Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business…

Privacy International has released its findings that some menstruation apps have been sharing users’ information with Facebook.Photograph: Nishat Ahmed/Associated Press Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter​ on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday. Surveillance is a feminist issue When…

Continue reading the main story Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics Worse, they don’t seem to want to understand it. Dr. Carroll is a physicist. Credit... Alejandro Guijarro, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,”…

Quando negli anni ’80 la marina militare italiana riuscì a fare l’impossibile PREMESSA IMPORTANTE: questa è Storia, non opinioni. Ho raccontato e raccolto testimonianze di fatti accaduti quarant’anni fa di cui oggi ricorre l’anniversario. Chiunque desideri fare parallelismi o “interpretarlo” lo fa…

Graiki / Getty The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their…

“As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance—the boundary between the known and unknown. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination—whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyways—but to more questions and mysteries. The…

Cameron Dezen Hammon | Longreads | excerpt from This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,521 words) “She’s saying ‘thank you’ when she blinks like that,” Hannah’s mother says. Hannah is dying. She lies in her bed, in her bedroom, surrounded by…

Il caso di Bibbiano – la rete di presunti illeciti nella gestione degli affidi di minori in Emilia Romagna – ha sconvolto l’Italia come poche cose nella sua storia recente. Nonostante se ne sappia pochissimo (e proprio perché se ne sa pochissimo) tutti gli italiani ne sono rimasti toccati, in due…

Share A lessandro Barbero insegna storia medievale all’Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, da trent’anni pubblica saggi – sul Medioevo, i Savoia, Waterloo, Lepanto, Caporetto – e biografie – Carlo Magno, Federico il Grande, Costantino, Napoleone. Ha scritto sette romanzi e vinto un premio…

Dentro Chernobyl | 15 Giugno 2019 C’è un istante, brevissimo, nella seconda puntata di Chernobyl , la serie attualmente in onda su Sky, in cui una donna, richiamata dal rumore dei colpi all’ingresso dei soldati che stanno iniziando l’evacuazione forzata di una intera città, va ad aprire la porta…

Members of the Yellow Vest movement at a roundabout near Aumetz, France, in August. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times France Dispatch France is justifiably famous for its long summer vacations. But more and more can no longer afford to go, reflecting an increasingly unequal society.…

Il viaggiatore leggero di pubblicato sabato, 9 aprile 2011 · 2 Commenti di Liborio Conca Era la primavera del 1999 e dalle basi italiane si alzavano gli aerei militari diretti verso la Serbia; guerra “a pochi chilometri dalle nostre case”. Il nostro professore di latino e greco, uomo colto e…

Share I n pellegrinaggio a Fatima nel maggio 2017 in occasione del centenario della prima apparizione della Madonna, Papa Francesco volle togliersi qualche sassolino dalla scarpa. “Quale Maria?” si chiese nella sua omelia in Portogallo. Non certo, precisò, “una ‘Santina’ alla quale si ricorre per…

Share N el 2009 la sociologa britannica Rosalind Gill firmava un saggio inusuale, i cui dati – ammetteva in uno dei primissimi paragrafi – mancavano del tutto di scientificità. L’autrice affermava anche, in una postilla finale, che il testo era andato vicino al non essere scritto affatto, dal…

16 settembre 2019 10:15 Quando Giulia (il nome è di fantasia) e il suo compagno hanno cominciato ad avere rapporti senza preservativo, racconta lei, “tutto mi è sembrato così naturale, come in fondo dovrebbe sempre essere”. Era il 2018 e fino ad allora i due non l’avevano mai fatto senza protezione.…

Un fenomeno meraviglioso e inaccessibile è al centro di una delle scene chiave di Livelli di vita , l’ultimo libro di Julian Barnes, pubblicato in Italia da Einaudi nella traduzione di Susanna Basso: l’immagine esatta e ingrandita di un pallone aerostatico, con la sua cesta, le sue funi e il profilo…

Skiathos, estate 2019. La spiaggia di un’isola greca è un luogo sociologicamente magico in cui si sono dati appuntamento commercialisti di Hannover, vecchi marinai di South Hampton, casalinghe di Malmö, librai di Montpellier, impiegati ministeriali di Roma e via così, in un sabba balneare alla…

AMERICA is saying goodbye to a president whose spiritual life presents an extraordinary paradox. Barack Obama was loathed, almost literally demonised by many God-fearing people, who felt that his policies over reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research were something much worse…

i went to a science magnet high school, graduating in 2001, but in my late 20s, I began to notice that some of my classmates were turning toward the Catholic faith. It surprised me: My high school was ostentatiously secular. We had a steel statue on the front lawn depicting the triumph of…

Published on December 22, 2015 President Obama was flying over Los Angeles in June as he listened to the first accounts from a courtroom in Charleston, S.C., where family members of nine dead parishioners who were gunned down at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church had just addressed the…

Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career. It’s the best way to learn faster, build your resume, and find peers and collaborators who can create job and business opportunities for you. Content builds on itself. It multiplies and compounds. Day and night, your content searches the…

LeBron James didn’t always have thick calves, a raging six-pack, and arms like the Incredible Hulk. Ask LeBron about his off-season training regimen, and he’ll share a detailed run-down of his workout plan and on-the-court practice routine. When he entered the NBA, LeBron wasn’t a strong shooter.…

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015,…

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been on Broadway for about six months and collected six Tonys after a successful run in London. I was lucky enough to see the play a few months ago, and while I liked it enormously, I can’t stop thinking about how odd it is. With Cursed Child , Rowling foregoes…

Introductory note: Mary Robinette Kowal’s novelette “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” was first published in 2012 as part of RIP-OFF , an original audiobook anthology from Audible.com. It was later published in text form in early 2013 on Kowal’s personal blog, along with a (few) “stage directions” the…

08 giugno 2019 09:58 Nel 1992 avevo vent’anni, volevo fare lo scrittore e allora mi capitava di entrare in libreria e di rubare libri. Mi sentivo in diritto, era una sorta di borsa di studio che mi davo da solo, visto che di lì a poco ne avrei scritto di bellissimi anch’io. Per il momento, però, ero…

Credit Jessica Chou for The New York Times (Zuckerberg); Damon Winter/The New York Times (Hughes) Opinion It’s Time to Break Up Facebook Credit Jessica Chou for The New York Times (Zuckerberg); Damon Winter/The New York Times (Hughes) The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017,…

Lara Prior-Palmer | an excerpt adapted from Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race | Catapult | May 2019 | 19 minutes (5,344 words) It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an…

At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here. It may sound like a strange juxtaposition: hardened, tattooed offenders donning the cloaks of fantasy characters. Yet both former inmates and correctional…

In 2017, Dungeons & Dragons, a game played outside the realm of the Internet, can feel slightly rebellious, or at least pleasantly out of place. Illustration by Edward Steed The clinical psychologist Jon Freeman was feeling burnt out. He spenthis days at a corporate office in Manhattan, managing…

click to enlarge Young Kwak The Adrian family plays Dungeons & Dragons in their Spokane Valley home. On a late summer morning , the Adrian family is investigating a cultist hideout when a fight breaks out. "I'm actually gonna take my great axe, but not with the blade, and try and knock him…

The Templeton Foundation , which was founded to promote “spiritual progress,” has given its 2019 Templeton Prize, worth almost $1.5 million, to physicist Marcelo Gleiser, a professor at Dartmouth . Gleiser, who grew up in Brazil and still speaks with an accent, is a big-picture guy, with a knack for…

I n physics, we like theories that are simple and broad-ranging. By “simple,” physicists usually mean a mathematical theory that rests on as few postulates as possible; by “broad-ranging,” we mean theories that can describe a wide class of phenomena, even when apparently not related. A…

I'm not a nerd. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something. I entered the '80s immersed, variously, in science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons , and Stephen King. Except for the multiple-player aspect of D&D, these pursuits were not "passions from a common spring," to quote Poe. I…

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe , physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is…

What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand that sold thousands of SKUs to Amazon as a vendor (both stocking and drop ship) and as a marketplace…

In quello straordinario piccolo libro che è Una certa idea di Europa di George Steiner, i caffè insieme alle vie con nomi propri, alle strade e ai territori percorribili a piedi (all’essere la sua civiltà “figlia” di Atene e Gerusalemme), sono un’idea di Europa aldilà di ogni confine, lingua,…

July27, 2016 15+ min read This story appears in the August 2016 issue of Entrepreneur . Subscribe » Fred Ruckel was an advertising guy. At 25, he started his own agency, and over 12 years he developed commercials for the Super Bowl, Lays and Pepsi. But he never considered himself a Mad man. “I’ve…

Pink brain, blue brain? ‘The science has moved on.’Illustration: Kyle Bean/The Observer Y ou receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant…