Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural H

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com. In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle

Classic Christopher Hitchens column on the delusional demagogue who died today in Caracas. http://t.co/tCxo9TLxYc

Amazing mashup of Call Me Maybe with NIN's Head Like a Hole. So so good. http://t.co/NnwubWZxIi

Why I switched from iPhone to Android, by @ihnatko! (ht @codinghorror) http://t.co/oZ4BkFhzoy

Published 1 March 2013 Share page About sharing The search is on for a couple to train as astronauts, for a privately funded mission to Mars. But wouldn't any couple squabble if cooped up together for

Marissa Mayer Is Clueless about Creative Work. Me @Slate, written from home. http://t.co/6KGm3cGcNL

Corrections Appended: February 26 and March 12, 2013 1. Routine Care, Unforgettable Bills When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie's…

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer The woman sitting in front of me on this plane seems perfectly nice. She, like me, is traveling coach class from Washington to Los Angeles. She had a nice chat before t

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a co

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fai

Some clever comedy to start off the day: @jbranyancomedy's 'classic' retelling of the 3 Little Pigs: https://t.co/qhCWaion Enjoy!

When Marissa Mayer took over as Yahoo's new CEO, she was instantly beset with widespread calls to save Flickr . Traffic was steadily declining year over year. The mobile app was an atrocity living in

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bri

Photograph by James West. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. IT’S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second

This story was originally printed in the March/April issue of Inside Triathlon magazine. Meredith Kessler is one of the better cyclists in triathlon. Her typical Ironman bike split is in the 5:10 range. Pretty good for a full-time office worker and longtime age-grouper who waited until she was 31 to…

Friday 1 p.m. Heading south on King Street. “This place. I can’t believe this place. San Francisco is amazing– ah-MAAAY-zing . Full of all these kids who are gonna make a billion dollars before they t

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Don’t miss out on our Labor Day sale! Subscribe now for unlimited access ⇛ q and a Jordan Firstman Could Never Have Written Rotting in the Sun ’s Jordan Firstman The social media star on his hyper-met

A year-and-a-half ago, a small group of Twitter employees set out to improve our team’s internal analytical and administrative tools. After some early meetings around this one product, we set out with

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I n the 1943 noir thriller The Fallen Sparrow , John Garfield asks the police inspector whether his permit to carry a gun is still valid. “Good for a year,” the cop says wearily. “Why did you want to

The Century 16 Cineplex in Aurora, Colorado, stands desolate behind a temporary green fence, which was raised to protect the theater from prying eyes and mischief-makers. The parking lots that surroun

Shin Dong-hyuk was malnourished, subjected to medieval torture, and worked to exhaustion while imprisoned for 23 years in North Korea’s Kwan-li-so (penal labor colony) No. 14, in Kae'chŏn county, 50 m

For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it. The very scale o

how to Android users can take advantage of Google’s major services right out of the box, but setting Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar up on your iPhone isn’t quite so clear. It’s worth doin

This 5 minute video by @claychristensen is the most influential thing I've watched in 2012: http://t.co/5VnrkP4y

Nice vid on Phelps' core workouts and nutrition before the olympics - http://t.co/yy1WGhP5

This video is 13 minutes of traffic accidents in Russia and totally amazing. Question #1: Why did I end up watching all 13 minutes of this video? A: Because it's one literally unbelievable thing after

This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously, in the early 2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more effi

The crash at Wenzhou. The Rail Ministry had been determined to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway more quickly than anyone thought possible. Illustration by A. J. Frackattack; Phot

With Bill Murray, Just Take the Trip 1 / 6 Bill Murray in London in October. 1 / 6 Bill Murray in London in October. 2 / 6 Mr. Murray as Franklin D. Roosevelt in “Hyde Park on Hudson.” Credit... Nicol

Op-Ed Contributor A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy Omaha SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, an

If you bought a television recently, or are considering buying one, take heed: your beautiful new flat-panel TV will try very, very hard to make whatever movies you watch on it look not just bad, but