October 31, 2017

By Virtue of Being a Woman, You Are Already a Witch.



The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how.



Christmas Trees and the Logic of Growth. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments.



In Today’s America, Small Voting Shifts Can Have Really Big Effects.



Cold War World. How the contest between capitalism and communism shaped world politics—and defines today’s inequalities.



October 30, 2017

The Pros and Cons of Strict Land-Use Regulations.



Why do we call it that? Backstories of seven disease names.



The Hidden Meaning of Kids’ Shapes and Scribbles.



The liberal-left divide reshaping American politics.



People are Different. Yes. The norm today is shifting to anything that shows interest in anyone is automatically bad.



Wall Street has a “financial doping” problem.



People Are Dying Because of Ignorance, not Because of Opioids.



October 29, 2017

The Most Unaffordable Housing Markets In North America, Charted.



Our instincts to do more, coupled with a predisposition to accommodate everyone’s vision often produce complex solutions where each person contributes something to the mix — a sort of Rube Goldberg machine.



The opioid crackdown is making life untenable for chronic pain patients like me.



College pays…if you’re white.



Scientists Are Rewriting the History of Photosynthesis.



US winter has shrunk by more than one month in 100 years. Turns out I actually love global warming.



The American Dream is dead, and voters are angry. With wages stagnated and younger generations expected to make less than their parents, expect voters to grow even more discontent.



We’re temporal experts and manipulators; we have flashbacks and flashforwards and stop motion and instant replay and time gates and time shifting and time forks. Not content with nostalgia for the past that never was, we begin to feel nostalgia for futures that will never come.



Fewer now have mix of liberal, conservative views in U.S.



There’s now proof that women perform better under pressure than men. I bet this holds for all fields.



Rediscovering History’s Lost First Female Video Game Designer.



Shattering the Bell Curve. From 2007. Still relevant.



October 28, 2017

Healthy obesity doesn’t exist; obesity is not a benign condition: new study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.



Under a fermium sky.



Why opioids are such an American problem.



Sarah Polley’s 20-Year Journey to Adapt Atwood’s Alias Grace.



Climate change might be worse than thought after scientists find major mistake in water temperature readings.



Trump or Pence? Either way, the Koch brothers have won.



Your Pumpkin Pie Probably Has No Actual Pumpkin In It. Gourd-dammit!



Diverging Life Expectancies and Voting Patterns in the 2016 US Presidential Election.



Having children is not life-affirming: it’s immoral.



October 27, 2017

‘Tiny House Hunters’ and the tiny American dream.



Capitalist triumphalism: a brief history.



Selective Feminism and the Myth of the Bernie Bro: The Backlash to Sanders and the Women’s Convention.



New Zealand to ban foreign homebuyers from purchasing existing properties.



The blood on George W Bush’s hands will never dry. Don’t glorify this man.



Astronomers Spot First-Known Interstellar Comet.



Sex in America Is Incredibly Uptight.



The useless design features in modern products.



Pregnancy and childbirth are killing African American women at inexplicable rates.



The Mandela Effect.



October 26, 2017

Why Conservatives Blame Poverty on the Poor. A new essay by National Review’s Kevin Williamson exposes the ideological blind spots of responsibility politics.



CRISPR 2.0 Is Here, and It’s Way More Precise. CRISPR 2.0: Even crispier.



How Can the DNC Be So Clueless?



The NRA hoped everyone would forget the Las Vegas massacre. It only took 3 weeks.



A tendency for your mind to wander is correlated with creativity and intelligence. Good news, because I literally can’t do anything for longer than 10 minutes at a time.



What do ordinary people think fake news is? Poor journalism and political propaganda.



The 238 Attempted Bribes of Amazon Should Be Illegal.



In the U.S. market for human bodies, anyone can sell the donated dead. When Americans leave their bodies to science, they are also donating to commerce: Cadavers and body parts, especially those of the poor, are sold in a thriving and largely unregulated market. Grisly abuses abound.



For an Endangered Animal, a Fire or Hurricane Can Mean the End. Future humans — if any remain — will look back at all of us as we gaze back at Nazis. Worse, most likely. We are someone else’s monster.



October 25, 2017

Brit Marling on Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent.



Let Me Tell You.



Wounded Women. The assumption of female vulnerability threatens to invigorate the sexist evils it aims to combat.



You see the problem I’m having with the faux-resistance?



Troops of the Uniform Unite! The Military Is a Socialist Paradise!



Firearms-related deaths and injuries increased 70 percent in parts of California in the weeks after gun shows in neighboring Nevada.



The sad humanity of American Captain, the best anti-superhero comic about superheroes. No one that powerful can ever be good enough to not be dangerous.



The fastest-growing city in america is 100 percent sure to get wiped out by a natural disaster. I have been to Cape Coral. It is a very strange place. The problem is, winter is terrible in much of the rest of the country, and people don’t want to tolerate it — so, Florida.



We don’t have to choose between growing the economy and fighting climate change.



We Asked Men and Women to Wear Sensors at Work. They Act the Same but Are Treated Very Differently.



The Necessity of Questioning the Military.



The central problem is the political failure of elites to implement openness in a way that is politically acceptable for most people, in most circumstances, most of the time.



How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers).



October 24, 2017

The Earth’s interior is teeming with dead plates.



The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and rewriting a running GUI.



This Company’s Robots Are Making Everything—and Reshaping the World.



Advances and Harassment.



Are We Ready For A Workforce That is 50% Freelance?



Female homicide rate dropped after Craigslist launched its erotic services platform. Only the most predictable outcome ever. Too bad the government forced censorship.



Universe shouldn’t exist, CERN physicists conclude. I don’t disagree.



Forbidden City: How Los Angeles Banned Some of its Most Popular Buildings.



Too much fructose can damage your liver, just like too much alcohol. That is fruct up.



Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes.



Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between.



Irradiated Dimes.



Traces of Alzheimer’s Disease Detected in Wild Animals for the First Time.



Games Look Bad, Part 1: HDR and Tone Mapping. This is about games, but applies to film as well.



Paying For Dirt: Where Have Home Values Detached From Construction Costs?



October 23, 2017

Across several metrics, organic agriculture actually proves to be more harmful for the world’s environment than conventional agriculture.



We’re running out of big ideas. No.



Australia Mourns the End of Its Car Manufacturing Industry. Very dumb but typical decision that Australia allowed this to occur.



White Friend More Intolerant of Gluten Than Racism.



There are now new borders and fences going up all over Europe, as a response to Merkel’s blithe misjudgment. But to some as long as your heart is in the right place, whatever idiot crap you do is just fine.



Here’s Why Engine Oil Filters Are So Fascinating.



Jeremy Corbyn to European left-wing parties: you won’t win until you abandon neoliberalism.



October 22, 2017

Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras. I was always skeptical of the “body cameras will solve all” narrative.



How Amazon Took Seattle’s Soul.



Rokurokubi.



CO₂ benefits of regrowing forests nothing to shake a stick at.



Americans are still terrible at investing, annual study once again shows. What’s weird is that they both increase their risk and make less money — it’s like some idiotic combination of the worst of both worlds.



Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories.



What school dress codes have to do with Harvey Weinstein.



What Would Women Be Doing if We Weren’t Constantly Dealing With Male Abuse?



Give researchers a lifetime word limit.



How Hollywood Gets Its Old-School Tech.



China Is Quietly Reshaping the World.



How Retailers Use Personalized Prices to Test What You’re Willing to Pay.



The Sexual Assault News Cycle Is Hell for Survivors.