The Man Who’s Going To Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store
American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.
The Quest For Ancestral Riches That May Not Exist
Videos of men riffling through documents are meant to offer proof that thousands of people from a Dominican family, the Rosarios, are the heirs to a multibillion-dollar fortune they believe resides mainly in Credit Suisse’s vaults and those of Banco Santander SA in Spain.
What Do We Do With Robert E. Lee?
The president of Washington and Lee University, Will Dudley, understood the depth of his problem the moment he turned on the television and saw hoards of white men in collared shirts and khakis carrying tiki torches as they marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
The Empty Houses That Foreign Aid Built
After the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, aid agencies promised to rebuild Indonesia “better.” Fifteen years later, their failures are all too obvious. The disaster hit Aceh the hardest. The evacuation buildings are unmistakably the shiniest features of the city’s newly built landscape.
How Migration Could Make The World Richer
Many of the recent political shifts in the West—the election of Donald Trump, the rise of populism in Europe and Brexit—can be partially attributed to the fear of mass migration. Yet increasing migration is one of the quickest ways to make the world richer.
The Music In You
The more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a startling sense. You might not be a virtuoso, but you have remarkable music abilities. You just don’t know about them yet.
What Does Uber Love More: Restaurants or Investors?
Eateries are getting squeezed by delivery apps. Restaurants can enjoy a 69% profit margin onsite, versus just 38% from deliveries. Uber could give up profit to keep them happy, but that’s not what IPO investors want to hear.
Murder And Manifest Destiny On The Mosquito Coast
In 1999, a mysterious Greek entrepreneur bought and resold a series of tiny islands off the coast of Nicaragua, setting off a bizarre and tragic chain of events that included a reality-TV sensation and allegations of an insidious murder plot. The ensuing chaos brought to light a centuries-old question: Who does land really belong to?
Amazon Is Trying To Control The Underlying Infrastructure Of Our Economy
Jeff Bezos’s big bet is that he can make buying from Amazon so effortless that we won’t notice the company’s creeping grip on commerce and its underlying infrastructure, and that we won’t notice what that dominance costs us. Amazon has unprecedented power to steer our choices.
Meet The Americans Who Moved To Europe And Went Awol On Their Student Loans
The amount of money adults in the US owe due to educations is over $1.3 trillion and jumps up by more than $2,000 every second. The average borrower owes $28,000. Some cash-strapped former students are choosing to leave America behind in order to avoid paying off their giant debts.
The Time I Sabotaged My Editor With Ransomware From The Dark Web
When I started shopping around for my ransomware service, the community was still grieving GandCrab. GandCrab wasn’t the first Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) but its overwhelming success had demonstrated the model’s commercial potential.
The Hijacking of the Brillante Virtuoso
A mysterious assault.An unsolved murder. And a ship that hasn’t given up all its secrets. This is the story of the hijacking of the Brilliante Virtuoso in the Gulf of Aden in July 2011.
Why We Fell For Clean Eating
The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it.
Plane Stowaway: The Man Who Fell From The Sky
It was sunny and warm on 30 June as residents in south London finished their lunch and unwound on a leisurely Sunday afternoon. But the peace was shattered in Offerton Road with a terrifying thump. A man occupied a crater in one of the back gardens after falling through the sky for a kilometer.
The Pandemic Will Reduce Inequality—Or Make It Worse
A recession is no picnic. A financial crisis leaves wounds that last for decades. A pandemic, though, can sow a unique kind of chaos. The rich got even richer after the Great Recession, but the Great Depression changed the social order.
The Fukushima Surf Revival
“If Fukushima was a book, the cover would be about radiation. But the contents would be totally different. Of course, people never read the contents.” How surfing was revived alongside a community in the wake of a tsunami and nuclear disaster.
The Night The Music Died
It came out of the sky about five miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa, and slammed into the frozen earth. Outside lay the bodies of three young men who had been thrown from the plane at more than 100 miles per hour. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jiles P. Richardson, also known as the Big Bopper, were dead.
Maybe Just Don’t Drink Coffee
As more than half of all American adults do on a daily basis, you could drink a cup of coffee to stave off the fog of imminent unconsciousness. After all, you love coffee. And not just because of the caffeine. But have you really thought it all through?
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.
The Criminalization Of The American Midwife
New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.
How Two Lottery-Crazed Bank Clerks Cooked Up China’s Biggest Bank Robbery
On April 16, 2007, the fuzzy, grey star had just set, and the bustling streets cast further into darkness, when police detectives arrived at the Agricultural Bank of China. When detectives entered the vault, they were stumped. The suspects had left behind only one piece of physical evidence: a bag full of lottery tickets.