Since its founding in 2006, it has been difficult to separate Twitter the platform from the 140-character limit that defines it. At its inception, blogs were the norm, and the idea of a service that deliberately compressed writing so that it could fit in a single SMS text seemed both absurd and cont
Ben Carson on Wednesday responded to a question about climate change with a long diatribe about the planet, science, evolution, and even wondered aloud where gravity comes from."You don't believe in evolution or climate change
Jeb Bush is height vain. He is vain about his height. But like so many people captivated by their own beauty, it’s not quite enough for Jeb to tower over more than 95 percent of American males. Behind the height b
When New Yorker journalist Alec Wilkinson approached me in June for an interview about Kenneth Goldsmith, I told him that I wasn’t interested in being mentioned as one of Goldsmith’s many naysayers. Last March, after Goldsmith read a slightly altered version of Michael Brown’s autopsy
An estimated two million children are being homeschooled in the United States. Scholars studying homeschooling often talk about the
Last year, Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything laid bare the capitalist economic system’s dependence on environmental devastation. We can’t fight climate change until we properly understand capitalism’s culpability, she argued. And with her characteristic brand of activist-or
Ask most Republicans about Benghazi and they’ll pay lip service to the September 11, 2012 attacks in Libya that killed four Americans. But in an an unprompted defense of his party’s record in Congress, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—the odds-on favorite to replace John Boehner as speaker
Midway through Taxi, the driver of the titular vehicle, our protagonist of sorts, pulls up to a middle school to pick up his precocious, bright-eyed niece. She complains, in that manner kids have where you can practically see them forgetting their words even before they've spoken, that he's
On June 14, 1952, a former U.S. navy pilot named John “Buz” Sawyer received a late night phone call from his boss, a Frontier Oil executive named Wright. “Sawyer,” Wright said, “You’re just the fellow we need to handle a little job in Iran.” The job, which involved spraying “a potent
On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed a ground-breaking rule requiring industry-wide monitoring of emissions at petroleum refineries. The new regulations, which the agency says will reduce pollution by 5,200 tons per year and lower cancer risk for 1.4 million people, mark a tu
The twenty-first century vanity museum seems to be everywhere. The Broad Museum, which opened recently in Los Angeles, is only the latest incarnation of a phenomenon that includes Walmart scion Alice Walton’s
