Soft Fail What actually happens today is that a browser will do what we call a "soft fail revocation check." That is, the browser will try to do a revocation check, but if the response doesn't come back, or doesn't come back in a short period of time, the browser will simply forget about it. Even is…

The first time I dealt with a chiropractor was in 1999 at a mall kiosk, which seemed like an odd place to encounter a medical professional. I was a teenager working a few storefronts down selling butterfly clips, and I made the mistake of looking at one of the kiosk’s spinal models. The chiropractor…

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not…

The classic purveyors of Canadian accents in the U.S.—from sketch comedy troupe SCTV. (Photo: YouTube ) Considering the geographical, cultural, and economic closeness of our two countries, it’s almost perverse that Americans take so much pride in their ignorance about all things Canada. Drake? Dan…

Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors Why your phone’s security is unlike any other For a country fighting over security , we seem to know very little about it. I’m reminded of this every time I fly out of LAX, since they’ve got a security hole big enough for Timothy McVeigh to drive a truck through. LAX has…

If you were to rank the most exciting presidential nomination contests, the 1996 Republican race would be near the bottom. Bob Dole, the “next-in-line” GOP candidate and the Senate majority leader, built up a huge lead in polls and endorsements early in the race and was never seriously challenged…

After 27-year-old Josh Duggar came out as a gay man Thursday, he was greeted with an unexpected call from President Barack Obama. Obama congratulated Duggar and assured him that he would be an inspiration to LGBT youth nationwide. Even so, Duggar faced viscious backlash from the evangelical…

David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “ Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets ” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries.…

This is what most of us know about the death of Julius Caesar, half-remembered from movies and plays: Some soothsayer said, "Beware the Ides of March." A few idealistic Romans decided to win back Rome for the people. Caesar got stabbed by Brutus with a big sword, said "Et tu, Brute?" and died nobly.…

There has been much discussion lately concerning the word "derp" and its appropriate usage. For example, Josh Barro used the word to describe conservative bigmouth Erick Erickson, and Paul Krugman used it as well . This prompted a primer on the history of the term , followed elsewhere by the usual…

“So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness,” Ive says. Things are “developed to be different, not better.” Credit Photograph by Pari Dukovic I. Launch Day In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play…

Speaking up for yourself is hard enough. When others try to silence you through threats of violence and intimidation, what should be the appropriate response? A game developer announced plans this week to withdraw from exhibiting at the upcoming PAX East game conference in Boston, Mass. Giant…

Gary Braasch took the first photographs of the Shell oil rig Kulluk in the Beaufort Sea as it prepared to drill an exploratory well in October 2012. Gary Braasch In 2005, Royal Dutch Shell, then the fourth-largest company on Earth, bought a drill rig that was both tall, rising almost 250 feet above…

S he tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore. "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is a tall, thin,…

CC-BY John M, filtered. This essay would not be the first to criticize the mantra of Joel Spolsky’s blog post, “The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing”. Critics rightly point out that criteria like “Smart, and Gets Things Done” are vague and uninformative enough to be susceptible to bias . What’s…

James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has long been one of the nation’s most aggressive and adversarial investigative journalists. Over the past several years, he has received at least as much attention for being threatened with…

I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish. (this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me) The…

They didn’t see a comedian. They saw the “king of the world.” Long before there was a Dr. Cliff Huxtable, before rumpled sweaters and a collective anointing as America’s dad, Bill Cosby was magnified a hundredfold in the eyes of the young models and actresses he pulled into his orbit. For them, he…

Anyone suffering with impostor syndrome should feel cheered by this. Being too confident is not a good sign. http://t.co/1Z476XMqGi

A short story set in the Ancillary Justice universe? Yes, please. http://t.co/tNuRYX1cgm

The best thing you'll read this week about building apps. https://t.co/Lj9SUdJWoj

America is built around cars. And most of us expect that we'll be able to park our cars for free, pretty much anywhere we go. But economist Donald Shoup of UCLA has made a name for himself by advocating an alternative scheme: charging for street parking anywhere there are more people with cars than…

Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Credit Illustration by Brian Stauffer In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and…

In case you missed it, my thoughts on fixing the App Store's discovery problem to help indie devs: https://t.co/NEVYX3mLIs

Eric Cantor wasn't beaten by the Tea Party. He wasn't rejected by Republicans. He was beaten by 36,000 of the roughly 65,000 people who voted in last night Republican primary in Virginia's 7th congressional district. Cantor's loss last night came at the hands of about 5 percent of his constituents.…

By me @stratechery: The Net Neutrality Wake-up Call http://t.co/crdY7SYSqp Tech can't just complain about politics. We need to be involved.

I flew in to Indianapolis on Friday morning, sleep deprived and dispirited after spending a red-eye flight stuck next to a guy with foul breath who passed out with his elbow in my rib. Inside the airport, incoming planes were disgorging hundreds of eager NRA convention attendees — more camo…

"Look, you’re getting very upset, and this is just the first scene of the movie." http://t.co/68R5fnnFLi

In 1992, an elderly woman in New Mexico bought coffee at a McDonalds drive through, spilled it on herself, and successfully sued for nearly $3 million. The account is the poster child for the absurdity of the American legal system. Nearly every late night comic has a bit about suing over hot coffee.…

In a thrilling twist, M. Night Shyamalan's UNBREAKABLE is revealed as the fallen director's true masterpiece: http://t.co/kyk1awbv3H

hey twitter. I wrote this today. How we talk about race at SCOTUS and why it matters. http://t.co/stetT2sUYB