IN August 2009, I was betrayed by both my husband and my country. A few months earlier I had left Iran — for good, perhaps, though I did not know it then. The government had harassed me for years for my work as a lawyer and a human-rights activist, and the threats against me had increased in the…

The Fujifilm Finepix X100 , to give it its full name, has been one of the most eagerly awaited new cameras of the first half of 2011. Announced at Photokina in September, by the time the X100 started shipping in Europe and the Far East early in March an almost cult-like following had developed. The…

The annual camel race in the desert of Wadi Rum, Jordan, in 2007. Radiocarbon dating was used to pinpoint the earliest known domesticated camels in Israel to the 10th century B.C.— decades after the kingdom of David, according to the Bible. Salah Malkawi/Getty Images There are too many camels in the…

In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military study his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention. Credit Photograph by Martin Schoeller A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of…

John Aldridge on the deck of the Anna Mary. Daniel Shea for The New York Times Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He…

I'm sorry to have kept you waiting for this update; you might have seen from the tracker that we haven't moved for a while, and you may be wondering what's up. For more than a decade I've been trying to get to the start line of this expedition, and for more than a decade I've been talking about how…

With civil commitment, child-pornography offenders can be imprisoned indefinitely, lest they molest children when released. Credit Illustration by Noma Bar / Dutch Uncle On a Saturday night in the summer of 1998, an undercover officer logged in to a child-pornography chat room using the screen name…

On Friday Standard & Poor’s, the bond-rating agency, downgraded France . The move made headlines, with many reports suggesting that France is in crisis. But markets yawned: French borrowing costs, which are near historic lows , barely budged . So what’s going on here? The answer is that S.& P.’s…

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy…

RT @lexfri: My friend @dmoren and I share our predictions on what Apple will release this year. http://www.macworld.com/article/2025514/predictions-what-apple-will-release-in-2013.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Prefer to read this article as a PDF download? Just enter your info below and we’ll send it to you right now! If you have ever wondered about the power of thought to influence nutritional and calorie burning metabolism, here’s a story you won’t want to miss. It’s about two clients who provided me…

Highly emotional and completely guileless, elephants mourn their dead—and across Africa, they are grieving daily as demand from China’s “suddenly wealthy” has driven the price of ivory to $700 a pound or more. With tens of thousands of elephants being slaughtered each year for their tusks, raising…

In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and…