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Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man: Mel Brooks in His 90s
The comic has stormed though 75 years of show business; he remains prodigal in expression, memory, and imagination.
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The Nastiest Feud in Science
A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.
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A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers
Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
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I Am a Man With Down Syndrome and My Life Is Worth Living
Congressional testimony that illuminates what a developmental disability means—and doesn’t mean.
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A Cultural Leap at the Dawn of Humanity
New finds from Kenya suggest that humans used long-distance trade networks, sophisticated tools, and symbolic pigments right from the dawn of our species.
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The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future
Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm.
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The Meaninglessness of the Stock Market Index in a Digital World
It’s not a good snapshot of the economy, which is incomprehensible anyway, and we now have far more information to understand the country’s companies.
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Is Franz Kafka Overrated?
Critics have long tended to see him as a modernist master on par with Joyce, Proust, and Picasso. Let's reconsider that.
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Even More Evidence for the Link Between Alzheimer’s and Herpes
Several new studies have rejuvenated a long-dismissed idea that links the common brain disease to the viral infections.
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Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver.
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The Cheapest Generation
Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy. There is also a discussion on YCombinator's Hacker News about the article.
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MIT Economist: Here's How Copyright Laws Impoverish Wikipedia
Using a little-known copyright rule and a trove of…
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China's Great Leap Backward
The country has become repressive in a way that it has not been since the Cultural Revolution. What does its darkening political climate—and growing belligerence—mean for the United States?
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Scientists Recover the Sounds of 19th-Century Music and Laughter
Computer analysis of a piece of foil reveals audio captured by a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
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A Design Lab Is Making Rituals for Secular People
What they are doing? Can something like that work? No understanding of internedepence, just gross causality, can't create effective rituals.
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Why Is the Golden Age of TV So Dark?
A new book explains the link between the rise of antihero protaganists and the unprecedented abundance of great TV (and what Dick Cheney has to do with it).
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Why Do So Many People on YouTube Sound the Same?
The attention-grabbing tricks of "YouTube voice".
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Why There Are Too Many Patents in America
Having just dismissed a high-profile patent suit between Apple and Motorola, one of our leading jurists discusses the problems plaguing America's intellectual property system.
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Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes)
Facebook's expectations about users' social lives can be very different from users' own.
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I Lived Alone in a Cabin in the Alaskan Wildneress
The simplest question became the most complicated: How would I fill a day?
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Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium
Millions of publications—not to mention spy documents—can be read on microfilm machines. But people still see these devices as outmoded and unappealing. An Object Lesson.
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Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline
A Harvard professor says his company should be able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, at industrial scales, by 2021.
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Imagining the Jellyfish Apocalypse
The stinging, gelatinous blobs could take over the world’s oceans.
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Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way
Whichever company’s vision wins out will shape the future of the economy.
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Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses
Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.
TheAtlantic
Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
An extended conversation with the legendary linguist.