Hiroshima, The Stories Of Six Survivors Of The Atomic Bomb
A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition that spared him.
How Oxford University Shaped Brexit — And Britain’s Next Prime Minister
You turn the pages of yellowing student newspapers from 30 years ago, and there they are, recognisably the same faces that dominate today’s British news. Boris Johnson running for Union president, Michael Gove winning debating contests, Jeremy Hunt holding together the faction-ridden Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).
How To Prepare Now For The Complete End Of The World
Some people now are considering what it means to live in a world that could be shut down by a pandemic. But some people are already living like this. Some do it because they just like it. Some do it because they think the end has, in fact, already begun to arrive.
Some people now are considering what it means to live in a world that could be shut down by a pandemic. But some people are already living like this. Some do it because they just like it. Some do it because they think the end has, in fact, already begun to arrive.
How The Far-Right Helped To Create The Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the New York Times. With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s.
How The English Language Is Taking Over the Planet
English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. Is there any point in resisting?
The British Once Built A 1,100-Mile Hedge Through The Middle Of India
There was nothing charming about what the British built. It wasn’t meant to protect anything except imperial revenue. It grew along the Inland Customs Line, a bureaucratic barrier that the British created to impose a high salt tax on the people living on one side of the line—the relatively saltless one.
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
We’re spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as “adulting,” a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.
An Innocent Man Spent 46 Years In Prison. And Made A Plan To Kill The Man Who Framed Him.
Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolors. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.
The Pentagon’s Push To Program Soldiers’ Brains
The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle
Since his involuntary retirement, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has raised money for worthy causes, attempted to make a comeback in Russian politics, and, notoriously, made an advertisement for Pizza Hut.
How A Volcano In Hawaii Became A Battleground For Astronomy
Native Hawaiians are protecting the mountain of Maunakea, at the heart of Hawaii’s Big Island, from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at its summit, where the facility would join venerable observatories like the twin Keck domes and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility.
A ‘Thrilling’ Mission To Get The Swedish To Change Overnight
“Thrilling” is the word repeatedly used by Jan Ramqvist to describe how he felt about participating in a nationwide mission to get all Swedish motorists and cyclists to change the habits of a lifetime and begin driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time.
The Strange & Curious Tale Of The Last True Hermit
For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real.
How Small Farmers Are Fighting To Keep Vermont’s Identity Alive
Not much says “America” more than the small dairy farm, and Vermont has spent decades selling that image. Increasingly, it’s a relic of a bygone era. As of the third quarter of 2019, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets had accounted for only 675 dairy farms in the state.
The People Of Las Vegas
Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas. They have thoughts and generalizations, takes and counter-takes, most of them detached from any genuine experience and uninformed by any concrete reality.
I Could Never Understand My Grandmother’s Sadness – Until I Learned Her Tragic Story
My French grandmother came to the US to escape the Nazis. Although she had made a life for herself in America, she never stopped seeming sad to me, and her sadness never stopped unnerving me. What did a box of letters and photographs reveal about the sacrifice she made?
‘The Big House And The Picket Fence’
Tonya Crowder still dreams that she and her fiance, Roosevelt Myles—who’s been in prison for decades fighting what he says is a wrongful conviction—will one day build a life together somewhere “nice, quiet, and simple.”
The Dictatorship Of Data
Big data is poised to transform society. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.
America’s ‘War’ Against Switzerland
The not very widely known aerial fighting and bombing that occurred between the United States and Switzerland during World War II.
How Adorable R360 Coupe Shaped Mazda’s Design DNA
The Japanese brand might be celebrating their 100 year anniversary in 2020 but it was 60 years ago that one model, in particular, set the benchmark for Mazda and microcars at large. priced at just 300,000 ¥ (around $830 USD), the small, adorable Mazda R360 coupe was more than a city car.
Revisiting The Seven Weeks In 1991 That Changed Music History Forever
In rock history, 1991 is most often seen as The Year Everything Changed. A procession of landmark releases from August to September 1991 helped transform alt.rock’s steadily growing snowball into an all-enveloping avalanche.