“Check your egos at the door” read the sign on the front door of A&M Studios in Los Angeles on the night of January 28th, 1985. Producer Quincy Jones had placed it there because dozens of the nation’s biggest singers were walking through that door, and he had exactly one night to cut a record that…

What I learned from doing 1,000 pushups @ramit @markdivine http://t.co/6sEOSnJrBK

The Web wasn’t built to preserve its past; the Wayback Machine aims to remedy that. Illustration by Harry Campbell Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a…

Public engagement: hidden costs for research careers? http://t.co/RTLrhls9Ln via @timeshighered

IMAGINE a job where excellence does nothing to improve your pay or chances of promotion, and failure carries little risk of being sacked. Your pay is low for your qualifications—but at least the holidays are long, and the pension is gold-plated. Teaching ought to be a profession for hard-working…

Come si diventa insegnanti? Serve un’abilitazione, e questa abilitazione è stato possibile ottenerla, in passato, in modi diversi. Due anni fa, per provare a ridurre il numero dei precari impiegati nella scuola, il ministero dell’istruzione ha aperto un Percorso abilitante speciale (Pas) per coloro…

The God decision: is religious training of children morally defensible? From the archives: http://t.co/83OYMNGM7E http://t.co/STeIQt0oES

On 5 August 2014, a celebrated Japanese scientist was found dead, hanging by his neck at his workplace, his shoes politely removed and placed on the landing of the stairs. Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was a legendary stem-cell expert, widely regarded as an exceptional scientist, who worked at the RIKEN Center…

T he story of Andy Weir is a strange mix of fact and fiction. There’s the fairy tale success of his book, The Martian , which he self-published on his blog for free, intended for the few thousand fans he’d accumulated over years of hobby writing. Some of those fans wanted an electronic book version,…

Nearly twenty million Americans now say that they regularly experience stomach problems after eating products that contain gluten. Illustration by Paul Rogers Just after Labor Day, the Gluten and Allergen Free Expo stopped for a weekend at the Meadowlands Exposition Center. Each year, the event…

Alcuni spunti interessanti su questi giorni, sul fanatismo e pure Galileo http://t.co/lQdhy2hawv via @ilpost

What is the science case for a 100 TeV collider, and can it be communicated to the public? Cf @overbye in @nytimes: http://t.co/Z0jPol9aIU

Un 2014 è appena trascorso. Difficile resistere alla tentazione di domandarsi che anno sarà il nuovo, cosa ci aspetta. Non per nulla questo è il periodo in cui in tanti, anche solo per divertimento, consultano oroscopi. Che ci si creda o no, opposizioni e congiunzioni astrali non costituiscono il…

Stephen King's office building sits on a particularly dreary dead-end road on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, just down the street from a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership and, appropriately enough, an old cemetery. From the outside, the anonymous building looks like a new branch of Dunder…

Jack Conte performing with Pomplamoose on their (money-losing) tour, which they consider a success. Photograph: Joe Loong/flickr T he first rule of Art Club? Don’t talk about how you run Art Club – that is, don’t talk about your risks, your losses and definitely don’t discuss your eccentric…

I’ve always been a do-it-yourself investor. This habit started around age 19 with a series of ridiculous speculative trades in individual high-tech company stocks. “This stock is sure to go through the roof”, I would think, “because their products are so great.” This is a terrible way to invest. But…

People once woke up halfway through the night to think, write or make love. What have we lost by sleeping straight through?

A photograph by Yunghi Kim, taken in Kosovo in 1999. Kim says that her work has been frequently reproduced without permission on the Internet. Photograph Courtesy Yunghi Kim/Contact Press Images A photograph is taken: camera up, frame the shot, click, and you own the moment. Or there’s the digital…

No Scantron tests, please. Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images Answer by Peter Kruger , high school English teacher: Here are 10 easy steps for destroying all love of reading and instead instilling a lifelong hatred of otherwise amazing literature (even books the kids would enjoy reading on their own):…

Why young women are rejecting academic research careers Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as PhD candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic…

Il libraio per te I libri scelti in base ai tuoi interessi Scopri i nostri suggerimenti di lettura personalizzati Accedi al sito Grazie alle azioni che compi sul sito saremo in grado di fornirti consigli per le tue prossime letture.

What is the etiquette anyway regarding the making of a literary reference in casual conversation? Say, for instance, you want to refer to your newborn’s recent gastric exclamation as an “airborne toxic event.” The allusion is self-contained enough — i.e., your audience will be amused even without…

Ah, passive aggression. The best way to handle conflict. Not. There's a reason why passive-aggressive behavior gets such a bad rap. Not only is it supremely frustrating for both parties involved, but it's also incredibly unproductive to the passive-aggressive person -- because his or her needs…

On March 24, 2008, two years before she penned her oft-cited ten rules of writing , the immeasurably brilliant Zadie Smith delivered a lecture at Columbia University’s Writing Program under the brief “to speak about some aspect of your craft.” Appropriately titled “That Crafty Feeling” and included…

Fabiano Caruana plays Magnus Carlsen at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup. The St. Louis tournament featured one of the strongest fields in chess history. Photo by Lennart Ootes Before any of the six entrants in the 2014 Sinquefield Cup had nudged a white pawn to e4, they’d already been hailed as the…

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft has been a fixture in my English classroom for years, but it wasn’t until this summer, when I began teaching in a residential drug and alcohol rehab, that I discovered the full measure of its worth. For weeks, I struggled to engage my detoxing,…

The Boy with Half a Brain Zionsville’s Jeff and Tiernae Buttars surrendered their son William to the most radical procedure in neurosurgery. The grim choice to remove a portion of his brain left everyone changed. December 23, 2015 “The Boy with Half a Brain” was published in our August 2014 issue…

As readers of this blog know, late last spring I spoke at a cool conference in England called How the Light Gets In , where I hung out with all kinds of professional reality-ponderers. I've already posted Q&As with two fellow speakers I shared housing with: biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who urges…

The latest epidemic to terrify the Western world is Ebola, a virus that has killed hundreds in Africa in 2014 alone. No wonder there was so much worry when two infected health care workers from the United States were transported home from Liberia for treatment – why bring this plague to the US,…

Anne Applebaum ha 50 anni ed è una giornalista polacco-americana esperta di temi internazionali e questioni relative all’Unione Sovietica e all’Europa orientale. Ha scritto per l’Economist e Slate e ha fatto parte dello staff degli editorialisti del Washington Post. Nel 2004 ha vinto il Premio…

The phrase “white privilege” is one that rubs a lot of white people the wrong way. It can trigger something in them that shuts down conversation or at least makes them very defensive. (Especially those who grew up relatively less privileged than other folks around them). And I’ve seen more than once…

My breakdown of the 2014 Hugo Awards data: http://t.co/l0ZwoIXmNz Uh, it's long.

Wired 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 SCROLL DOWN T he message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most…

“We should not underestimate the very real pleasure of being pleased with oneself.” @Rebeccamead_NYC on reading: http://t.co/cfjDhhOYzQ