When the machines arrived last winter, the villagers were mesmerized. In Zamashegu, a farming community of 1,000 people in northern Ghana, they may as well have come from outer space — four electric slot machines installed in two roadside shacks, chirping and clattering, bathing the packed-dirt…

It took the StarTimes satellite TV salesman about 30 minutes to install a pipeline for Chinese propaganda into Francis Gitonga’s squat, cinder-block home here in southern Kenya, near Africa’s Great Rift Valley. First, he climbed onto Gitonga’s roof, drilled a satellite dish onto the chimney, and…

Africa’s past is the mildewed train station in central Addis Ababa, where locomotives sit gutted and rusted tracks vanish in the grass. The line was once the greatest in Africa; built by France in the 1910s, it ran more than 450 miles northeast to neighboring Djibouti, where the desert meets the…

In 1970, while I was a student at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NewYork, I moved away from campus and into an old farmhouse outsideof town. It took about fifteen minutes to get there, a longer drive inbad weather, which Ithaca had plenty of, freezing winters and heavysnows. The area was rural,…

Such a lovely and loving piece about reading from @christaylor_nyc https://t.co/6ndmrflRgC — Joseph Planta (@Planta) August 11, 2017 Tweeted by @Planta

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email PrintFriendly Quickly, now: Go rip a smartphone out of the hands of the nearest teen. If you have a teen child of your own, you can start there—or if you have kids under 13, you can take away whatever device they’re presently using. Feel free to just tear your TV off…

In preparing to write about the lack of gentle touch in men’s lives, I right away thought, “I feel confident I can do platonic touch, but I don’t necessarily trust other men to do it. Some guy will do something creepy. They always do”. Quickly on the heels of that thought, I wondered, “Wait a…

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Katerina Lyadova's original post on Craigslist. ( Screenshot ) Katerina Lyadova is hiring an online dating profile manager she found on Craigslist. She calls it

This research is really interesting! https://t.co/vdy6FJkOGY pic.twitter.com/MCIpsaCD2n — Les TuloMakski (@lesley_mak) June 4, 2017 Tweeted by @lesley_mak

Excellent article on the effect of video games on people https://t.co/C0OljDWVUO — Jay McCarthy (@jeapostrophe) June 15, 2017 Tweeted by @jeapostrophe

This is from 2008… a men’s fashion conundrum that never goes out of style: https://t.co/ZYMR8YQSDe — Cam Cavers (@camcavers) June 4, 2017 Tweeted by @camcavers

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching,…

I talked to a bunch of music experts (professional critics, teenagers) about how they discover new bands/songs https://t.co/3MWtSCbaZv — Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) May 18, 2017 Tweeted by @knguyen

This article appears in the June 2017 issue of ELLE, on newsstands now. At the photo shoot, the accoutrements of being her precede her. A tray of acrylic nails and an almost-empty bottle of professional-grade nail polish remover are carried by Bernadette Thompson, the Takashi Murakami of…

Illustration by Matt Chase Seven days before Donald Trump took office , the inauguration festivities got off to a low-key start inside a modest conference room at the Capitol Hill offices of the American Trucking Association. There, a hundred-odd familiar faces from the Washington set gathered to…

goosie gander O n April 14, 1934, Richard Byrd went out for his daily walk. The air was the usual temperature: minus 57 degrees Fahrenheit. He stepped steadily through the drifts of snow, making his rounds. And then he paused to listen. Nothing. He attended, a little startled, to the cloud-high and…

Dealing with Loneliness While Traveling for Work https://t.co/zh7tKwHNPG — Harvard Biz Review (@HarvardBiz) November 23, 2015 Tweeted by @HarvardBiz

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Preface This is a blog post about a large design research project we completed in 2011 in close partnership with Google Creative Lab . There wasn’t an

In which I tell you all my secrets, as smugly as possible https://t.co/wV5eKQLihz — Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) April 17, 2017 Tweeted by @knguyen

So many #vodday projects involving transportation! A very good reminder of how transportation is a "derived demand." https://t.co/tOnflVdRdE — Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍 (@counti8) March 4, 2017 Tweeted by @counti8

Hello single friends, no pressure, but if you're not on Tinder Select, then get your act together: https://t.co/wmrQpVaksm — Ryan Cousineau (@rcousine) March 8, 2017 Tweeted by @rcousine

The Union station bus terminal where that woman was killed is a complicated interplay of pedestrians and vehicleshttps://t.co/UXJAsVm7ZF — Oliver Moore (@moore_oliver) February 27, 2017 Tweeted by @moore_oliver

This talk from Maciej Ceglowski—on why singularitarianism is bunk—is indispensible: https://t.co/gOIhlOjaOO — Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 23, 2016 Tweeted by @cstross

“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs,” Samuel Johnson said back in 1791. “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Over two centuries later, denigrating women who dare to express their thoughts remains a popular cultural pastime. This is especially…

HN comments are underrated HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect.…

White nationalist nutjob loses nut job: https://t.co/OM6m5f1BPy — John Gruber (@gruber) December 7, 2016 Tweeted by @gruber

This article is from our archives. It was published in September 2012. “If you walk down a street with Kevin, it’s like parting the Red Sea,” says Stuart Coxe, the television producer who cast Kevin O’Leary on Dragons’ Den in 2006. “It’s ‘Kevin!’ and high-fives.… We’ve never had someone like Kevin.”…

Credit: Izhar Cohen Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related…

(Photo by Jeff Quinn) Y ou don’t need inside knowledge to know that hoppy beers are hyper-trendy these days. The demand seems inexhaustible. In the U.S., “Gimme an IPA” has replaced the more generic bar call for “a beer.” There are white, black, red, double, triple, session and Belgian variations,…

Beyond its status as the first Star Wars movie in more than a decade, beyond its promised revival of characters unseen in new filmed adventures for over three decades, this December’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be seen as a new chance for the series to shake off its status as a nostalgia…

“Cyberpunk creeps up on us. Some kind of alchemy transforms its fictions into truths, and draws us towards places we thought unreal.” — @uttunul Conventionally speaking, cyberpunk is a media genre. It brings to mind William Gibson’s Neuromancer . You fondly remember Blade Runner , and maybe Deus Ex…

Reference books & URLs from last night's Emotional Intelligence chat at #Vancouver's Data Driven Wellness meetup: https://t.co/GJUJetwGGM — Kris Constable (@cqwww) January 13, 2017 Tweeted by @cqwww

"I Moved to Montreal!" https://t.co/YChOivKwNU — Peter Rukavina (@ruk) January 4, 2017 Tweeted by @ruk

wrote a tiny post about programming experiments https://t.co/C7J2tWdsLK — Julia Evans (@b0rk) January 5, 2017 Tweeted by @b0rk

@jack Alright, I wrote up my suggestions of how I'd love to see Twitter improve in 2017. Hope you'll take a look. :) https://t.co/jZ4v9KoPRz — Anil Dash (@anildash) December 30, 2016 Tweeted by @anildash

Nice story by @njaved on the cathedral of Cathedraltown that finally opened. You've seen it from the 404. https://t.co/XigxcsESvQ — Shawn Micallef (@shawnmicallef) December 17, 2016 Tweeted by @shawnmicallef

@shawnmicallef thanks! My colleague did a deep dive on the cathedral a few years back: https://t.co/I24XKql5J5 — Noor Javed (@njaved) December 17, 2016 Tweeted by @njaved

MLB Rookie Hazing: New Rules a Not so Subtle Signal of a New Era https://t.co/2TCUjJ3iC3 — Jessica Quiroli (@heelsonthefield) December 16, 2016 Tweeted by @heelsonthefield