[image source: Expocrete] With most residential work, be it a new home or a remodel, the design of the exterior “hardscape” is just as important as the home itself. These areas can include an entry sidewalk and its sequence of experiences leading up to the front door, a deck or a private courtyard…

Violins are displayed in the workshop of Mathias Menanteau, a French violin maker on January 30, 2013 in Rome. After studying and working in England and Germany, Menanteau setup his workshop in the Italian capital, where he builds and restores violins and cellos for notorious musicians. AFP PHOTO /…

The Perfect Storm Much of the education technology world – and many of the foundations and venture firms that provide the funding for it – are obsessed with adaptive learning. The Gates Foundation’s Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program RFP is the most recent evidence of this trend. The…

Michael Lopp is now an engineering leader at Apple. Michael Lopp (aka Rands) is a former director at Palantir, an author of a number of books on software engineering and management best practices, as well as an ex-manager of the Mac OSX engineering team. He also hates meetings. At the First Round…

James and Michael, photographed by Donna Turner Ruhlman . Parents Who Cook is a Q&A series in which I ask my guests about how their cooking has changed after kids entered the picture, and pick their b

Laurie Niles March 13, 2013, 12:09 PM · In a way, David Schoenbaum has been researching his book, The Violin: A Social History of the World's Most Versatile Instrument, ever since he started playing the violin, as a child. The idea for a history of the violin formally occurred to him in the early…

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are wonderful things. We should applaud MOOCS, participate in MOOCs, teach MOOCs, and encourage our institutions to participate in the MOOC movement. MOOCs will help us improve our own courses. MOOCs will catalyze new platforms, techniques and methods to improve…

The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox. Wagner Iworrigan, a 17-year-old high school senior on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska, knows a lot about biology,…

Noah Berger for The Chronicle Review In the summer of 2011, Ian Morris gave what most of his fellow classics professors would consider an unusual talk. The setting: CIA headquarters. The subject: humanity’s future. Until recently, intelligence analysts had taken no interest in Morris. The Stanford…

Last summer​ at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them. I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at your ideal dinner party, what book has changed your life, which fictional character do you most…

Opinion Editors’ note: We’re resurfacing this story from the archives because who doesn’t want to be more productive? THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly…

Chris Beneke A detail of a print of Union prisoners in a Confederate camp playing baseball, Salisbury, N.C., 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Very few people ask me why I teach baseball history. It’s obvious. I love baseball. Lots of students love baseball. But let me offer another…

CBS banned SodaStream's Super Bowl spot because, apparently, it was too much of a direct hit to two of its biggest sponsors, Coke and Pepsi. Please pause and read that sentence again. I am shocked that CBS would ban a spot for being too competitive. But I'm even more shocked that the advertising…

America's Test Kitchen has been giving viewers recipes, science lessons, and gadget how-tos for more than a decade now. Its founder and host Chris Kimball is known for taking less-than-great dishes an

The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district. Six members of the Lykov family lived in this remote wilderness for more than 40 years—utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settle

exclusive Politics Hong Kong Officials Met U.S. Lawmakers About Punishing China Erin Banco U.S. News Naked, Screaming Man Arrested in Murder of Pitcher’s Family Tracy Connor Politics Non-Partisan, but Not Neutral This Senator Tried to Make Nice With Russia. It Shut Him Out Betsy Woodruff, Erin…

TO: Malcolm Gladwell FROM: Chuck Klosterman [ Wednesday, 9:04 p.m.] Dear Malcolm: I’m writing this on Wednesday night, roughly three hours after discovering that Manti Te’o’s deceased girlfriend was 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. Let me open by saying I totally saw this coming. All…

I’m hoping for a flurry of retractions. A Marine spokesperson said yesterday that she couldn’t confirm or deny that Beyoncé wasn’t lip-syncing, and pretty much every media outlet assumed that was an admission. On NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams said that Beyoncé wasn’t lip-syncing, but, “in effect,…

The Sporting Scene January 14, 2013 This weekend offered two of the best football games of the year, both of which I watched, though turning on the television for Sunday’s games was slightly harder after reading Dan Le Batard’s account of Jason Taylor’s fifteen painful years in the N.F.L., in the…

Annals of Business May 9, 2011 The mouse was conceived by the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, developed by Xerox PARC, and made marketable by Apple.Illustration by PAUL ROGERS In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox…

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former…

Politics How Luigi Mangione Is Fighting the Justice Department’s Rush to Execute Him Legal experts are questioning Attorney General Pam Bondi’s death penalty pursuit. “I’ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years,” one tells VF, “and I’ve never seen anything like it.” emmys 2025 Emmys 2025:…

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Science & technology | Internet gaming Clever cheating apps to make word-game players look smarter |3 min read By G.F. | SEATTLE WORD games reward people with a vast vocabulary and the ability to sort a jumble of letters into the most unusual concatenations. Cheating is hard because consulting a…

A pilot uses the FlySmart with Airbus app on an Apple iPad. The F.A.A. has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims. Airbus, via European Pressphoto Agency Over the last year, flying with phones and other devices has become increasingly…

The Loss of the Innocents NEWTOWN, Conn., is about 20 miles from the town where my wife grew up. It’s the kind of place that rewards rambling New England drives: there are big old Victorian houses fla

It’s a tough time to be a teacher. The bureaucracy is stifling. The politics are worse. And, the irresistible force of disruptive innovation has come to school. Everywhere you look, entrepreneurs sell silver bullets that will save our kids from the assembly line. Some teachers quit. That’s…