week. Part of this is cyclical. We don’t know where we are in the cycle or when it definitively turns.…

THE first ever e-commerce transaction, conducted by students from Stanford and MIT in the early 1970s, involved the sale of a small quantity of marijuana. For decades afterwards, the online drugs trade was severely constrained by the ability of law enforcement to track IP addresses and the means of…

[I am posting below a short essay by my friend and colleague Brett Frischmann of Cardozo Law School concerning the “net neutrality" rules now being considered by the FCC. I’ve stayed largely away from the whole net neutrality debate over the years — too much inside [FCC] baseball for my taste — but…

AKB48, a popular Japanese group, has sold CDs containing tickets to its performances, encouraging fans to buy multiple copies. Credit Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press TOKYO — Around the world, the music business has shifted toward downloads and streaming. But in Japan, the compact disc is still king.…

Opinion There Is No ‘Healthy’ Microbiome Credit Michael DeForge LONDON — IN the late 17th century, the Dutch naturalist Anton van Leeuwenhoek looked at his own dental plaque through a microscope and saw a world of tiny cells “very prettily a-moving.” He could not have predicted that a few centuries…

The Pierre Omidyar Insurgency The eBay founder was a mild-mannered Obama supporter looking for a way to spend his time and fortune. The Snowden leaks gave him a cause — and an enemy. Illustrations by Matthew Woodson Every September, for a siren-snarled week, much of midtown Manhattan surrenders to a…

This man is probably listening to “Radiolab.” Photo: Roberto Westbrook/Blend Images/Corbis In 2001, Steve Jobs announced the original iPod, a music player that would make it possible for people to carry their entire album collections in their pockets. Over the next few years, a genre of narrative…

Software engineer Gobi Muthuperiasamy said his father’s experience as a union leader encouraged him to fight a labor broker’s lawsuit.Photograph: Matt Smith/CIR Labor brokers providing Indian high-tech workers to American companies have hijacked a professional visa program, creating an underground…

Image Credit: Kichigin / Shutterstock This post originally appeared on ChargeCon , an event series produced by Mountain and Jumpstart Foundry. Your whole life in business is full of wins and losses. This is a story of one loss that really impacted my business. I own, CentreSource, an interactive…

Honoré Daumier: A Criminal Case The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes. To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was…

Opinion They Call Me Doctor Berry Credit Stephen Doyle TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — I HAVE never been big on titles. Many people I interact with outside my job don’t even know that I am a professor, or that I have a doctoral degree. When I introduce myself in public, I’m Carlotta Berry. But when I introduce…

Virgin Galactic’s space plane broke apart in mid-air seconds after its re-entry system deployed prematurely in an accident on Friday that killed one of its pilots and left another seriously injured, US crash investigators have said. SpaceShipTwo (SS2) was equipped with a “feathering system” to…

Old furniture, broken cups, worn-out shoes and stinky mattresses: we don’t think twice about throwing things out that we don’t need anymore. And books? Here things are a bit different. Apart from the fact that you may find it morally abject to throw out a book, that noble carrier of ideas, the…

When it introduced the Fire smartphone in July, Amazon bet sales would be something worth bragging about. But three months in, it’s obvious the Fire phone is more dud than runaway success. Last week, Amazon CTO Tom Szkutak disclosed as much by saying the company took a $170 million charge, mostly…

From the very first game in the Civilization series through to today, India’s supposedly-peaceful leader Gandhi has been famous for one thing: dropping nukes. And there’s a very good reason for it. This piece originally ran November 3, 2014. It’s not your mind playing tricks on you, or a case of…

It's not unusual to hear about attempts to save a disappearing language - but in one place in rural California, some Native Americans actually want their language to die out with them. Three hours drive from Silicon Valley, we reach the railway. The orange rusting tracks follow the curve of the…

For Brin, a billionaire who wears Google Glass in the promo video for the Cultured Beef project, maybe that’s true: he’s already living in a future where man can augment himself and surpass any obstacle. For the rest of us, meat — actual beef — which has never been an animal, undercuts one of our…

'There are many incentives to getting something built and very few to getting it right' - Nate Soares, research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute The scene in the cramped office in Berkeley on a recent Saturday feels like a typical start-up carried along by the tech boom, with engineers…

It has been 100 years since the start of the First World War, which was fought for four years and claimed the lives of more than 6000 soldiers a day. Countries in Europe began marking the centenary earlier this year and the Tower of London, pictured above, is awash in poppies in beautiful tribute to…

MAY 25, 2011 It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in…

Creigh Deeds, Virginia state senator. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) He wakes up, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son. Gus , Creigh Deeds thinks. He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying to conjure specific images. Gus dancing. Gus playing the banjo. Gus…

Passports for Sale Passports for Sale Until recently, becoming a citizen of a country has largely been regarded as priceless—a rare intangible privilege that can’t be bought or sold. This perception is starting to fade. ▪ Fall 2014 (Daisuke Matsumura / Flickr) Last March, Malta began accepting…

A car with an Uber sticker waits to receive customers leaving the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles on a Saturday evening. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times LOS ANGELES — When Ryan O’Connell, 28, moved here from New York last year, he didn’t want a car. “I’ve always been so scared of driving,”…

H alfway through director Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity , Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly half a century ago. For Bullock, home is (as it was for Dullea) the Earth, looming below so huge it…

A new study by Canadian academics says Mother Teresa was a product of hype who housed the poor and sick in shoddy conditions, despite her access to a fortune. The Times of India, reporting on the controversial essay, wrote that the authors asserted Mother Teresa saw beauty in the downtrodden's…

In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life…

Hungary has decided to shelve a proposed tax on internet data traffic after mass protests against the plan. "This tax in its current form cannot be introduced," Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday. Large-scale protests began on Sunday, when demonstrators hurled old computer parts at the…

Section through the rhizome of a fossilized fern that looks for all the world like a living royal fern (A), complete with nuclei, nucleoli, and cell membranes (arrow) still visible (B) Fig. 1 from Bomfleur et al. 2014. Scale bars (A) 500 micrometers (B) 20 micrometers. Click image for source. It…

A new way of looking at brain activity may give insight into how psychedelic drugs produce their consciousness-altering effects. In recent years, a focus on brain structures and regions has given way to an emphasis on neurological networks: how cells and regions interact, with consciousness shaped…

Cross-posted on Salon I just bought a new TV. The old one had a good run, but after the volume got stuck on 63, I decided it was time to replace it. I am now the owner of a new “smart” TV, which promises to deliver streaming multimedia content, games, apps, social media, and Internet browsing. Oh,…

Millions of minority voters threatened by electoral purge Millions of minority voters threatened by electoral purge By Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America Photos by Zach D. Roberts for Al Jazeera America Produced by Alex Newman , Steve Melendez, Tate Strickland, John Thomason, Lam Thuy Vo Edited by…

Technology developed during World War Two is to be used as a back-up for GPS. The General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) have announced that they have installed a system called eLoran in seven ports across Britain. The GLA say many critical instruments on ships use Global Navigation Satellite Systems,…

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Oct. 31, 2014, 2:23 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 1, 2014, 7:08 PM GMT Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane broke up and crashed during a test flight on Friday, killing one…

Kenneth Goldsmith stands in front of 10 tons of printed paper from his exhibition “Printing Out the Internet” at a Mexico City art space in 2013. (Janet Jarman/For The Washington Post) Lucky creative writing students in a University of Pennsylvania seminar will be able to earn academic credit for…