George Hotz is taking on Google and Tesla by himself. A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been worki
In the Miami area, the daily high-water mark has been rising almost an inch a year. Illustration by Jacob Escobedo The city of Miami Beach floods on such a predictable basis that if, out of curiosity
O n Wednesday, February 11, 1931, Albert Einstein met for more than an hour with a small group of American scientists in the cozy library of the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California. Th
They’re funding a new organization, OpenAI, to pursue the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence — and give the results to the public Published in Backchannel · 11 min read · Dec 11, 2015 -- A
We have cancer therapies, Vincent DeVita says, that could cure another hundred thousand patients if used to their full potential. Illustration by Harry Campbell In the fall of 1963, not long after Vin
What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a sh
Op-Ed Contributor The New Atomic Age We Need Credit... Script & Seal THIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activ
What’s it like to help protect the world from climate chaos? Here’s my daily peek behind the scenes at #COP21. Published in Natural Resources Defense Council · 28 min read · Dec 4, 2015 -- Friday, Dec
W hen Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military drones, one of th
State of Terror ISIS Women and Enforcers in Syria Recount Collaboration, Anguish and Escape Aws, 25, a former resident of Raqqa, Syria, used to be a member of the Khansaa Brigade, the Islamic State's
“ALFRED, it’s spinning.” Roy Kerr, a New Zealand-born physicist in his late 20s, had, for half an hour, been chain-smoking his way through some fiendish mathematics. Alfred Schild, his boss at the new
Idioms are Dying: Should we mourn them? 3 min read · May 14, 2015 -- If I offered you a penny for your thoughts would you say I’m barking up the wrong tree, and that curiosity killed the cat? Or, mayb
4 min read · Nov 28, 2015 -- From 18–22 I spent four years working at McDonalds. I worked a mix of part and full time over these years, always failing to find a ‘better’ job. I never advanced up the r
Published in Signal v. Noise · 7 min read · Nov 25, 2015 -- I grew up lower-middle class on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Anywhere outside of Scandinavia, the socioeconomic label would probably have be
I t’s easy to develop a case of the latest psychiatrically acknowledged eating disorder, orthorexia nervosa – an obsession with avoiding foods perceived to be unhealthy. I got one for just £65. That’s
There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the United States. Bill Clinton served for eight years, but we were always more intrigued by
Rechercher Dernier numéro Ce podcast est réservé aux abonnés Accédez à l’intégralité des Inrockuptibles Abonnez-vous Vous êtes déjà abonné ? Connectez-vous Actu 9 min Raphaël Liogier : “Le jihadisme n
The air shrieks, and life stops. First, from far away, comes a high whine like angry insects swarming, and then a trampling, like a herd moving through. The kids on their bikes who pass by the Caltrai
I. EAUX CLAIRES In what seems like a quiet hour, loose activity fills the lives of the National’s five members. It’s that period of time before the band takes the stage; last-minute decisions and logi
When a shocking event like the Paris attacks occurs, we know how the world will respond. There will be dismay, an outpouring of solidarity and sympathy, defiant speeches by politicians, and a media fr
Ten years ago Bill Gates suggested that open source software was the province of “modern-day sort of communists” whose views on intellectual property were hopelessly outdated: The idea that the United
A terrible calm has descended on the city of Paris. A passenger arriving at Charles de Gaulle late Saturday morning, expecting to find some heightened version of the airport’s usual chaos, was met, in
Next post Previous post My wife sent me a link to this article by Ian Bogost , because she knows the “are programmers engineers?” thing is a pet peeve of mine. I liked the article, and I think Bogost
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 fac
At universities around the world, students are claiming that reading books can unsettle them to the point of becoming depressed, traumatised or even suicidal. Some contend that Virginia Woolf’s novel
The New York Times published a piece over the weekend about the political prospects of Bernie Sanders , a politician who apparently does not kiss enough babies : “[Sanders] rarely drops by diners or c
O nce upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart ’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceil
It started out as a routine missing persons case. But by the time the internet was done with her, Elisa Lam had become a macabre celebrity, a conspiracy magnet—and the inspiration for a TV series. Pub
Published in Be Yourself · 7 min read · Nov 2, 2015 -- The push towards attachment-based parenting and “natural consequences” has led modern moms and dads away from one of the most powerful tools in t
Mount Everest is home to more than 200 bodies. Rachel Nuwer investigates the sad and little-known story behind its most prominent resident, ‘Green Boots’ – and discovers the disturbing effects this de
In the years since Columbine, school shootings changed; they became ritualized. Illustration by Oliver Munday On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman
Salman Khan sits at the head of a conference table, surrounded by about a dozen children, talking about Hitler. It’s late June, nine months into the first year at Khan Lab School, Khan’s educational R
When Facebook shelled out a stunning $19 billion for WhatsApp in February of last year, few here in the US had heard of the tiny Silicon Valley startup. The move surprised even the small coterie of jo
Coming from a scientist, this sounds smug, but here it is: science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works. We know more than ever abou
Drawing by Shutterstock/Barnaby Chambers If global warming is a hoax … … then why was this September globally the hottest September on record by a substantial margin? … then why were seven of the mont
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but the sociologist Erving Goffman added that most of the interesting stuff lies behind the scenes, in what he called the “backstage” areas of everyday l
Periodically, in the vast spans of time that have preceded us, our planet’s living beings have been purged by planetary catastrophes so extreme they make your typical Ice Age look like the geological
Sean Smith was looking for the Nintendo games his mother had hidden when he found a .38 revolver in his father’s underwear drawer. It was June 5, 1989, and Sean, a cherubic, blue-eyed 10-year-old, had
Published in Discovery News: Space · 7 min read · Oct 14, 2015 -- Credit: Corbis NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is tasked with finding small, rocky worlds orbiting distant stars. However, exoplanets ar
“When i left the White House in 2001, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” Al Gore told me this summer, at his office in the Green Hills district of Nashville. “I’d had a plan”—t