The Internet's Own Monster

Every generation creates its own monsters. Folk tales tell of witches and wyrms in the woods, my TV-infused generation feared Jaws in lakes and Bloody Mary in the mirror. This generation gets its monsters from the Internet. Slenderman is a pure product of electronic media. He appears in places...

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Why Women Aren't People (But Corporations Are)

Earlier today, five men agreed that closely held corporations with anti-birth control religious beliefs cannot be required to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees. Corporations are people, my friend. Women? Not so much.The decision to declare women Unpeople was a narrow one; the five men agreed that corporations (people) shouldn't...

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The Unraveling Of An American Life

“You’re my husband. I’m supposed to just let go?” Madina Salaty whose husband is being deported LAWRENCE, KAN.â€"Each ordinary moment now seemed worthy of preservation, so Madina Salaty, 45, turned on her cellphone camera and hit record. “Four days left,” she said, her voice and the video both shaky as her husband leashed the dog and headed toward their front door....

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Can Path Come Back From The Dead?

In 2012, Dave Morin was a tech industry celebrity. His start-up firm, Path, was nearing the top of the iTunes App Store charts. Britney Spears and other A-listers occasionally stopped by his company’s San Francisco office in a black-glassed business tower in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. Outside the office, Mr. Morin, a slim 33-year-old who often wears a peacoat, even indoors, was spending his weekends skiing...

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100 Years Later, Paper Admits It Blew Coverage Of Outbreak Of WWI

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie moments before they were assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Photograph: Popperfoto "It is not to be supposed," wrote a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian analysing the significance of the assassination 100 years ago on Saturday, "that the death of the...

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Astro-Matic Baseball

The meeting drew to a close at 11:40 a.m. “All right, it’s a good group,” Luhnow said to his 39-man brain trust. “Flip a coin now, or later?” “If we take one of the high school pitchers, we have to be really [convinced] that this guy is the guy, and that’s not real easy to settle on,” Elias said later. “Especially when you’ve got other good options.” The Astros’ decision engine had one...

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America’s Floating Prisons

The U.S. Navy has taken on a curious new counterterrorism role. The USS San Antonio (James DeAngio/U.S. Navy) Right now, a suspected terrorist is sitting...

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The Worst Party In Asia

KOH PHANGAN, Thailandâ€" “HELLOOO, FULL MOON PARTY!” the touts holler. Welcome to Koh Phangan… I guess. The host of tuk-tuk drivers and solicitors who await the tourist ferry-load arriving every hour make no mention of the actual island. It’s all about the party. Or rather, parties. Every night. The next greeting...

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Inside George W. Bush’s Closet

“It was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so,...

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How The Disney Animated Film 'Frozen' Took Over The World

June 25, 2014Posted by Maria Konnikova Earlier this month, BabyCentre, one of the largest Web sites that track baby names globally, released its mid-year report on the top hundred names of 2014 in the U.K. Usually, the popularity of names stays roughly the same from one year to the next. But, this year, a name jumped two hundred and...

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How Often Men Think About Sex

It's a stat that gets bounced around as e-mail-forward wisdom: men think about sex every seven seconds. Even when the idea lacks this mythical specificity and grandiosity (that's 7,200 times a day!), the idea that men think about sex basically all the time is widespread. And so, it is possible to attach all kinds of bogus statistics to...

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