Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue. Illustration by Zohar Lazar ~ Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your ­computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from…

Captain Marvel Marvel In 1980, Carol Danvers was part of perhaps the most irresponsible story Marvel Comics has ever put to paper. The plot involved kidnapping, inter-dimensional roofies, and rape, and it ended with Danvers riding off into the sunset with her rapist as her Avengers teammates wiped…

The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing Networks Without Networks 1/10 Emulation Fever Over the last few days I’ve been crazy for emulation—that is, simulating old, busted computers on my sweet modern laptop. I’ve been booting up fake machines and tearing them down, one after the other, and not…

Freemasons, Catholics, Communists, and women in video games Credits first: I wouldn’t have written this if not for the excellent and incisive essays of Liz Ryerson (“ On Right-Wing Video Game Extremism ”) and Katherine Cross (“ The nightmare is over: They’re not coming for your games ”). As I was…

Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future

Diary Marina Warner The professor from the West Coast stepped out of the taxi and looked around, head tilted back and swivelling from one looming grey tower to another as she assessed the flint-studded concrete ramparts of the library. ‘Oh, wowww!’ she cried, ecstasy lifting her voice above the wind…

Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and her toes would scuff the ground. Her back started to ache, and then her joints too. This was in…

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Stewart is hungry. He’s munching on potatoes smothered in chicken fat drippings, sitting by a long metal table that once served as a gurney in the morgue at the Treasure Island Naval Base. It’s a prominent piece of furniture in what will be the kitchen area for Stewart’s new…

Mark Macluskie, 16, who is no longer autistic. Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times At first, everything about L.'s baby boy seemed normal. He met every developmental milestone and delighted in every discovery. But at around 12 months, B. seemed to regress, and by age 2, he had fully retreated…

HelloTailor: To begin with, how did first you get involved with Snowpiercer ? The combination of Korean and English-language production made me curious about how you came to work on the film. Catherine George: Director Bong had seen We Need To Talk About Kevin at Cannes in 2011, when he was on the…

How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab rats By Carl Elliott Photographs by Jeffrey Stockbridge Illustrations by Matt Rota Two years ago, on a gray January afternoon, I visited the Ridge Avenue homeless shelter in Philadelphia. I was looking for poor people who had been…

Cartoon by Ralph Steadman In March, midway through her set-piece cross-examination at the phone-hacking trial, as she explained her campaigning style of journalism, Rebekah Brooks said: “When we did those campaigns we had to be above the law . . . I mean within the law.” It was an uncharacteristic…

Nature | Comment Sharing , & Clinicians and neuroscientists must work together to understand and improve psychological treatments, urge Emily A. Holmes, Michelle G. Craske and Ann M. Graybiel. Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Subject terms: Health care Neuroscience Therapeutics Research…

Campo Verde Bajo las Estrellas , José Basso, 2013. Courtesy the artist and CK Contemporary, San Francisco . It was sweltering the day I unmarried Marta, and we weren’t even together. I was with my little brother in a Penske truck, the flat haze of West Texas rising before us like the credits at the…

PATIENT (LEFT): Willie, donkey. AFFLICTION: Depression over change in habitat. PATIENT (RIGHT): Sukari, Masai giraffe. AFFLICTION: Anxiety around people with large cameras. Robin Schwartz for The New York Times Dr. Vint Virga likes to arrive at a zoo several hours before it opens, when the sun is…

Let’s note that I write this while experiencing psychosis, and that much of this has been written during a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that she is dead. What the writer’s confused state means to either of us is not beside the point, because it is the…

Most Popular Joe Pugliese version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? By Published in the August 2014 issue Here in purgatory, the mansion is smaller, but the wine cellar, paneled in rich mahogany and stocked with thousands of bottles, is truly magnificent. The TV will go over on that wall. The…

Listen to or download an audiobook of this story on SoundCloud and iTunes . Passing fields of soy, corn and towering bleach-white windmills fanning out across windy plains, I arrive early one morning somewhere between Chicago and Indianapolis at a place that promises “sow much fun”. The Pig…

Credit Illustration by Nishant Choksi I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She’s afraid of the…

On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal for weeks. The aliens, also known as the Children of Tama, are an apparently peaceable and…

Do Animals Suffer From Mental Illness? Anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery On a warm May afternoon in 2003, a little boy I’d never met was doing his homework in the sunroom off his family’s kitchen in Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The back of our…

There's a lot you won't learn about Nico Sell in the course of this story. You won't learn how to follow her on Twitter or Instagram or Vine. You won't learn her age, or where she lives, exactly, or the year she graduated from Dartmouth. You won't find out the names of her two girls or her husband's…

Illustrations by Yarek Waszul Or, how I came to love the (money) bomb The single most important change in American politics today is not the rise of Internet-driven, small-dollar contributions. It is the SuperPAC. The Net may have fueled Obama in 2008. (It almost gave us Howard Dean in 2004.) But…

With the rise of the “sharing economy,” many have asked the same question, though perhaps not with the same excitement. But this was Share , a conference meant to “catalyze the sharing economy,” organized by sharing economy lobbying group Peers and capitalism-for-good boosters SOCAP , sponsored by…

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and…

“…for he has no right to give names to objects which he cannot define.” –Charles Darwin Do “races” exist as meaningful biological categories? Physical anthropologists and human biologists have been studying race (i.e., blacks vs. whites, or Europeans vs. Asians) for centuries. For most of that time,…

Listen to or download an audiobook of this story on SoundCloud and iTunes . I was such a moody child. That’s what my parents said. “She’s such a moody child.” “Why are you such a moody child?” I don’t remember ever being called a happy-go-lucky or sunny-natured child, or feeling like one, although I…

Racist views of Germans as warlike and subhuman seem preposterous now but plausible at the time. The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true, but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous. I’ve been thinking about this…

Contenders or pretenders to the throne? Considering all the above reasons for Fortran to stay dominant, what are the chances that another language can carve out a niche in this realm? Haskell, Clojure, and Julia each provide features and abstractions that Fortran, despite its willingness to…

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “There is no more dangerous error than confounding consequence with cause: I call it the intrinsic depravity of reason.” In economics the problem of confusing cause and effect is rife and frequently leads to disastrous policy mistakes. The more I think…

When I sit down with Ai Weiwei, the first thing he does is aim his iPhone at me. We are in Ai’s cathedral-like home-cum-studio, in the dusty village of Caochangdi, on Beijing’s outskirts. Winter sunlight streams through vast windows into an expansive room, sparsely decorated with a large potted…

The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms: with Observations on Their Habits by Charles Darwin Jelly-Fish, Star-Fish, and Sea-Urchins: Being a Research on Primitive Nervous Systems by George John Romanes Mental Evolution in Animals by George John Romanes In Search of Memory: The…

Mar 4, 2014 · 199,731 views Source: Stumptown Coffee Among coffee aficionados, the AeroPress is a revelation. A small, $30 plastic device that resembles a plunger makes what many consider to be the best cup of coffee in the world. Proponents of the device claim that drinks made with the AeroPress…