SpaceX has won its first contract to launch a classified military satellite on its Falcon Heavy rocket, beating out rival United Launch Alliance, a joint…
All the US airlines that refused to fly separated immigrant children—and the ones that did not
Airlines are among the most visible enterprises doing business with the US government as it carries out immigration policies. This week, major US carriers issued…
The most elite UK boarding school built a startup to teach kids to be assertive and persuasive
At Eton College, Britain’s most famous boarding school, boys wear tailcoats to class each day. An unusually high number of Britain’s prime ministers have graduated…
MoviePass is going to start charging more for popular movies next month
As if seeing a popular movie with MoviePass—where you can’t reserve tickets in advance—wasn’t stressful enough, it’s about to get more expensive, too. The movie-ticket…
Trump wants to merge the US education and labor departments. It isn’t a terrible idea
For decades, Republicans have attempted, and failed, to abolish the US Department of Education. Former president Ronald Reagan was the first to try to take…
Immigrants are changing the way native Kansans speak English
The town of Liberal, population 20,000, lies on the southern edge of Kansas, right where your thumb would be if you grabbed Oklahoma by its…
Jacinda Ardern just became the first world leader to give birth in office in almost 30 years
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, gave birth to a girl today (June 21), joining a tiny club of two for world leaders who gave…
China has banned ads suggesting alcohol can help women be less shy about sex
In one ad, a nervous woman in a cafe drinks a few glasses of a carbonated beverage and works up the courage to confess her…
Microsoft is deploying what could become one of the biggest enterprise blockchains
Even as blockchain mania is in some cases being replaced by blockchain skepticism, projects using the distributed ledger technology are still being rolled out. One…
The world will finally have to confront its massive plastic problem now that China won’t handle it
Since the 1950s, when the world was first introduced to the flexible, durable wonder of plastic, 8.3 billion metric tons of it has been…
Trump made the bizarre claim that people are smuggling American shoes into Canada
Donald Trump delivered a speech to the National Federation of Independent Businesses yesterday (June 19) that included a claim which left many listeners confused. His…
The unseen hand of China in Africa’s largest economy
Sometimes a throwaway sentence is more illuminating than it ought to be. A line in an article in Roads & Kingdoms in January about the…
A Facebook fundraiser raised nearly $5 million to reunite immigrant children with their parents
Facebook’s built-in fundraising platform can be a powerful tool for nonprofits, especially when combined with a hot-button issue. Over four days, a fundraiser set up…
Is it fair to call the US’s migrant child detention centers “concentration camps”?
As furor grows in the United States over a new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all illegal immigrants and separating them from their children, immigrant…
This could be the first emissions-reductions project (inadvertently) supported by Trump
Jackson Hole, Wyoming Donald Trump is not interested in cutting carbon emissions. Apart from pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement, president Trump…
Viruses love what we’ve done with the planet
Washington, DC Humans like to think of themselves as the dominant force of life on the planet, but stepping into the Outbreak: Epidemics in a…
The inside story of how AI got good enough to dominate Silicon Valley
Alex Krizhevsky didn’t get into the AI business to change the course of history. Krizhevsky, born in Ukraine but raised in Canada, was just looking…
Some of Startup India’s poster children say they never even signed up
India is home to over 20,000 startups, but few are even aware of the benefits of the government’s ambitious Startup India programme. On Jan. 16,…
