The rise and fall and rise of Upcoming.org Andy Baio May 28, 2014 “It’s the nature of the beast.” You haven’t made it until someone calls you a sellout. My moment was October 5, 2005, the morning after we announced that Yahoo! acquired my side project, a collaborative events community called…

Drugs, hacking, money laundering, and above all else, murder. The bust of the Silk Road was headline news around the world instantly thanks to these salacious details. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ( FBI ) claims that alleged Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht carried out six shocking…

(Mis)Uses of Technology from the because-when-you're-already-in-the-torture-business,-what's-a-little-hac dept The CIA is still fighting for creative control of its most anticipated 21st century work: the Torture Report . Long before it got involved in the ongoing redaction battle, it was spying on…

São Paulo, in southeast Brazil, is the largest city in South America and home to more than 21 million people. rvcroffi/Flickr São Paulo, in southeast Brazil, is the largest city in South America and the 7th largest metropolitan region in the world, with more than 21 million people. It's the engine…

Anti-American murals adorn the former US embassy in Tehran, Iran.Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images “S o far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution , by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary…

After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign. Old Masters After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign. Photographs by ERIK MADIGAN HECK Frederick Wiseman, filmmaker, 84, on a walk in Paris. Wiseman’s documentary ‘‘National Gallery’’ had its premiere at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes this…

The entrepreneur offered a glimpse into his life in innovation while in conversation with the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson. Still haven’t subscribed to Vanity Fair on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2z6Ya9M ABOUT VANITY FAIR Arts and entertainment, business and media, politics, and world…

Nature | Comment Sharing Kevin Laland 1 , Tobias Uller 7 , Marc Feldman 8 , Kim Sterelny 9 , Gerd B. Müller 10 , Armin Moczek 11 , Eva Jablonka 12 , John Odling-Smee 13 , Gregory A. Wray 3 , Hopi E. Hoekstra 5 , Douglas J. Futuyma 14 , Richard E. Lenski 15 , Trudy F. C. Mackay 16 , Dolph Schluter 17…

The Health Issue Credit Photo illustrations by Zachary Scott for The New York Times. Hair and Makeup: Bruce Spaulding Fuller, Aimee Macabeo, Stephanie Daniel. Wardobe: Gillean McLeod. Set and Props: Patrick Muller. Retouching: Electric Art, Amy Dresser. One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in…

We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama , our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend.…

He is considered to be an important founding father of modern quantum physics, his books are still standard reference works, and many people have heard of one of the technical terms named after him. But who is the person behind these terms – who was Paul Dirac? First of all, he was one of the…

in Literature, Writing | October 3rd, 2013 17 Comments Advertisement Kierkegaard apparently did his best writing standing up, as did Charles Dickens , Winston Churchill , Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf. Also put Ernest Hemingway in the standing desk club too. In 1954, George Plimpton…

In a rare interview which lasted about four hours, Mao Tse-tung conversed with me on topics ranging over what he himself called shan nan hai pei , or “from south of the mountains to north of the seas.” With China’s bountiful 200-million-ton 1964 grain harvest taxing winter storage capacities, with…

Rick Riordan’s series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” has sold upwards of twenty million copies worldwide. Credit Photograph by Bob Hallinen / Anchorage Daily News / AP About a year ago, the novelist Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture at the Barbican, in London, on behalf of the Reading Agency, a…

The first thing you hear is the bang. Then the clatter of something metallic hitting and rolling across the pavement. Then, out of the black of night, come the screams. The location, according to video , is a darkened street somewhere in Ferguson, Mo. And the cops, marching inexorably down the…

Abner Dean It has long been a commonplace that fiction provides a way to break taboos and talk about potentially embarrassing or even criminal personal experiences without bringing society’s censure on oneself. Put the other way round you could say that taboos and censorship encourage creativity, of…

Jump to navigationJump to search The Gombe Chimpanzee War (also known as the " Four-Year War " of Gombe), lasting from 1974 to 1978, was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, in Tanzania. The belligerent groups were the Kasakela and the Kahama,…

A major change this year in how online advertisements are sold has been embraced by hackers, who are using advanced ad-targeting capabilities to precisely deliver malware. Security vendor Invincea said it has detected many instances of people within defense and aerospace companies stumbling across…

I get my face photographed and printed on a temporary ID card that I deposit into a slot and I get on an elevator and am led down a hallway. On a desk, I spot a signed letter with the Vice President's seal. I'm brought into a windowless room, and there is the filmmaker Laura Poitras. On a coffee…

T he voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor. But six years into his…

Marc van Rijsselberghe with some of his experimental crop of salt-tolerant potatoes. Photograph by Sarah Helena Rijpkema In a small army field-hut Dr Arjen de Vos shows off his irrigation machine with pride. Pipes lead out to several acres of muddy field, where only a few stragglers from the autumn…

Section Grower Morgan Blenk inspects a marijuana plant clone before planting it at Tweed Marijuana Inc in Smith's Falls, Ontario. REUTERS/Blair Gable No pressure, Colorado and Washington, but the world is scrutinizing your every move. That was the take-home message of an event today at the Brookings…

Contrary to conventional advice, eating more of some fats may be good for our health, says Michael Mosley. It really is the sort of news that made me want to weep into my skinny cappuccino and then pour it down the sink. After years of being told, and telling others, that saturated fat clogs your…

Opinion Are Women Better Decision Makers? Credit JooHee Yoon RECENTLY, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said that if we want to fix the gridlock in Congress, we need more women. Women are more focused on finding common ground and collaborating, she argued. But there’s another reason that we’d…

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty While revelations from Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s massive database of phone records have sparked a national debate about its constitutionality, another secretive database has gone largely unnoticed and without scrutiny. The database, which affects unknown…

Readers of this post have no doubt seen articles admonishing millennials for their perceived apocalyptic effect on the workforce, society, family and everywhere in between. The seemingly endless list of complaints about millennials begins with lazy and pampered, and ends with “selfies.” The…

Forget wearable tech. The pioneers of our “post-human” future are implanting technology in to their bodies and brains. Should we stop them or join them? by I an Burkhart concentrated hard. A thick cable protruded from the crown of his shaven head. A sleeve sprouting wires enveloped his right arm.…

Are Americans getting dumber? Our math skills are falling . Our reading skills are weakening . Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales.…

How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a…

Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the acronym GLIPAR ( Guide…

Imagine you’re a doctor and someone hands you the chart of a 60-year-old man, asking you to predict the patient’s health for the next decade. The guy is a probiotic-eating marathon runner and his cholesterol numbers look great. Still, your prediction will likely give more weight to the average…

Lockheed Martin’s announcement last week that it had secretly developed a promising design for a compact nuclear fusion reactor has met with excitement but also skepticism over the basic feasibility of its approach. The interior of Lockheed Martin’s fusion reactor shows a series of rings used to…

911 calls and directing them to the most appropriate public safety answ

An 1857 illustration of Encephalartos woodii . Library of Congress One day in 1895, while walking through the Ngoya Forest in Zululand, southern Africa, a botanist with the oh so suitable name of John Medley Wood caught sight of a tree. It sat on a steep slope at the edge of the woods and looked…

The disease is carried by the black-legged tick, now found as far south as Florida. Credit Photograph by Kenji Aoki Kaleigh Ahern was twelve years old when a tick bit her. She noticed it “perched” on her shoulder when she was taking a shower one morning. “I thought it was your average, everyday…

Nobody would mistake sugary soda for a health food, but a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health just found that a daily soda habit can age your immune cells almost two years. Senior study author Elissa Epel, PhD, professor of psychiatry at University of California San…

Getty Images The Edward Snowden revelations of massive secret government surveillance and the string of data breaches at large U.S. companies have increased awareness among the American people about the need to protect the privacy of their electronic data. While public pressure has so far had no…