Trillions of queries are posed to Google every year. Alongside the mundane searches for recipes and random trivia are private questions too mortifying to pose directly to another human. People come to Google with desires, fears, and curiosities they can’t discuss anywhere else, but still must know: does anyone else think this way?
Some women, after giving birth, choose to preserve their child’s placenta—the organ that connects a fetus to the wall of the uterus—and eat it. They eat this placenta raw in smoothies, or cooked in lasagna, or freeze-dried and placed in ingestible capsules.
Hi! Pardon my appearance—I’ve lost so much weight lately that these old jeans from college are the only ones that fit. How was your weekend? Ours was fine, I guess—we spent the entire time at Taylor’s all-star tournament. Between that, and Pat’s promotion, and McKinley’s coding academy—she just got moved up a level again—it feels like there’s never a free minute.
On the night of Sept. 19, 1961, Barney and Betty Hill were driving on a rural highway to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. By all accounts, the Hills were an exemplary couple: he a postman, she a social worker, active in their community and in the civil rights movement. On an isolated road snaking through the White Mountains, the couple later recounted, they saw a bright object that appeared to be following their car. They arrived home around 5 a.m., unable to account for two hours of the night but feeling that something terrible had happened to them.
Nicolas Cage (domestic terrorist Castor Troy) lies on a hospital bed, in a medically induced coma. John Travolta (FBI agent Sean Archer) stands nearby, contemplating something few people have: Should I put Nicolas Cage’s face… on my face?
Once you see the chicken in the church, you can’t unsee it. Same with the laughing desk chairs, or the puppy in the door, or the boat howling in terror.
If the project you’re working on needs and deserves your full attention, put your phone away. No, really. Not just face down. Not just in a bag or a pocket. Get up, set the phone down in a different room—on silent, or maybe even just turn the thing off—and return to your desk, secure in the knowledge that your limited cognitive capacity just grew a little bit.
An average of 37 children each year in the US die of overheating after being trapped in cars. In more than half of these cases, the children were unintentionally forgotten by parents, grandparents, or other caregivers who parked, locked the doors, and went about their day, oblivious to the fact that the child was still strapped into the carseat in the back.
At the intersection of chemical resistance, American entrepreneurialism, affluence, and parenting anxiety lies a particularly modern phenomenon: the professional delousing business.
Time with friends, colleagues, siblings, and children diminishes over the course of a lifetime. The older we get, the person we spend the most time with is the one we see in the mirror.
This post has been corrected.
Customs officials in Germany have seized 77,000 pounds of fidget spinners deemed unsafe for children’s use. It’s a move that many a teacher may have fantasized about in recent months while wresting one of the whirling, hand-held doodads from a child. A spokesperson from German customs administration said the confiscated toys had loose parts that could pose choking hazard and lacked instructions and other required information, according to the Associated Press.
Jeff Bezos—CEO and founder of Amazon.com, owner of the Washington Post, and the world’s second richest person—is crowdsourcing ideas for his next major venture: philanthropy.
US president Donald Trump’s famously short attention span means that people trying to get information to the president have to get creative.
Former attorney general Eric Holder’s report on Uber’s corporate culture has not been made public yet, but news reports in recent months preview some of the allegations that may be included: an allegedly discriminatory corporate culture, disregard of local regulations, sexually inappropriate internal communications, egregious mishandling of the private medical records of a woman raped by an Uber driver, and CEO Travis Kalanick’s snarling at a driver who questioned the company’s pricing structure.
A new train station opened last month in the British university town of Cambridge. In promotional materials for the new station, both the building’s architect and its operating company said the striking aluminum façade was inspired by the Game of Life, the famous mathematical model created by former Cambridge University professor John Conway in 1970.
The World Bank’s chief economist Paul Romer lost his managerial duties at the bank’s research arm late last month following a staff revolt against Romer’s efforts to improve the quality of writing in the group’s publications.
Officials from the US National Park Service are draining the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, after a parasite in the water killed 80 ducklings in recent weeks.
Ask people to imagine what they’d say if they knew they were dying and most would have words of sadness, fear, and regret. But new psychological research bolsters what chaplains, hospice workers, and others who spend a lot of time in the company of those approaching the end of life have long known: the process of dying is a complicated one, with room for moments of profundity and light alongside fear and darkness.
“How screwed am I?” asked a recent user on Reddit, before sharing a mortifying story. On the first day as a junior software developer at a first salaried job out of college, his or her copy-and-paste error inadvertently erased all data from the company’s production database.
On May 26, students and faculty at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics unveiled what’s believed to be the world’s first monument to anonymous peer reviewers. The cube-shaped statue started out as a lump of useless concrete left on the university grounds. HSE sociologist Igor Chirikov launched a Kickstarter effort that raised $2,500 to chisel and polish the block into a shrine to the people Chirikov called the “invisible heroes of science.”
Bank robberies are great case studies for the economics of crime. They’re premeditated affairs in which a perpetrator has evaluated (consciously or not) the rationality of proceeding. The gains are quantifiable. They also come with a built-in dilemma: every minute a robber stays in the bank increases both the haul and the chance of getting caught.
Yes, there is a lot to worry about. There’s the threat of nuclear warfare and insecurity about climate change and the fact that the US nuclear defense system is based on islands threatened by rising sea levels.
Costco, the US-based chain of warehouse stores, opened its first branch in Iceland on May 23. This year.
