Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials...
Saturday, August 31, 2013
How A Small Music Agency Is Helping Indie Artists Sell Out
By Erin Griffith On August 22, 2013 It used to be that fans would cringe if they heard a band’s song in a commercial. Selling out, or compromising one’s precious art for crass commercialism, was incredibly un-rock and roll. (Spinal Tap’s Rock’n'Rolls comes to mind.) And then the music industry died,...
Friday, August 30, 2013
What Happens When You Mash Up 3D Printing And Amazon's Same-Day Delivery?
They say waiting to get something is often more enjoyable than actually getting it. That’s not how Jeff Bezos sees it. In the last few years, the Amazon.com founder has been in relentless pursuit of a lag-less future, one where you barely have enough time to utter the word “shipping†before your package arrives. In this...
Cancer’s Primeval Power And Murderous Purpose
It was 2010 and I was driving through the badlands of northwest Colorado, far from the cool, green Rocky Mountains. This was the land where the oldest known example of cancer had been found: inside of a bone of a Jurassic Age dinosaur. About 150 million years ago, the malignant growth had eaten away at the beast. It died and was buried under the layered debris of the ages. But a fragment...
Thursday, August 29, 2013
The Billionaire Who Controls Your Beer, Your Condiments And Your Whopper
After they sold H.J. Heinz to Warren Buffett and a bunch of Brazilians in June, the ketchup manufacturer’s outgoing board of directors met for dinner at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Twenty-three billion dollars had just changed hands. The takeover price, at $72.50 a share, was almost 20...
How A Near-Death Experience In The Jungle Inspired A Blockbuster Zombie Game
Photo: Antonin Kratochvil/VII
Dean Hall was close to death in the jungles of Brunei. It was December 2010 and the officer cadet in the New Zealand army was alone on a survival-training mission. Given only two days’ worth of food for 20 days, he supplemented his diet with raw fish and ferns. He...
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