The scariest scene in John Carpenter's original 1978 Halloween is completely bloodless. It takes place at night, on a patch of lawn in the perfectly leafy suburb of Haddonfield, Illinois. Just a few moments earlier, the masked babysitter-stalker Michael Myers had been stabbed, shot, and sent falling to the ground—and to his ostensible death. Seconds […]
You have instant communication, on-demand entertainment, and dial-up transportation—why should you have to wait nine months to see what kind of baby you’re going to have? Now there’s an app for that. In a modern-day reboot of Lindsay Bluth’s “Mommy What Will I Look Like” business venture, Denver-based startup HumanCode has introduced BabyGlimpse. It’s a […]
He was ours. And because he was ours I told myself I wouldn't watch it. I told myself that there was a chamber somewhere deep within, somewhere perhaps beyond reason and logic, that Michael Jackson inhabited. That I wanted to protect that place, that altar. That I needed to protect it. For myself. Because isn't […]
The best fantasy debut of 2018 has a problem. It was also the best fantasy debut of 2009. And 2007. And 1997, 1985, 1982, and 1968. Authors change; the story stays the same. In the darkness a child is born. The child suffers, but he has mysterious power. Posthaste, destiny leads the child to the […]
In the arid, sun-soaked northwest corner of Australia, along the Tropic of Capricorn, the oldest face of Earth is exposed to the sky. Drive through the northern outback for a while, south of Port Hedlund on the coast, and you will come upon hills softened by time. They are part of a region called the […]
Locked away beneath the surface of Mars are vast quantities of water ice. But the properties of that ice—how pure it is, how deep it goes, what shape it takes—remain a mystery to planetary geologists. Those things matter to mission planners, too: Future visitors to Mars, be they short-term sojourners or long-term settlers, will need […]
Fire doesn’t heed history. It doesn’t care about posterity or culture or memory. Fire consumes everything and anything, even if that thing is the last of its kind. On Sunday night, it came for the National Museum of Brazil, burning for six hours and leaving behind ashes where there had been dinosaur fossils, the oldest […]
Some time around the mid-aughts, folks in the weed industry began to notice a shift in the market. Pot smokers were smoking less, and dabbing more—heating the plant’s oily extracts to inhale high concentrations of hallmark marijuana molecules like THC. Extracts, which go by names including shatter, batter, wax, dabs, and honey, weren't just stronger […]
Another week, another seven days so full of events that it’s difficult to remember all that’s happened. That’s especially true on a week that saw another mass shooting, as if everyone needed a reminder of what that felt like. I mean, we were just a week out from the last one, so perhaps some people […]
In the early Space Age, the people who sent up satellites could operate under what's known as "big sky" theory. Space is so vast, so spacious, that we could never possibly use it all up. History, however, has repeatedly shown that whenever we think something is too abundant for humans to deplete, we're wrong. And […]