Welcome To Retirement: Lindsey Vonn Confronts Life After Skiing
Vonn is a three-time Olympic medalist with 82 World Cup golds, an internationally renowned comeback artist, and one of the most dominant American athletes of a generation. She is also no longer skiing. So what will she do next?
What It’s Like To Live Next To America’s Largest Coal Plant
By the late 1960s, Georgia Power had started planning to build the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant. Over a decade later, in 1982, its first unit opened in Juliette. Now, residents worry it’s contaminating their water.
Real Estate For The Apocalypse: My Journey Into A Survival Bunker
Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it.
Bellagio Bandit: How One Man Robbed Vegas’ Biggest Casino And Almost Got Away
By robbing the Bellagio, Tony Carleo had achieved something he hadn’t been able to do in a decade of striving – he had made himself a millionaire. But, because he had stolen chips instead of cash, he was really only a millionaire inside the Bellagio casino.
Where Oil Rigs Go To Die
The world has a problem with its oil rigs. There are too many of them. When a drilling platform is scheduled for destruction, it must go on a thousand-mile final journey to the breaker’s yard. As one rig proved when it crashed on to the rocks of a remote Scottish island, this is always a risky business.
Social Distancing? You Might Be Fighting Climate Change, Too
“Any time you can avoid getting on a plane, getting in a car or eating animal products, that’s a substantial climate savings.” Many people trying to avoid the coronavirus are already two-thirds of the way there.
The Gambler Who Cracked The Horse-Racing Code
Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time. “I find the real business world to be a lot more difficult than horse racing.”
The Man Who Runs 365 Marathons A Year
One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?
Ashes To Ashes, Dust To… Compost? An Ecofriendly Burial In Just 4 Weeks
Also known as “natural organic reduction,” composting burial is the brainchild of Katrina Spade, CEO of alternative burial company Recompose. The process involves decomposition of the corpse in soil—but not within a traditional cemetery.
My Restaurant Was My Life For 20 Years. Does The World Need It Anymore?
Forced to shutter Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton has been revisiting her original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.
Behind The Scenes At Rotten Tomatoes
Humans, not algorithms, determine those ubiquitous scores. The Tomatometer is run by a team of “curators” who read just about every known review from a gigantic pool of approved critics, then decide if each is positive or negative. Once a movie has five reviews, it is Tomatometer-eligible.
Parents: Let Your Kids Fail. You’ll Be Doing Them A Favor
We seem to be more worried about raising happy children than competent or autonomous ones. Middle-school students wilted in the face of challenge. They didn’t love learning like they used to. Parents took bad grades personally. Everyone was unhappy.
As Warming Waters Make Shellfish Toxic, A Way Of Life Becomes Deadly For Alaskans
Coastal states have developed statewide systems to keep their recreational and subsistence harvesters safe from paralytic shellfish poisoning. Alaska has no such system. State environmental health officials say the sheer length of its coast makes monitoring shellfish for the toxin impossible.
Can Ageing Be Delayed, Stopped Or Even Reversed?
This is the pursuit of a much longer, healthier life span using science and genetics to achieve it. Who hasn’t dreamed of staying young but how far will you be prepared to go to achieve that dream? BBC’s Gabriela Torres meets the self-experimenters and scientists who are trying to dramatically extend our lives.
How Wikipedia’s Volunteers Became The Web’s Best Weapon Against Misinformation
Twenty years after it sputtered onto the web, it’s now a de facto pillar in our fact-checking infrastructure. Its pages often top Google search and feed the knowledge panels that appear at the top of those results. Big Tech’s own efforts to stop misinformation also rely upon Wikipedia.
Treasure Fever
Cape Canaveral contains one of the greatest concentrations of colonial shipwrecks in the world. The discovery of a legendary, lost shipwreck in North America has pitted treasure hunters and archaeologists against each other, raising questions about who should control sunken riches.
The Prison Inside Prison
Texas has banished hundreds of prisoners to more than a decade of solitary confinement, an extreme form of a controversial punishment likened to torture. Many of these prisoners aren’t sure how—or, in some cases, if—they will ever get out.
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 Best Hike In Every American State
Alpine scrambles and beach-front strolls; multi-day singletrack adventures and quick urban escapes; soaring trees and rolling sand dunes—every state in the country has something to offer intrepid hikers.
Murder at Sutton Place: The True Story Of Joey Comunale’s Death
After the surrogate son—and alleged lover—of New York’s “jeweler to the stars” was involved in a brutal killing, tabloid drama engulfed a swath of the city’s rich and powerful. But what really happened the night of Joey Comunale’s murder?
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.