Nikhil Sonnad

Hurricane Harvey, the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States in over a decade, breached the Texas coastline last night (Aug. 25) around 10pm, according to the Weather Channel. It made landfall as a category 4 hurricane—the first category 3 or higher storm in the US to do so since hurricane Wilma in 2005—with winds reaching 130mph. Since making its way onto land, Harvey has weakened to a category 1.

Every year for the past two decades, artists, revelers, weirdos (and lately billionaires) have descended on a desert in middle-of-nowhere Nevada for the festival known as Burning Man. It is a “culture of possibility,” a “laboratory” structured around 10 “principles,” including “decommodification” and “immediacy.” It has been called Davos without clothes.

This chart, created by a Reddit user, has been going around after the Great American Eclipse.

Steve Bannon, the White House’s chief strategist, has left the Trump administration that he helped put into power, after losing long-running feuds with the president’s economic and security advisors. ”We are grateful for his service,” said the White House press secretary in a statement, “and wish him the best.”

There are two Americas, we’ve been told.

Amazon is buying Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. More than just a store with organic shampoos and obscure fruits, Whole Foods is a distribution network through which Amazon can now reach millions of customers—particularly the high-income, selective shoppers who are likely to live near the stores.

Let’s do a quick exercise. Are you ready? Draw a circle in the box below. Don’t think too hard!

The United States Congress has given us many terrible acronyms in the form of “clever” names for bills. There is the JOBS Act (“Jumpstart Our Business Startups”), the STALKERS Act (“Simplifying The Ambiguous Law, Keeping Everyone Reliably Safe Act”), and of course the STOP SMUT Act (“Special Taxation On Pornographic Services and Marketing Using Telephones Act”).

Last year we analyzed the effect that the Star Wars franchise has had on the names of American children. The number of Lukes, Leias, and even Darths rose after the first film, A New Hope, came out in 1977.

The Donald J. Trump administration is very concerned with efficiency. That’s why they’re cutting waste, eliminating regulations, and—the ultimate efficiency hack—tapping senior adviser Jared Kushner to full-on Disrupt Government.

Bengaluru, India

Following his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump made a shocking admission of ignorance to the Wall Street Journal, on the subject of China and North Korea: “After listening [to Xi] for 10 minutes I realized that…it’s not so easy.” Trump has been called out for having his views on such an important geopolitical issue shift dramatically in a matter of minutes. He also may not know who rules North Korea.

Wikipedia is a lot more than its most common use as a repository of basic information about famous people, historical events, and obscure terms. Its editors and writers must attempt to answer questions that have confounded history’s greatest philosophers, like “What is ‘happiness,” all while accounting for input from the entire world.

In China, you can use WeChat for just about everything—sending messages, transferring money, ordering a taxi, reading the news, even doing your laundry. But there is one thing that WeChat won’t let you do: discuss politically sensitive topics in a group.

The United States is set to prohibit passengers traveling on 56 routes to the US from the Middle East and North Africa from bringing devices larger than a smartphone on board. That’s why Royal Jordanian Airlines is offering some advice on how travelers can spend their time on a 12-hour flight with no laptops or tablets:

Facebook has started deploying new weapons in its battle against fake news.

US secretary of state Rex Tillerson met today (March 19) with China’s president Xi Jinping, which is the highest-level meeting between the Trump administration and Beijing to date. It is a significant moment in the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, one that has been tense (paywall) since Donald Trump took over the White House.

What does Donald Trump want for America? His supporters don’t know. His party doesn’t know. Even he doesn’t know.

Hi Mr. Zuckerberg, this is Bradley from Campaign Associates, the firm your team hired to help you look into a presidential run. We’ve been working hard on making Zuckerberg 2020 a reality.

Every year, various countries with large Chinese-speaking populations vote to select a “Chinese character of the year.” Here are the words chosen to represent 2016:

The electoral college, usually an obscure quirk of the US political system, has drawn new scrutiny this year.

The data for these maps are drawn from billions of tweets collected by geographer Diansheng Guo in 2014. Jack Grieve, a forensic linguist at Aston University in the United Kingdom, along with Andreas Nini of the University of Manchester, identified the top 100,000 words used in these tweets and how often they are used in every county in the continental United States, based on location data from Twitter.

US president-elect Donald Trump held a meeting today with various Silicon Valley luminaries.