Results day has a time-worn rhythm, full of annual tropes: local newspaper pictures of envelope-clutching girls jumping in the air in threes and fours, columnists complaining that exams have gotten far too easy, and the same five or six celebrities posting worthy Twitter threads about why exam results don’t matter because everything worked out alright…
Gone are the simple days when we fought off armies of clunky and clearly fake bots trying to sway our votes. Now we face sophisticated and organic-seeming campaigns driven by people with an even more keen understanding of how to manipulate the flow of information. Check your feed: Partisan, paid nanoinfluencers may be your friends…
Last weekend, during and in the aftermath of a contentious presidential election, the country of Belarus effectively shut off access to most of the internet for its 9.5 million citizens. It’s a tactic that has become increasingly popular among authoritarian regimes, whether it’s a total blackout like Belarus’ or more targeted censorship of specific apps…
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Last summer, a monstrous heat wave descended on the United States. It claimed four lives in Maryland, one in Arizona, and one in Arkansas. Temperatures skyrocketed, with heat indexes—the measure of how hot it feels outside—reaching between 100 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit…
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.The window air conditioner in my apartment is loud. Its droning hum is speckled with the chattering of plastic components vibrating, like teeth on a freezing cold day. The baffles—those plastic wings that stretch out to the window frame to…
In the decade since the hacker Barnaby Jack famously made an ATM spit out cash on stage during the 2010 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, so-called jackpotting has become a popular criminal pastime, with heists netting tens of millions of dollars around the world. And over time, attackers have become increasingly sophisticated in…
Yet another week in quarantine. The cats have taken over. I (Jess Grey) am no longer in charge of anything but keeping them fed. They pay the bills, they even wrote this piece. OK, they didn’t. But it’d be cool if they did—with their little paws, just tick-tacking away on my keyboard. Anyway, the coronavirus…
At 8:30 am on Monday, Mark Licht was sitting in his home outside of Ames, Iowa, on a conference call with other agronomists and meteorologists from around the state. Iowa had been having a dry spell, the western half of the state stricken with severe drought. What farmers needed was a big storm, thought Licht,…
Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is too long, the Rankin/Bass cartoon from the 1970s is too short. The proper length is somewhere in between. Photograph: Warner Bros/Everett CollectionThe Rankin/Bass cartoon The Hobbit, released in 1977, features beautiful artwork, catchy music, and great acting. As a child of the…
NEW YORK/BENGALURU – A YouTube alert interrupted Jack Erricker’s schoolwork on Friday morning as he and kids all over the world woke up to the news that their favorite game, Fortnite, had been taken down from Apple’s Store and Google Play store.“It’s basically the only game I play,” said Erricker, an 11-year-old in Bengaluru, India,…
