Less than 24 hours before I arrive at HBO’s offices in midtown Manhattan on an early April morning, Saheed Vassell is fatally gunned down by police in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood weathering the cruel agony of gentrification. Vassell’s death was preceded by that of Stephon Clark on March 18 in Sacramento, and of Decynthia […]
It's still near the beginning of the semester for most introductory physics courses—so it's not too late to give some physics advice. I know it might be hard to believe—at least it is for me—but I have been a physics educator in one form or another for over 20 years. In all that time, I […]
Recently, I was hungry. So I told the Whole Foods chatbot what I had in my fridge, and it revealed that a bacon, lettuce, and heirloom tomato sandwich was mine for the making. Yum. Then, out of boredom, I booted up the movie-recommendation bot And Chill, which suggested I watch Jake Gyllenhaal repeatedly relive the […]
The baby was still in diapers when the first blister appeared, ballooning red and angry from his pale, newborn skin. Soon, they became a regular feature on the map of his body, along with deep creases in his face when he howled out in pain. A doctor told the parents his LAMB3 gene had a […]
Kratos, the star of the God of War series of action games, is a bad man. Devised as an ersatz Achilles edgy enough for gaming in the mid-00s, all anger and very little pathos, the one-time god and long-time god-killer is one of the biggest dicks in the medium. He had a family, once; he […]
On YouTube, NBA all-star Blake Griffin is his own comedic genre. A cursory search for his funniest moments generates 271,000 results, an aggregate of humor and oddball spirit that includes videos like “Blake Griffin Does Stand Up Comedy – Actually FUNNY!” “Chris Paul Says D*ck, Blake Griffin Cracks Up,” and “Top 10 Blake Griffin Funny […]
In Gerald Grant’s line of work, there isn’t such a thing as an “average” patient. As a chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center, the children that come into his operating room are unique, each requiring a complex surgical procedure tailored to the architecture of a young brain. But that doesn’t mean he […]
As the second season of Westworld approaches its end, the world is closing in on the Man in Black. A philanthropic family man in real life and a model of depravity within Westworld, he had built a wall to separate his two selves. But in Episode 9, the divide between those lives comes crashing down. […]
This year, government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are placing their bets on a warmer-than-average winter. In the East and southern two-thirds of the country, temperatures will be higher than normal, while Southern California, Texas, and Florida will be drier than usual. At first glance, this pattern looks a lot like the […]
In recent years, organizations have used hackathons to find code-enabled solutions for everything from the opioid crisis to gerrymandering. It's hard to imagine a field where a hack day hasn't been utilized to solve one problem or another. But tomorrow a group of budding entrepreneurs, developers, and technologists will be making hackathon history: participating in […]