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The New Editors of the Internet
Bowing to their better civic natures, and the pleas of James Foley's family, Twitter and YouTube have pulled down videos and photos of his murder. They had every right to do so, and in my view they did...
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California High-Speed Rail—More Questions and Concerns
If David Letterman can put out a Top Ten list night after night for decades, we can certainly make it all the way to ten in our chronicles of the California High-Speed Rail debates. As a reminder, this...
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I Didn't Expect to Find Pornography in My 9-Year-Old's Web History
This was the conversation I was dreading—the one probably every father dreads—and it was happening much earlier than I’d expected. I’d been steeling myself all day for it; I knew neither of us was...
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The Quest to Scan Millions of Weather Records
Deep in the dusty catalogues of weather stations and meteorological offices all over the world are hidden treasures. They're easy to miss if you're not looking for them—often taking the form of, well,...
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The Evolution of Chat
There's this thing that happens in text messages, online chats—really, any text-based, real-time communication: The lag. Because real-time isn't always actually real-time—or same-time, anyway—people...
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A Digital Search for the Long-Dead Grandmother I Never Knew
After three years of haphazard searching for a great uncle I never knew, I’m ready to conclude that there are many Irving Feldmans scattered across the continent. There is Irving Feldman the celebrated...
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For $200,000, This Lab Will Swap Your Body's Blood for Antifreeze
In 1972 Max More saw a children’s science fiction television show called Time Slip that featured characters being frozen in ice. He didn’t think much about it until years later, when he started hanging...
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Swing Copters: The Randomness of the Universe, Captured in Pixels
Many of the highest-performing professional athletes are also the most superstitious. Serena Williams bounces the tennis ball five time before her first serve, twice before the second. Michael Jordan...
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Is There a Better Way to Measure Earthquakes?
Two hundred years ago, Missouri was rocked by an earthquake so severe it made the Mississippi River flow backward and set off church bells in Boston more than 1,000 miles away. These details help...
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The Other Neanderthal
We don’t know what the Denisovan looked like. We don’t know how it lived, what tools it used, how tall it was, what it ate, or if it buried its dead. But from only two teeth and a piece of finger bone...
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Why I Wrote a Book About an Obscure '90s Computer Game
Most popular writing about video games tends to be experiential, focusing on the relationship of the player to the game. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s worth recognizing that...
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The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn't Want You To See
In 1978, Star Wars won seven Academy Awards. But if you want to watch that original version, the first of George Lucas’s soon to be seven-part saga, you’ll find it difficult. In fact, it’s actually...
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Old Newspapers, New Value
One Thursday morning, I found a post in the “free” section of Craigslist for a sizable collection of historic New Orleans newspapers. Months earlier, the very same collection had been for sale but now...
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The Volunteers of FindaGrave.com
Last weekend I biked to a cemetery near my apartment with a camera and a name. I was looking for the grave of Rose Victor, a woman I’ve never met and know nothing about—except that she was buried in...
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California's Underground Water War
Grape vines march across wires strung along rolling hills, their little trunks improbably supporting heavy black fruit. Cindy Steinbeck’s family has been farming this land since 1920. They grow...
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Late Summer Reading, Cheering and Otherwise, but Worth Checking Out
My colleague Alexis Madrigal has a wonderful daily newsletter called 5 Intriguing Things. If you haven’t signed up for it, you can check out back issues here and sign up to get it delivered daily here....
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Inside Google's Secret Drone-Delivery Program
A zipping comes across the sky. A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than...
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My Week on the All-Emoji Diet
“Why isn’t there a sandwich emoji?” The instant message flashed on my screen from a coworker suggesting lunch. It was followed by: “TRAGEDY.” Tragedy may be an overstatement to apply to emoji, the...
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The Elusiveness of Stolen Art
Earlier this month thieves made off with a giant Renaissance masterpiece—a 10-foot by six-foot piece painted by Guercino in 1639, and worth over $8 million. Whoever took the painting didn’t have to do...
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