The Art Of Eviction
In Brooklyn, the median rent has gone up about 10 percent in the six years since Quick Evic was founded, allowing the company to expand aggressively. In 2014 it brought in $20,000 in revenue, which ballooned to more than $300,000 by 2017. How one company helps landlords exploit a loophole in New York’s tenant laws.
Up In The Air: Meet The Man Who Flies Around The World For Free
Ben Schlappig, 25, is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They’re self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught.
Kudos, Leaderboards, QOMs: How Fitness App Strava Became A Religion
Strava is a fitness and sports tracking platform that launched in 2009 and bills itself the “number one app for runners and cyclists”. The app offers community, training data and motivation to millions of athletes. Even runners who dislike tech can’t bear to be without it.
Larry Krasner’s Lonely, Radical Crusade To Solve America’s Gun Problem
Unlike traditional prosecutors, Krasner does not measure success by accumulating convictions and toting up lengthy prison sentences. Instead, he has promised to address abuses by the criminal justice system and imprison fewer people for less time. And he thinks all of that can drive down gun crime.
The Cost Of Keeping Singapore Squeaky Clean
Founding father and first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew kicked off the Keep Singapore Clean campaign 50 years ago. The aim wasn’t just to make the city more pleasant. A cleaner city, Lee Kuan Yew reasoned, would create a stronger economy.
Songdo, The World’s Most Futuristic City
The world’s most futuristic city is Songdo, South Korea. Within the larger city of Incheon, Songdo is a $40 billion project that embraces the 21st century design concepts of Aerotropolis and Ubiquitous city.
How To Spot A Perfect Fake: The World’s Top Art Forgery Detective
The incentive to be a proficient forger has soared; a single, expertly executed old master knockoff can finance a long, comfortable retirement. The technologies available to abet the aspiring forger have also improved. Forgeries have got so good – and so costly – that Sotheby’s has brought in its own in-house fraud-busting expert.
‘Anyone Popular At School Has Muscles’: The Rise Of The Ripped Teen
Charlie, 13, starts his morning with 40 press-ups; William, 15, spends an hour a day working out. But when does a healthy interest become a dangerous obsession?
2,000 Drones Replace Fireworks On New Year’s Eve In Shanghai
Nearly 2,000 drones took to the night sky and illuminated the Huangpu River in Shanghai to welcome in the new year. At around midnight, the drones gathered to form a running man. It moved forward, showing the changes and achievements Shanghai has made in the past 40 years.
The Man Who Walked Backward
When the Great Depression put Plennie Wingo’s bustling Abilene, Texas, cafe out of business, he tried to find fame, fortune, and a sense of meaning the only way he knew how: by embarking on an audacious trip around the world on foot. In reverse.
What Really Happened To Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. Judging from the electronic evidence, this was not a controlled attempt at a water landing. The airplane must have fractured instantly into a million pieces.
See How The World’s Most Polluted Air Compares With Your City’s
The New York Times visualized the damaging, tiny particles that wreak havoc on human health. From the Bay Area to New Delhi, see how the world’s worst pollution compares with your local air. The particles are too small for the eye to see but in high concentrations, they cast a haze in the sky.
How ‘Landscape Urbanism’ Is Making Gentrification Look Like Fun
The High Line and its imitators are examples of “landscape urbanism,” a growing design movement that places green space in collision with old infrastructure. Rehabilitation projects follow a familiar playbook, aestheticizing the labor of the past even as they support a gentrified future.
I Tried AirBnb’s Zaniest Online Experiences
Could the company’s latest play to own the experience economy transport me virtually around the world? I made sangria with drag queens in Portugal, meditated with sleepy sheep in Scotland, and visited stray dogs in Ukraine to find out just how far Zoom-powered travel could take me.
Behind The Scenes Of A Radical New Cancer Cure
CAR-T involves removing a patient’s own blood, filtering for immune cells called T-cells, and genetically engineering those cells to recognize and attack cancer. CAR-T made history in 2017 as the first FDA-approved gene therapy to treat any disease. The trials that led to approval showed response rates of 80 percent and above in aggressive leukemias and lymphomas that had resisted chemotherapy.
Gustave Eiffel’s Secret Apartment In The Eiffel Tower
When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to much wonder and acclaim, designer Gustave Eiffel soaked up the praise, but as if that wasn’t enough, it was soon revealed that he had built himself a small apartment near the top of the world wonder.
The Case For Making Low-Tech ‘Dumb’ Cities Instead Of ‘Smart’ Ones
There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?
The Death And Afterlife Of The Mall
Once a cornerstone of American consumerism, shopping malls are now mostly ghost towns. In a new episode of The Atlantic’s Idea File, staff writers Jim and Deb Fallows explore the phenomenon of the dead mall, and its emerging afterlife.
I Was a Proud Non-Breeder. Then I Changed My Mind.
When I hear younger women confidently describe how they’ll feel when they’re older, sometimes I feel a pinch of such condescension myself. Not because I think they’ll all necessarily want kids, or that they should have them, but because one tricky thing about your 20s is the need to make decisions for a future self whose desires are unknowable.
A Vision For Agriculture
Allowing cows out to harvest their own feed and spread their own manure is the most profitable means of producing meat and milk. But, somehow, agricultural science has encouraged farmers to mount a treadmill of increasing yields of milk or meat by increasing the amount of production per unit input.
How Space Tries To Kill You And Make You Ugly
Outer space is the most noxious of substances: devoid of air and filled with a soup of deadly particles in the form of high-energy photons and energetic bits of atomic nuclei. The lack of gravity there affects every element of your being, as even the proteins in your body can’t figure out which way is up.