Longreads

When Gene Locks led Princeton against Columbia on Oct. 7, 1957, it took the Tigers quarterback only a few plays to discover “that the middle of the Columbia line was paper thin,”…

This weekend I’ll be at Science Online 2013 in North Carolina, moderating a panel with io9′s Annalee Newitz on science and science fiction. It’s a topic near and dear to both our…

CSA Images Open the neat spreadsheet and scroll past the listing of local developers, prominent attorneys, and personal trainers. You'll find a lengthy list of nicknames: Mostro, Al Capone, El…

On May 29, in the bottom of a tin-mining pit on Bangka Island in Indonesia, a wall about 16 feet high collapsed, sending a wave of earth crashing down on a 40-year-old father of two. His name…

Here are some farmers in a big field. Here is a mother with six kids. On this field were the Mamadas people —who were nomads, hunting and foresting little plots of corn and camote (also known…

June 2012 At this year’s Coachella music festival, slain rapper Tupac Shakur was resurrected for a performance with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Projected as a two-dimensional image, abs still…

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Some insight into the workings of the newly-opened Associated Press bureau in North Korea:

"North Korea remains the world's most opaque country, in part because of the difficulty foreign journalists have working there. "It's unique in having walled itself off for so long," says Mike Chinoy, a former senior Asia correspondent for CNN who has visited North Korea 15 times. "Therefore the mere fact of a decision [to allow the opening of a bureau] must have been taken at a very high level, and to me that is very encouraging."

"AP's investment in opening a bureau in North Korea might ultimately pay off in having people in place if the country collapses. Beck thinks AP's motivation is the same as that of any foreign company trying to operate in North Korea. "First movers have the advantage," he says. (Daniszewski responds, "We don't predict events, but it's always better to have someone there to witness whatever should happen in the country.") When crisis hits North Korea, AP has "a foot in the door, so to say, and that is good," says Lankov. "But simply don't expect muckraking reports about Kim's family finances or interviews with closet dissenters."