Nikhil Sonnad

A video released over the weekend in China has garnered well over 20 million views on video sharing site YouKu, and close to 5 million on Tencent Video. What’s more, it hasn’t yet been banned. Usually that would describe content like celebrity gossip or comical animals, but this is Under the Dome (link in Chinese), a meticulously researched documentary on the causes and implications of the country’s pollution crisis.

Government policies in the US are often characterized by the silliness of their acronyms, like the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) or PATRIOT (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) acts. In China, the favored ridiculous convention is enumeration.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

Eight films are vying for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. But have past winners actually been the “best” films of their respective years, or just the most popular?

It’s the end of an era for RadioShack.

Like many Latin American politicians, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is an avid Twitter user. So what inspirational message did she send to her 3.5 million followers, just a few hours ago during an important trip to China, that quickly garnered thousands of retweets?

As human populations disperse, the separation leads to changes both in genes and in language. So if we look at human DNA and languages over time, we should find that they differ along similar geographic lines.

“Do you work for the Communist Party? Do you know the size limit for your office at work?”

Languages are as diverse as the people who speak them. But to foreign ears, they can be hard to tell apart.

#blacklivesmatter is word of the year.

The US economy created 252,000 new jobs in December, slightly higher than expected. Unemployment fell to 5.6%.

Wikipedia is the internet’s first stop for fast familiarization. Quartz has analyzed English-language Wikipedia data from 2014 to find out how the things people want to learn about change day to day. The interactive graphic below shows the top-viewed page for every day of last year.

“It seems safe to report that dude has supplanted totally as the word most often uttered by American youth,” claimed Richard Hill in his 1994 paper on the history of the word “dude.”

“NOTICE: We request every internet commenter carry out the following task today,” begins an email from the supervisor.

Here’s something every tech entrepreneur ought to know: “Only the wearer of the shoes knows if they fit or not.”

Daniel Cloud is an unlikely philosopher. He is a partner at Euphrates, a hedge fund based in Iraq, and was among the first wave of Westerners to invest in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that, he was an equity analyst in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and China.

The US economy added 321,000 jobs in November, blowing out expectations. The unemployment rate remained at 5.8%. We live-charted the report below.

Which country would you say is entering a ”marijuana era”? Maybe Uruguay, which recently legalized the drug? Perhaps the United States, where the state of Colorado is offering holiday discounts on legal weed.

Some novels are known for their creative plots and compelling characters. And then there is Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel written in 1939 by American author Ernest Vincent Wright. It’s mainly known for having been written without “e,” the most common letter in the English language.

The goal of Interpol’s “Operation Infra-Red” is to “locate and arrest serious long-term international fugitives.” That probably brings to mind crimes like mass murder, drug trafficking, and money laundering—not the illegal trade in wildlife.

A new business school now sits atop Bloomberg Businessweek’s biennial ranking of American MBA factories. Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business leapt to the number one position on the list, up from sixth place in 2012.

The internet is positively amazeballs. But the unedited, character-limited way we communicate on the web and mobile is often blamed for ruining the purity of language, English or otherwise. What hope is there for future literary greats when wacky internet terms like “adorbs“ and “LOL” make it into the most revered dictionaries? Is the internet destroying the foundations of language?

The US economy added 214,000 jobs in October. The unemployment rate fell to 5.8%, staying below the 6% mark for a second consecutive month. Here’s the breakdown of employment status for all Americans age 16 and above: