Top Reads
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Revenge, ego, and the corruption of Wikipedia
In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern novelist with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the…
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First Australians
A finger across the throat and a glance seaward. That’s the signal. The two men grip their spears, hand-carved from stringybark trees, and walk barefoot over the red soil to the water’s edge. Then into the aluminum dinghy, engine…
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Crack Rock City
Hallie Bateman for The Morning News One afternoon, my friend Corine called to see if I felt like taking a walk. Corine was a Dutch photographer who’d been living in Detroit for nearly 10…
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Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking
Daniel Dennett: 'Often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.' Photograph: Peter Yang/August 1 USE YOUR MISTAKESWe have all heard the forlorn refrain:…
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Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start…
Dear Consumers: A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue. Sure,…
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How Exercise Affects Your Body (and How to Pick…
We all know that exercise is good for you, but when you understand why, it makes getting off the couch and into the gym a lot easier. Here’s an explanation of what happens when you work out,…
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Dirty Medicine - Fortune Features
By Katherine Eban 1. The Assignment FORTUNE -- On the morning of Aug. 18, 2004, Dinesh Thakur hurried to a hastily arranged meeting with his boss at the gleaming offices of Ranbaxy Laboratories in…
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Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros
Rajat Gupta, who was indicted in the largest insider trading case in United States history. Late one Friday morning, Rajat Gupta was rushing through security at
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Cult of Mac » Five Tricky, Advanced Ways To Save…
So thin, so light, so…easy to fill with cruft.Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in…
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The heartbreaking saga of Zhu Ling
By Kevin Morris on May 16, 2013 In a grainy, black-and-white video of her final performance, Zhu Ling sweeps across the stage in a black skirt and white blouse before taking a seat behind a guqin,…
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Drinking And Driving And Dying
October 20, 1987Jerry Jerome Brown Jr. comes along at a strange time in history: a time when humans willingly enter cages of glass and steel that move in such great numbers at such terrific speed that a subtle turn of the steering wheel can easily…
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Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity
[ 0 ] So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it. Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have…
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Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet to…
Weight loss is tricky business. Obviously what you eat has a huge impact on your health and body weight. But anyone who has ever tried to modify their diet for the sake of losing weight knows it…
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Caterpillar's Doug Oberhelman: Manufacturing's…
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-16/caterpillars-doug-oberhelman-manufacturings-mouthpiece Caterpillar’s (CAT) D 11 bulldozer, which costs about $2 million, is the size of a small studio…
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Statistical Formulas For Programmers
By Evan Miller DRAFT: May 19, 2013 Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower. Where most people see averages, you see confidence intervals. When someone says “7 is…
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How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled
The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin Penguin, 430 pp., $29.95 …
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How a Career Con Man Led a Federal Sting That…
For three months, the operation plodded along. Whitaker and the agents worked 10-hour days and blew through their budgets. Reich wasn’t satisfied. There are, and have long been, strong First Amendment protections for Internet service…
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Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman
William Seward Burroughs is not a talkative man. Once at a dinner he gazed down into a pair of stereo microphones trained to pick up his every munch and said, "I don't like talk and I don't like talkers. Like Ma Barker. …
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The Lethality of Loneliness
Sometime in the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sat down to write an essay about a subject that had been mostly overlooked by other psychoanalysts up to that point. Even Freud had only…
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How to Supercharge Your Router with DD-WRT
Few routers utilize their full potential out of the box because their firmware limits their functionality. Thanks to an open-source project called DD-WRT, you can unlock your router’s…