Clik here to view.
The Energy in Things
The modern cellphone user is highly attuned to energy usage. I assiduously monitor my phone's battery, tracking its decline from morning to evening, and then its return to fullness. There are even...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Flood of Beer That Brought Out the Best (and Worst) in Humanity
It is possible, it turns out, to have too much of a good thing. Two hundred years ago today, in London, the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road suffered a malfunction. The metal hoop helping to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Exit, Pursued by a Bear
The one piece of advice I've given to writers more than any other is: just say what happened. So, here's what happened: In 2010, I took a job with The Atlantic and it turned out to be everything one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
California High-Speed Rail Lucky No. 13: Let's Look at Maglev and Other...
Three more installments to go! This is No. 13 in a series, started back in July, on the biggest infrastructure project underway in America, and either the most important one (if you're a supporter) or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Deep Dive: The Life and Times of Ocean Rovers
In 1966, 10 days after a U.S. plane carrying four nuclear bombs had run into another and crashed into Spain, the Department of Defense was not yet ready to admit that they were missing a bomb. There...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Comic Sans Typewriter
Like the tuxedo T-shirt and the Yoda backpack, some objects are too perfect not to exist. Such is the Comic Sans typewriter. The device, announced last week by Pittsburgh-based artist Jesse England, is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tag a Retro Ad Today, Help Journalism Tomorrow
If the TimesMachine is the bookish offspring of the Grey Lady, then Madison is her quirky niece. Awkward familial metaphors aside, the New York Times' new archive—named after Madison Avenue, once the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Happens When Chemists Don't Wash Their Hands
Serendipitous discoveries tend to happen in unexpected ways. But the stories of the serendipitous discoveries of three different artificial sweeteners are, in their basic components, identical. All...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shampoo Is Dead, Long Live Shampoo
The forefront of hair care today is to refrain from washing it every single day. A rinse in the shower is allowed but in this brave new world, popular hair-care products—shampoos, conditioners,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Dating' vs. 'Married': How Text Messages Change Over Time
So many loves start with a "hey." A tentative "hey." A hopeful "hey." And more often than ever that "hey" is not spoken, but sent through a text message. That first "hey," if all goes well, is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Upgrade Gap: Apple's New iOS Problem in One Chart
Stephen Lam/ReutersUpdated 12:25 p.m. Somewhere in the infrastructure of Apple’s mobile ecosystem, something has broken. Last year, iPhone and iPad users upgraded in droves to the company’s new...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Books by Friends
I give the "by friends" disclosure just for the record. I mention these books because, whether or not I'd known their authors, I would think they deserved attention. And I'll mention each as tersely as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
American Apartments Came From Paris
The urban idea of stacking people's homes one on top of the other is very old: The Romans thought of it; so did the Egyptians. In European cities and in New York, by the early 1800s, the constraints of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Imminent Death of the Internet Troll
A new survey on online harassment confirms what many people already know: The Internet can be a mean, hateful, and frightening place—especially for young women. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,849...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Benedict Got Cumberbatched: A History of Surnames
Imagine a world without surnames. I would be Megan, just Megan—one among many, many thousands of other Megans—instead of Megan Garber, one among a handful. Together, we would be unable to delight...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Elusive 'Bilingual' Molecule
In 1953, Crick and Watson (with some help from Rosalind Franklin) determined the structure of DNA. But despite knowing what the molecule looked like (a double helix) and what it did (encode for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Behold, the Soundtrack of Space
Technically, there is no sound in space: What we think of as sound is a series of vibrations in the air; and there is, to the ongoing frustration of NASA and Hollywood producers, no air beyond Earth's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Technical Constraints That Made Abbey Road So Good
On a cool, English Sunday afternoon, there was a crowd loitering on the sidewalks of this wealthy London neighborhood called St. John’s Wood. Some people were waiting to use the zebra crosswalk made...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watching Friends Recover From Addiction on Facebook
Through likes and comments, I’ve watched my hometown of Perry, Ohio, disappear into and come back from heroin addiction. The U.S. is facing a massive heroin epidemic, and nowhere is it more evident...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why You Shouldn't Get Your Hopes Up for the Self-Driving Car (California...
Over the weekend, in No. 13 from the Ulysses-scale saga* of California's plan to build a north-south High-Speed Rail (HSR) system, a reader from the Silicon Valley tech industry said that his state...
View Article