When I go online, I feel like one of B F Skinner’s white Carneaux pigeons. Those pigeons spent the pivotal hours of their lives in boxes, obsessively pecking small pieces of Plexiglas. In doing so, they helped Skinner, a psychology researcher at Harvard, map certain behavioural principles that…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and…

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My four month mini-break from the Matrix I’ve lost 18 smartphones over the past five years. It was expensive, but I was never really sad to see them go. I hate talking on the phone, I hate anything with a “seen” function, I hate the urge to check for something as much as I hate being notified of…

IF you’re a politician, there may be something worse than being called a liar, a cheater, a jerk or a wimp. In America, you don’t want to be known as a flip-flopper. Jeb Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton have both been criticized for changing their positions from yes to no on invading Iraq. A decade…

London, May A experiment involving thirteen homeless men takes off. They are street veterans. Some of them have been sleeping on the cold tiles of The Square Mile, the financial center of Europe, for more than forty years. Their presence is far from cheap. Police, legal services, healthcare: the…

London's iconic Blue Plaques mark where the famous lived across the capital. Meet the family that singlehandedly makes them all. Check out http://www.huckmagazine.com/ Like Huck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HUCKmagazine Follow Huck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HUCKmagazine Follow Huck on…

Sophie Weiner Author Jasu Hu Illustrator New York City has only recently adopted a policy mandating paid sick days for workers, but there are few other places in the country make that guarantee. And while Americans are still fighting for laws that will protect their jobs when they have the flu, it's…

As we muddle through our days, the quest for happiness looms large. In the U.S., citizens are granted three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The kingdom of Bhutan created a national index to measure happiness. But what if searching for happiness actually prevents us…

Forum November 2, 2015 With Responses From Value arises from glamour, with its tantalizing promises of escape. Virginia Postrel Our appreciation of an object’s history also reveals bigotry. Susan A. Gelman Visible wealth makes people less cooperative. Nicholas A. Christakis Objects are not…

Allan Ganz, then 19, poses in front of his dad's ice cream truck. Courtesy of Allan Ganz The 'Babe Ruth' Of Ice Cream Gives The Scoop On His 71-Year Career July 27, 2018 • The town of Peabody, Mass., calls him "The King of Cool." Allan Ganz reflects on how his father introduced him to the business,…

I work some days from a small office in San Francisco, and every day, I gotta eat. For a stretch of several weeks this year, I obtained my lunch from an iPhone app called Sprig. It’s a beautiful piece of software. A trompe l’oeil table offers a compact slate of choices for lunch and dinner, all…

Photo: @catebutler; @keishua_; @therock; @studioescargot The last thing you expect from the Rock is long-windedness. But Dwayne Johnson is a veritable novelist on Instagram, where he documents his days, which are composed chiefly of pumping iron at the gym, playing with his dogs, and eating snacks…

A s they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands , deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them. There was no hiding the fact that this man had been at sea for a considerable time. His hair was matted upwards like a shrub.…

Business is booming for Mistress Odette. The 26-year old was living in New York and working in a dungeon with a number of other dominatrixes, and eventually, like many New Yorkers do, she grew tired of the stresses that came with sharing space.She moved out to Austin, Texas four years ago to try and…

Last week I gave this talk at Web Summit in Dublin. It’s a first-draft of thoughts that I felt compelled to share in a room of entrepreneurs and VC’s. I’d love to hear any and all thoughts on this topic. Thx for reading — Y This is a talk about what happens when a culture is driven by the need for…

My dad died in an Airbnb rental, and he’s not the only one. What can the company do to improve safety? Photo-illustrations by Matter T he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the…

Wheel Today's Programme See the full listing of what's coming up on The Pool today. You can even save up-and-coming items to your scrapbook to view at another time. Scrapbook My Scrapbook Wherever you see the scissor icon, just click to start saving all your favourite things. Profile My Profile…

It’s hard to envision the Nordic model ever finding a home on these shores. Illustration by Script & Seal Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s…

Do you not have a mum? Or have a mum but she’s far away? Or have a mum but you don’t like her? Do you have $40 to spare? Then you can now rent yourself a mum. Nina Keneally has established a business in New York City renting out her services as a mother. She’ll listen to you talk about your…

When Lauren Urasek learned she was the most popular heterosexual woman on OkCupid back in 2014, she received an average of 35 messages a day. Sure, a lot of those messages were garbage—but plenty of others weren’t. The 25-year-old makeup artist must be doing something right. Urasek isn’t sure what…

The President was heading over to the nearby Department of the Interior and decided to break with tradition and take a Springtime walk. On the way, he got a chance to meet with all sorts of folks, who weren't expecting to meet the President of the United States of America.

1 Arts Why Sexy Robots Are Taking Over The Internet 2 U.S. ‘I Will Uplift You’: Rashida Tlaib’s Emotional Victory In Michigan 3 U.S. Why Tech Companies Are Booting Alex Jones 4 U.S. Ohio Election Raises New Worry for Republicans 5 Opinion A Farmer on Trump’s Trade War: I Can’t ‘Take It’ 6 U.S. How…

Ryan Hall and Sara Hall in Santa Monica, California.Photograph: Jonathan Moore/Getty Images Ryan Hall is the US record holder for the half marathon (59m 43sec). In 2011 he ran the fastest marathon ever by an American (2h 04m 58sec) in Boston. We speak to him in Ethiopia. Hi Ryan. What have you been…

After the image of a Brooklyn student named Vidal captured widespread attention on the Humans of New York blog, he and the photographer, Brandon Stanton, were invited to the White House. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRANDON STANTON. COURTESY ST. MARTIN’S PRESS The most famous photograph from Brandon Stanton’s new…

In 2013, David Lowery, a singer and guitarist for the band Cracker, was aghast with the music service Pandora. In a now infamous blog post , Lowery lambasted Pandora for paying him only $16.89 in royalties despite playing Cracker’s 1993 hit song “Low” over 1 million times. But Lowery’s attitude…

Alice, the heroine of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking‑Glass (1871), has many extraordinary encounters, but the one that’s always stuck with me is her meeting with Humpty Dumpty, an egg-shaped being, balanced on a wall. He is annoyed when Alice calls him an egg, he tells her she should stop…

Image by the USO, via Flickr Commons In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic , he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An opening line…

A line of discarded soda machines in a field in Barrow, Alaska. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times By Five years ago, Mayor Michael A. Nutter proposed a tax on soda in Philadelphia, and the industry rose up to beat it back. Soda lobbyists made campaign contributions to local politicians and…

For the last 61 days I've been traveling throughout California while living out of my Corolla, collecting stories from people living off the grid. The people I've met have abandoned the chase of the American Dream; they are not battling traffic to work a nine-to-five job in order to live in a big…

B eneath a yawning seven-metre-high Frank Gehry ceiling -- its outer shell covered by a 3.5-hectare Mark Zuckerberg-devised giant rooftop park; its pristine 40,000-square-metre interior decorated with posters imploring staff to "Move Fast And Break Things" and "Think Wrong" - David Marcus, a former…

Audrey Elaine Elrod was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived…

YOU know that uneasy feeling you get when someone is looming over you? I have it right now, multiplied by four. Only the hoverers aren’t doggedly trying to get my attention; they couldn’t care less. They’re beavering away behind standing desks. In my department alone, four people have installed…

If you’ve ever found yourself buying clothes just because they’re cheap, or if shopping itself has become a form of entertainment for you, I’ve got a proposal: The next time you buy something, spend a whole lot on it. Enough that it makes you sweat a little. The point is to make you pause and ask…

TGD Traveler : The perfect travel-sized version of our beloved large format magazine—small and light enough to take anywhere—packed with the same inspiring content our readers love. Buy Now Tell us about your path to becoming a musician. My path was weird and unconventional. I got my first proper…

How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale In the ‘90s, Aby Ngana Diop was the queen of taasu, a practice of ritual poetry performed by female griots in Senegal. Diop’s distinctive vocals made her a sought-after performer at the weddings and funerals of the rich and…

Photo: Godong/Getty Images Two years ago, I broke up with my boyfriend and, one month later, became a sex columnist. Since then I have been dating nonstop in every conceivable manner. I have used 15 dating apps personally and half a dozen others on behalf of friends and acquaintances. (I’m either…

It all happened so quickly, about a year ago today. One minute, hardly anyone had heard of the ad-free social network Ello. The next, it was a viral sensation, spawning countless think pieces on its chances for survival. Then, as quickly as it appeared, Ello faded from the spotlight. Now, only a…