E very emotion has a purpose—an evolutionary benefit,” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good . “I wanted to know why we have this emotion of boredom, which seems like such a negative, pointless emotion.” That’s how Mann got started in her…

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In 2017, Dungeons & Dragons, a game played far from the Internet, can feel slightly rebellious, or at least pleasantly out of place. Illustration by Edward Steed The clinical psychologist Jon Freeman was feeling burnt out. He spenthis days at a corporate office in Manhattan, managing dozens of…

A pedestrian walks past the Google offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Reuters / Brian Snyder) There is much to be concerned about in America today: a growing political and economic divide, slowing growth, decreasing life expectancy, an epidemic of diseases of despair. The unhappiness that is…

Edgar Allan Poe’s Hatchet Jobs

Sophie is a physical penetration tester and information security consultant. She specializes in social engineering security assessments including physical, voice (vishing) and text (phishing). She consults in remediation and prevention of security incidents through creation of policy and procedures,…

On a Friday in April, Bob Tharp, the mayor of Decatur, Ark., takes me to see what used to be the commercial heart of his town. There isn’t much to look at beyond the husk of a Walmart Express: 12,000 square feet of cinder block painted in different shades of brown. The glass doors are locked, as…

Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people. It has also obtained letters it says show the intelligence agencies’ oversight body had not been informed that…

The man leaned over his creation, carefully assembling the tiny pieces. This was the hardest part, placing a thin silver plated diaphragm over the internal chamber. The diaphragm had to be strong enough to support itself, yet flexible enough to be affected by the slightest sound. One false move, and…

"I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us." Those are the words of the great inventor Thomas Edison in an interview in the October 1920 issue of The American Magazine . And in those days, when…

Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich . In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the…

. He says he was acting for the good of the British people, and that he is willing to talk to the police because, as a man of God, he wants to prevent future atrocities. But h

A July 2017 study revealed that Tinder users are excessively willing to disclose information without realising it.Photograph: Alamy A t 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since…

The search for alien technology is about to get much more efficient. I ’ve bet a cup of coffee to any and all that by 2035 we’ll have evidence of E.T. To many of my colleagues, that sounds like a losing proposition. For more than a half-century, a small coterie of scientists has been pursuing the…

A pneumatic-tube station in the Sears, Roebuck & Company mail-order plant in Chicago, as depicted in a circa-1918 retouched photograph Library of Congress Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores . This…

Photographer: Jansucko/Getty Images Photographer: Jansucko/Getty Images The very first thing any college freshman learns in Economics 101 is the law of supply and demand. When people desire more of something but its availability is limited or constrained, its price goes up. There may not be another…

No matter how much anyone tries to sugar coat it, a service like Have I been pwned (HIBP) which deals with billions of records hacked out of other peoples' systems is always going to sit in a grey area. There are degrees, of course; at one end of the spectrum you have the likes of Microsoft and…

In rural Mecosta County, Mich., sits a near-windowless facility with a footprint about the size of Buckingham Palace. It’s just one of Nestlé’s roughly 100 bottled water factories in 34 countries around the world. Inside, workers wear hairnets, hard hats, goggles, gloves, and earplugs. Ten…

Executive Summary Historically, one of the benefits of purchasing index mutual funds and ETFs has been the simple transaction cost savings of being able to buy into a diversified portfolio of securities in a single step (pooled) transaction, rather than absorb the transaction costs of buying a small…

U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can…

What's "fair," anyway? Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images Here's a ranking you don't see all that often: the 20 U.S. publicly traded corporations with the biggest income tax bills. It amounts to a pretty fair who's who of corporate America's giants, with…

In Zinacantán, a Tzotzil indigenous community outside San Cristobal, Coca-Cola is widely sold during the festival for the town’s patron saint, San Jerónimo. (Photo: Martha Pskowski) The current political climate is hostile to real accountability. Help us keep corporations in check — support the…

A ll the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality.…

Tim Pyle’s conception of the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Between 1952 and 1954, the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ran a popular series in Collier’s Weekly called “ Man Will Conquer Space Soon! ”, outlining a manifest-destiny approach to space, the moon,…

The US Embassy in Havana on 17 December 2015.Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It…

I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is…

After 13 years at Saturn, the Cassini orbiter’s explorations are coming to an end on September 15 with a dramatic dive into the ringed planet’s atmosphere. This illustration depicts the spacecraft soaring above Saturn’s northern hemisphere in the midst of one of its “Grand Finale” dives, a series of…

By Diego Naranjo A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China…

Power grid in Gowkthrapple, UK. geograph.org.uk Nation-sponsored hackers have penetrated the operational networks multiple US and European energy companies use to control key parts of the power grid that supplies electricity to hundreds of millions of people, researchers warned Wednesday. The…

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world’s oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there—some of which contain hidden treasures. Now, as Jeff Farrell reports for the Independent , a…

Enlarge Guang Niu/Getty Images The FTC said Tuesday that it cannot stop computer makers from selling computers that inject ads into webpages to US consumers. The statement covers Lenovo's practice of having sold computers pre-installed with the so-called VisualDiscovery adware developed by a company…

Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover

BOTH HUME and Smith found a most receptive audience in France, where what passed as heresies in London were mere commonplaces in Paris. If anything, the philosophes thought Hume wasn’t radical enough. Hume first visited the City of Light in 1763 in the capacity of private secretary to Lord Hertford,…

There's even more water on the moon than we previously thought, according to new analysis of tiny glass beads left over from ancient volcanic eruptions. The naturally occurring beads were collected in the 1970s as part of the Apollo 15 and 17 missions, which landed near zones of volcanic activity.…

I’m sitting on a train when a group of football fans streams on. Fresh from the game – their team has clearly won – they occupy the empty seats around me. One picks up a discarded newspaper and chuckles derisively as she reads about the latest “alternative facts” peddled by Donald Trump. The others…

FLIP in action. Office of Naval Research/CC BY 2.0 The United States research fleet is made up of dozens of vessels, large and small, that take scientists out to sea to collect data on the ocean and climate and marine life, and most of them look like regular old boats or barges. But not the Research…

Beneath the relentless churn of steel, wood, and dust, the Indian railway is made entirely of stories. For more than a century, it has witnessed the infinite expression of the human condition, borne the incalculable weight of separations, and gently rocked the world-weary into oblivion. “It’s fresh…

Written by Patrick Howell O'Neill Aug 17, 2017 | CYBERSCOOP The FBI has been briefing private sector companies on intelligence claiming to show that the Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab is an unacceptable threat to national security, current and former senior U.S. officials familiar…