On Tuesday, October 2 the lights in Sanaa went out.* The power cut in the Yemeni capital wasn’t particularly surprising. Yemen has been suffering rolling blackouts for years; a problem […]
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The first-ever study of climate change’s impact on wild coffee crops shows that Coffea arabica, prized for its genetic diversity, could be extinct within 70 years.
Who won big in last night’s election? Data. Cold, hard data and the analytical tools to interpret it. The Obama campaign won by leveraging unbelievably detailed information about voters, as […]
Now that a second Obama presidency is assured, the agency expects to reveal its progress towards fulfilling the administration’s space travel mandate.
Millions of people depend on the water for drinking and agriculture, but experts say that the presence of natural uranium and thorium poses serious long-term health risks.
For several weeks leading up to yesterday’s election the forecasters were at odds. While traditional polls and pundits predicted an election that was “too close to call,” as noted today […]
Earlier today an apparent US drone strike targeted and killed ‘Adnan al-Qadhi in the area of Sanhan, just south of Sanaa. I say apparent drone strike, because while there is […]
Oh, the swell of hope. The hope that the bipartisanship so critical to progress might somehow arise from the post-election ashes of a rancorous and divisive national election. The […]
Over at the Breakthrough, my latest Public Square column takes a look at the good and the bad of Nate Silver’s cultural celebrity and oracle status. Here’s how the column […]
There are a lot of nightmare scenarios when it comes to the Middle East. Some of these are already visible on the horizon as the New York Times outlines in […]
I was reading a 1937 essay in which the author made casual mention of the problem of “morganatic marriage.” I’d never heard this term before. I figured it might be […]
The same mindset that drives a person to have it all eventually stops them from having what they really want.
The devastation left by Hurricane Sandy has reignited a long-controversial discussion about whether to maintain artificial beaches, especially in light of global climate predictions and diminishing sand reserves.
NASA now has a site, Spot the Station, that lets you register to receive a text alert whenever the craft is passing over your location.
Who will you put your money on — Richard Brandson, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?
It all started with a review. When a reviewer of a 1957 painting exhibition by Jasper Johns compared one of his paintings to a readymade by Marcel Duchamp, Johns and […]
The president’s decisive 60+% electoral college victory can be contrasted, of course, with his very narrow popular vote margin. Our Constitution has the effect of magnifying his win, giving it […]
The 2012 election is officially over, and it was glorious. Barack Obama and the Democrats have delivered what one of our elder statesmen once referred to as “a thumping” to […]
NowThis News, an iOS app created by two former Huffington Post executives, brings the news to mobile users in segments lasting a minute or less.
Its owner, Google, is putting more of its attention (and cash) towards Web-focused networks that can develop premium content that will hold its users for longer periods of time, thereby allowing them to generate more ad revenue.
“Browsers,” a musical comedy that was originally developed at CBS, isn’t the first series to arrive at the company, but it would be the first to move into actual production.
I will do my level best not to turn this site into a constant stream of book promos and the like in my transparent attempt to sell copies – I’ll […]
Blurb, which until now focused only on books, will allow Adobe InDesign users to create custom-made magazines and brochures through its digital platform starting today.
Technology created by PredictGaze uses a combination of gaze detection and gesture and facial recognition to enable completely touch-free control.
Ali Wyne interviews Graham Allison, the author of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, a book that swiftly and significantly altered our understanding of how policy decisions are executed.
If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]
Today Foreign Policy published the first excerpt from The Last Refuge. The piece is largely drawn from Chapter 13 of the book, entitled Policy Shift: Here is the opening as […]
Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century metaphysician who remains “the central figure in modern philosophy,” has wrangled up a Twitter account from the ether and this morning tweeted an endorsement in today’s […]
This was indeed a choice election, if you consider the choice between consuming entertainment journalism or data-based journalism. Entertainment is fun, and math is hard. Math won.
When you enter the voting booth on Tuesday and pull a lever or jab a touchscreen for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, you will be registering a vote not only […]