Longreads

Miranda July stood in her living room in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, apologizing for the sunflowers. It really was a copious amount of sunflowers.

Last summer, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired wrote and ran a cover story declaring, "The Web is Dead". A year earlier, the then managing editor of Time.com had rung the…

Last week, self proclaimed "geek," Miss California, Alyssa Campanella made beauty pageant history...by default. When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was

That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to deal with how we use words.

John Elder Robison would stand out in a crowd even if he didn’t have Asperger syndrome. A gruff, powerfully built, tirelessly curious, blue-eyed bear of a man, he hurtles down a San Diego sidewalk toward a promising Mexican restaurant like an unstoppable force of nature. ”What’s keepin’ you stragglers?” he calls back to the shorter-legged ambulators dawdling in his wake.