Illustration by Randall Munroe There once was a doctor with cool white hair. He was well known because he came up with some important ideas. He didn’t grow the cool hair until after he was done figuri

Actor James Earl Jones as Othello in 1981. Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images Is Othello black? With the news that David Oyelowo will play Othello opposite Daniel Craig’s Iago and tha

December 21, 2012 Page Weight Matters Three years ago, while I was a web developer at YouTube, one of the senior engineers began a rant about the page weight of the video watch page being far too larg

It’s hard to talk seriously about something with a silly name, and neoreaction is no exception. At first glance, it appears little more than a fever swamp of feudal misogynists, racist programmers , and “ fascist teenage dungeon master [s],” gathering on subreddits to await the collapse of Western…

With iOS entering the last stage of its single-digit version history, it’s time to wonder if Apple wants to plant new seeds or sit back, maintain, and reap the fruits of the work done so far. Last yea

Never marry again in slavery. — Margaret Garner, 1858 Wherever the law is, crime can be found. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973 I. “lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.” By his own

I recently heard a story where people were getting upgraded for flights and hotels based on their perceived social media influence. It makes some amount of Machiavellian sense—only reward those who mi

S omething strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that mig

It's almost midnight, and Elisa Stephens wants another tequila and lime. "Shake the sh-- out of it," she tells the bartender. Stephens, 56, is wearing a fitted black skirt-suit with a Chanel clutch an

The author with her father and brother, 1991 After years of prison and addiction, my brother went silent. So I visited his rehab. I’ve seen my younger brother Zach in person a handful of times in the

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis. N ext year, come summer, Edward Larvadai

Map of the new Community Improvement District in Columbia, Missouri Normally gerrymandering in a medium-sized town that doesn't even pertain to city council elections would be too down-in-the-weeds, b

Working at Amazon may be hell, but so is working everywhere else. Or at least it will be soon. The blockbuster New York Times report documenting Amazon's "bruising" white collar culture is a fine piec

Welcome to the second annual Verge Hack Week. We're totally blowing up our site: we've given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas

In 2011, Raquel Nelson was convicted of vehicular homicide following the death of her four-year-old son. Nelson, it’s crucial to note, was not driving. She didn’t even own a car. She and her three chi

5 min read · Aug 27, 2015 -- Homelessness and street behavior are eternal issues in San Francisco, on par with Muni’s ups and downs and the perpetual and real anxiety around housing costs. I use the t

(To read the extended, updated, more canonical version of this story, with additional reporting by the author, please go here .) Since 1953, to be nominated for a Hugo Award, among the highest honors

While in San Francisco last week, I had a great conversation with a friend. Actually, I had a lot of those, but this one in particular got me thinking. We discussed the advantages of film photography

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering cons

I n November 1996, executives at Warner Bros. were making final preparations to release one of the most ambitious films in the studio’s 73-year history. A hybrid live-action/animated production where

June Arbelo, a second-grade teacher at Central School, comforts a student who wants to go home during the first day of school. Tristan Spinski/GRAIN Leigh Robinson was out for a lunchtime walk one bri

Note: My first novel, Farisa’s Crossing, will be released in spring 2022. Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t…

by Joel Johnson Hey! As jizz-mopping gigs go, this isn’t my worst. The worst was the Uber gig, seven months back. Fully-fucking-autonomous cars that can park themselves in your driveway to wait, or fi

Joel Johnson's short sf story "Hello and Goodbye in Portuguese" is a series of letters between a brother and sister on either side of the post-work divide: the have, and the have-not. It's a very reso

Bernie Sanders in 1981, a few months after being sworn in as mayor of Burlington, Vermont Donna Light/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news th

The horrific Amtrak derailment outside Philadelphia this week set off some predictable uncertainty about what exactly had happened—a reckless motorman? An inadequate track? A missing mechanical device

On Thursday, April 30, Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke at Johns Hopkins University in his native city of Baltimore, at the inaugural Forum on Race in America. This article is an edited transcript of his remark

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Jon Rosenblatt, 27, a Harvard University English graduate student specializing in modern and postmodern critical theory, deconstructed the take-out menu of a local Mexican restaurant "ou

The most important part of engaging in sexual activity? Consent. Despite consent being so important, it’s one of the most widely misunderstood, even controversial, aspects of sexuality. STD Testing Fa

What if Silicon Valley had emerged from a racially integrated community? Would the technology industry be different? Would we? And what can the technology industry do now to avoid repeating the mistak

I saw lizTheDeveloper’s post about technical leadership at Simple and I realized that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. I hope to persuade you that there are a number of systemic bias

THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—

(Photo By A still from The Social Network. Photo: Getty) A few people have forwarded me MIT professor Scott Aaronson’s post about nerd trauma and male privilege ( link here , it’s comment #171) It’s p

The Secret Life of Passwords Howard Lutnick had to rebuild Cantor Fitzgerald after losing nearly 700 people on Sept. 11, 2001, beginning with a search for the passwords only they knew. Credit... Lesly

November 6, 2014 October 19, 2022 November 6, 2014 October 19, 2022 Meaghan O’Connell | Longreads | Nov. 6, 2014 | 57 minutes (14,248 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) It was Mond

Credit Photograph by View Pictures/UIG via Getty In 1973, my high school, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural trends of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one of its wings didn’t have doors. The…

Behold, a comic that explains Obamacare (nearly to death).