Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before. Take Kendrick Lamar, one of the…

Everyone hates parking tickets. Not everyone, however, is an information security researcher with a mischievous side and a freshly minted vanity license plate reading "NULL." That would be Droogie (his handle, if that's not obvious), a presenter at this year's DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas…

Tom Whitwell Dec 3, 2019 · 8 min read This year I edited another book , worked on fascinating projects at Fluxx , and learned many learnings. [NPR’s Planet Money covered this year’s list in Episode 959: Things We Learned in 2019 ] Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains…

This is how the world felt before Crackberries. ( LeoLuigi ) “Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: what you don’t do determines what you can do. Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers…

Here at the Credo House in Edmond Oklahoma , Tim Kimberley ( @pastortimk ) and I are teaching a series on the top theologians of church history on Tuesday nights. I have insisted that C.S. Lewis be part of the mix due to his abiding theological influence on so many people today. Though he is called…

Survivors Faces of Life After the Holocaust Photographed by Martin Schoeller Monday marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland by Red Army troops. Martin Schoeller, a photographer, collaborated with Kai Diekmann of the German Friends of Yad…

Donald Knuth, a renowned mathematician and recipient of the Turing Award (considered the Nobel Prize of computer science), retired from using email in 1990. He issued a public statement on his Stanford faculty page , which I saved to Evernote 1–2 years ago. I think of it often, and my favorite…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. In a post last year , we laid out the human lifespan visually. By years: By months: And by weeks: While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. But fuck it. The days…

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet…

Jacques Demy The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped…

When Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the tech giant might bring 10 gigabits per second internet connections to American homes, it seemed like science fiction. That's about 1,000 times faster than today's home connections. But for NASA, it's downright slow. While the rest of us…

Adam Voorhes In January of this year, the first subject checked into the metabolic ward at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to participate in one of the most rigorous dietary studies ever devised. For eight weeks, he was forbidden to leave. He spent two days of each week…

In early 2013 , Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: It didn’t say what he would be doing. So intense is Apple’s secrecy that all Lynch knew was his vague title, vice president of technology, and that he’d be working on something completely new. ¶ It was odd that…

1960s-1980s The evolution of the Consumer Electronics Show The first three decades of the CES journey 1969 Image: Consumer Electronics Association Another January, another CES. The Consumer Electronics Show, held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada, has been a fixture of the technology calendar since…

c. 30,000-0 B.C. Prehistoric sex toys The "ice-age baton" in all its glory. Neolithic Carved chalk phallus from an infilled pit in a ditch of Maumbury rings, now at Dorset County Museum. IMAGE: CM DIXON/PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES The artificial phallus -- the dildo -- is very far from a new…

Four years ago, I quit the Internet. Tumblr , Facebook , all of it. Lord help me, I just couldn’t read another invitation to an improv show. I didn’t like how I was representing myself, or what trying to live up to my online persona was turning me into. I’d hoped that leaving the cyberworld would…

Something that is rarely talked about is the moment you get stuck on set, unhappy with the camera placement you initially picked, knowing there is a best way to film a scene but unable to come up with a solution. Filmmakers often talk about either the amount of preparation they have put during…

Focus A New Take on Feature Post Directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra confer with Will Smith on the set. Copyright © 2015 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Ratpac-Dune Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved. Photo credit: Frank Masi “What I love about Final Cut Pro X is that it allowed me to be…

1944 The FBI's fingerprint files A place for every print, and every print in its place Image: George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Filing doesn't have to be dull. Here is the evidence — in more ways than one. These photos picture the FBI's overflow filing system, housed during…

A DJ is a lot like a magician: You can see and hear what's happening, but you don't know how it happens. With the push of a button or twist of a knob, a note trembles, a word distorts, a riff blurs. There’s rarely a physical object to explain what you’re hearing—in fact, the process of making music…

hadi: Beme Has a Problem: Authenticity Is Boring http://t.co/svwUjZXCgn

Coca-Cola has erased its famous script from its new cans. Gone, poof, vanished, leaving behind a naked white ribbon, fluttering against Coke’s theater-curtain-red backdrop. FP7/DXB , McCann-Erickson’s agency branch in Dubai, rolled out a limited-edition run of the new package design in Middle…

I've finally completed a cultural rite of passage: I watched Star Wars . To my peers who still haven't seen Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (a note to you indignant commenters: there are more of us out there, happily living our lives and pretending to get your references, than you think), let me…

When you watch a baseball game, you're also listening for the hum of the crowd and the crack of a baseball bat. People like Andrew Stoakley make that happen. He mixes audio for teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, which means he combines a tangle of audio feeds to create the soundscape you hear when…

Paul Terpstra worked the sidelines with his large parabolic mic. He discovered that sometimes, smaller is better. In 2011, the Fox network went on a search for a better parabolic microphone to use in its sports programming. When the company could not fine one, it asked an engineering contractor if…

Over the past two weeks, a wonderfully curated collection of high-resolution photos from the Apollo missions dropped onto Flickr. Ranging from the Apollo 7 mission all the way to the final moon landing by Apollo 17, the gallery contains thousands of captures of the Earth rising over the edge of the…

In my ongoing quest to watch all of the Star Wars films, I have now arrived at Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back . I was expecting the movie to be about, you know, the Empire's forces striking back. I was wrong. To my surprise, I spent two hours watching a movie about a green, diminutive…

In my journey to watch the Star Wars films for the first time I’ve asked many questions. Last night, I finally got some answers. First of all, the big one. Those following my saga know I've been a little perplexed about this whole Han Solo/Leia/Luke Skywalker love triangle for a while. Having…

There is a hero among us. He ambushes the most ordinary of autos in the dead of night and pimps them out in a style worthy of Xzibit. Our hero is Max Siedentopf , who felt that not nearly enough people customize their cars and give them the love and attention they deserve. Having already pimped his…

The revolters who battled the Ukrainian army in Maidan Square and toppled President Yanukovych did so while armed with little more than sticks, bats and sledgehammers. Their nasty homemade hardware is the subject of a series of portraits by photographer Tom Jamieson. They suggest how determined…

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 startup. All told, the…

Pretty much every name offers some possibility for being turned into a schoolyard taunt. But even though I'm an adult who left the schoolyard decades ago, my name still inspires giggles among the technologically minded. My last name is "Null," and it comes preloaded with entertainment value. If you…

Step through the sleek, anonymous metal door of J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions and you enter a world of memorabilia—the murderous Talky Tina doll from The Twilight Zone , rows of old VHS tapes labeled “Midnight Movies,” a Six Million Dollar Man board game, assorted Godzillas. But if you look…

There's another web out there, a better web hiding just below the surface of the one we surf from our phones and tablets and laptops every day. A web with no ads, no endlessly scrolling pages, and no annoying modal windows begging you to share the site on social media or sign up for a newsletter.…

Everyone has their own memory of the first time they heard the iconic yacht-rock band Blue Jean Committee. “I remember, as a young journalist, seeing [them live] and going 'holy shit,'” says Cameron Crowe. “'Hold onto this moment; this is magic.'” As Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates puts it, “A band like…

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and…

We hope it goes without saying by now, but this post contains plot elements for The Force Awakens that you'd probably consider to be spoilers. Read at your own peril. This fall, I watched Star Wars for the first time . I had never met the Skywalker family, or seen the Death Star, or learned the…