How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com. This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an ano

Today, when I remembered that exactly one year ago I was hospitalized for 22 days for a series of treatments to save my life , I tweeted about it. And then I opened Day One . In the app’s Calendar vie

Doing away with the leap second would mean decoupling clock time from the Earth’s rotation – from day and night itself

Illustration by Mario Hugo Picture this, arranged along a time line. For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant,

Scary myths and scary data abound about life as a tenure-track faculty at an "R1" university. Scary enough to make you wonder: why would any smart person want to live this life? As a young faculty mem

Matter Monogamy and Human Evolution Titi monkeys are monogamous--a way of life found in just 9 percent of mammal species. “Monogamy is a problem,” said Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in a

Dear Jeff, While it might seem an awful cliche, the fact of the matter is — if you go back to a time long before the commercial Internet existed, and well before you became so rich that you have $250

Jaw-dropper of the day: “Around Saturn”, an ebullient time-lapse video of the ringed planet. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/07/27/_around_saturn_a_time_lapse_video_made_from_cassini_images_of_the_ringed.html

The little rover that could (NASA) The most memorable thing was the tears. They were the result, for the most part, of the tensions of the " Seven Minutes of Terror ." And of hope. And of anticipation

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It only takes a quick peek at the TOP500 – the ever-updating list of the world’s top (public) supercomputers – to make you feel pretty good ab

When a single genetic mutation first let ancient Europeans drink milk, it set the stage for a continental upheaval. In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fer

In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv (currently at Stanford) and his co-author AlexFedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.They asked half tomemorize a seven-digit number and the other half to memorize a two-digit number.After completing the memorization task, participants were told the…

John Bunker Séan Alonzo Harris Every fall at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once a

RT @preshit: The making of the last portrait sitting of Steve Jobs - https://vimeo.com/48245994

Over a pint of beer, the great biologist, polymath and pub-lover J B S Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his drowning brother. He is supposed to have said: ‘No, but I would to save two brothers, or eight cousins.’ He was referring to one of evolution’s puzzles: why animals…

Back in 2006, I gave a talk at dConstruct called The Joy Of API . It basically involved me geeking out for 45 minutes about how much fun you could have with APIs. This was the era of the mashup—taking

I’m standing at the front of a darkened room full of middle-school girls, telling them about user interface patterns and trying to get them excited about reading Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines

Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the s

Over the weekend, I went to a sunset picnic on a rooftop in Brooklyn. The evening couldn’t have been more picturesque — a group of stylish women chatting and lounging on blankets, framed against a lav

Mad Men Gets All the Details Right—Except One AUGUST 27, 2008 Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and e

When I launched MacStories in April 2009 I wanted to focus on – as the name implies – Mac apps and the stories of the people who made them and used them. In the summer of 2009, I bought my first iPhon

Walt Disney speaks about 'the tricks of our trade' in this short video that introduces us to the MultiPlane Camera. It adds depth to backgrounds in cartoons.

T he individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden , a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence c

iOS 7 Announced yesterday at Apple’s WWDC 2013 keynote, iOS 7 is a dramatic reimagination of Apple’s mobile operating system. iOS 7 introduces new user features and brings over 1500 new developer APIs

I’m working up to writing at greater length about iOS 7 because, well, blogging. In the meantime, I thought I’d make one specific point. The thing that bothers me most about the new operating system i

Introduction It's no secret that I don't like the Mac OS X Finder. Almost every article I've written about Mac OS X has included a litany of criticisms, from small annoyances to fundamental philosophi

Photo: Dory Kornfield You thought I wouldn’t find out, runners? Your lies stop now! Published in Having It Some · 9 min read · Jun 7, 2013 -- I’ve decided, at the age of thirty-two, to start running.

“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” Phil Schiller’s one-liner in yesterday’s WWDC keynote just may be one of the best in Apple history. People may forget what drives Apple, but Apple does not. Back in the dark days, before Steve Jobs returned, the company really had become mediocre. The success of…