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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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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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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The Shooting Star and The Model
HOMEWhen Oscar Pistorius—the South African “Blade Runner,” who overcame a double amputation to compete in the Olympics last year—shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on…
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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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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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Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in…
Uma Swaminathan tuned the television set in the living room of her ranch style home in the suburbs of East Brunswick, N.J. to CNBC. It was 9:00 a.m. on May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher…
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Laptop U
Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At…
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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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Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle…
Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as…
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In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will…
The third and final stage is to build applications on top of these connected objects. This means not just tying together the behavior of two or more objects—like the sprinkler and the moisture sensor—but creating complex…
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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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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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Some of My Best Friends Are Germs
I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on Marc
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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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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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Survivors
Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her…
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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 the Trailer Park Could Save Us All
The smooth streets of Pismo Dunes Senior Park on the Central Coast of California. (PHOTO: ARNALDO ABBA) Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park “Pismodise.” Park manager Louise…