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Submarines From Scratch 18 Feb 2010 | 11:15 am
I'm thinking about a new career in amateur sub-building. Here's 34-year-old Tao Xinglai showing that anyone can do it, really. All it takes is a little ingenuity and scrap metal: Total budget? $4,400...
Post-Apocalyptic Hard Drives 18 Feb 2010 | 10:36 am
Suppose human civilization collapses one day. That's not such a zany notion—lots of past civilizations have collapsed. Maybe there's nuclear war, or giraffe flu, or maybe the Yellowstone supervolcano ...
I Don't Respond Well To Mellow 17 Feb 2010 | 11:38 am
Annie Hall is pretty much a perfect film. But as David Kimmel describes in I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes at the Great Romantic Comedies, it didn't start out that way. The original ver...
Lost In Translation 17 Feb 2010 | 10:12 am
There are plenty of English-language writers who sell a lot of books overseas—it's not uncommon for even lesser-known American authors to get their novels translated into multiple languages. But the r...
Heavy Toonage 30 Jan 2010 | 01:20 pm
Due to a series of increasingly frivolous Google searches, I just spent half an hour reading up on the history of Sunday-morning cartoons in the 1980s. (This all started with a legitimate work-related...
Gruesome Tongue Twisters 29 Jan 2010 | 05:25 pm
What's the world's most throat-chokingly difficult language? Here's a worthy contender: On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonan...
Our Nerdiest President 29 Jan 2010 | 12:34 pm
Huh, I had no idea that James A. Garfield was credited with discovering a novel proof for the Pythagorean Theorem (a clever one, too, involving trapezoids). He did this back in 1876, before he became ...
Exporting Depression 29 Jan 2010 | 11:54 am
Ethan Watters has a fascinating New Scientist report on how U.S. drug companies are basically "exporting" Western notions of mental illness to other countries, in order to create new markets for their...
Dos And Don'ts For Running A Host Club 28 Jan 2010 | 01:01 pm
The Kabukicho district in Tokyo is famous for, among other sleazy wonders, its host and hostess clubs. The idea here is simple enough: In a hostess club, you have paid female employees who chat with m...
How Many Moves Ahead? 28 Jan 2010 | 04:10 am
Famous chess players often get asked the same thing by reporters: "How many moves can you see ahead?" The query crept up, inevitable as the sunrise, in Time's interview with 19-year-old Magnus Carlsen...
