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Visiting 1985 With the Ghost of Christmas Past
This article is part of an occasional series that revisits moments in American history through the lens of old magazines. Previous entries include "Money, Power, and College Sports in 1905 America," "A...
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A Website for Ebenezer Scrooge
He ran to the window, opened it, and put out his head. “What’s today?” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes. We may stop the story here. For seven years, users have turned to...
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Who Patented 'My Favorite Things'?
“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” sings Maria von Trapp to her future step-children in The Sound of Music. It’s a lovely song whether performed by Trane or Tony Bennett, and one we now...
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The Rise and Fall of the American Kiddie Ride
On a recent Sunday afternoon in my neighborhood in Queens, I stopped to watch a mother, father, and their young child. The parents, in church suits with the mildly stoned look of the truly exhausted,...
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The Actual Future Is So Much Cooler Than Back to the Future II Predicted
Enough with the flying cars and Hoverboards already. There's way more to the future than a few cool ways to zip from one place to the next. I know this because the future, finally, is upon us. Yes,...
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Inside a Massive Electronics Graveyard
Agbogbloshie is a vast, scorched field, right in the middle of Accra, Ghana, dotted with rusting hulks and heaps of scrap. Hundreds of people work here in what looks like hell: smashing, burning,...
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The Politics of Drinking Water
On January 9, 2014, American Water warned 300,000 customers in and around Charleston, West Virginia, that local tap water was no longer safe. Ten thousand gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol...
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Say Goodbye to 2014 With These Weird Internet Clocks
The Internet is the ultimate time-waster. It's where we can unwittingly spend hours scrolling through Twitter, watching "related" videos on YouTube, or stalking checking up on dozens of old high-school...
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Americans Still Prefer Landlines at Work
At a time when at least one-third of American households have dropped landlines altogether, old-school phones are still "very important" to Americans at work. That's according to a new survey from the...
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The Death of 'Bae'
The International House of Pancakes set itself apart among chain restaurants this September when it tweeted, “Pancakes. Errybody got time fo’ dat.” But the American starch dispensary—whose claims to...
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The Artist Lives
Something is changing in the arts—now there’s a thesis we can all get behind. Perhaps you believe that video games will be the defining art form of the 21st century. Or maybe the widespread propagation...
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Getting Animals Drunk for Science
Feed a songbird enough spiked punch and it will begin to slur its song. We know this because scientists recently got some zebra finches drunk. The zebra finch was of particular interest to researchers...
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The Trouble With Sweeping Questions About the Internet
“Can the cellphone help end global poverty?” “Can Facebook promote world peace?” “Can the Internet defeat Putin?” Those are headlines from some recent articles, and the questions they pose are loaded...
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Where Design Choices and Civil Rights Overlap
User experience, that now ubiquitous phrase, is at the core of design culture in the Internet age. Developers obsess over the way lines flow across a webpage, how many taps of a screen it will take to...
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A Hacker's Hit List of American Infrastructure
On Friday, December 19, the FBI officially named North Korea as the party responsible for a cyber attack and email theft against Sony Pictures. The Sony hack saw many studio executives’s sensitive and...
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Chickenhawk Response No. 8: The Economic Realities (and Unrealities) of a...
The story so far: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and for previous reader responses see No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No....
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We Still Don't Know Who Hacked Sony
If anything should disturb you about the Sony hacking incidents and subsequent denial-of-service attack against North Korea, it’s that we still don’t know who’s behind any of it. The FBI said in...
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Mark Zuckerberg's Book Club Could Be (Much) Bigger Than It Looks
Over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited Facebook users to join him in his New Year's resolution to read a new book every other week. First up: The End of Power by Moisés Naím (an...
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The Secrets of the Toxic Disco Clam
The mantis shrimp is the undisputed lightweight champion of the sea. With a punch as fast as a .22 caliber bullet, the crustacean terrorizes small prey along the ocean floor. But now, an unexpected...
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A Visit to the Corporate-Industrial Robotics Competition for Teenagers
Sometimes I think of school as an overlapping set of calendars. Students come in and out of eras: testing season, soccer season, marching-band season. Semesters and trimesters overlap and interfere....
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