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An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but…

SIMON CRITCHLEY, A BRITISH PHILOSOPHER based at The New School in New York, is best known for books like Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007) and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009), a bestseller that has helped to cement his status as a prominent public intellectual. (Recently this status was further solidified by a noteworthy spat between Critchley and the Slovenian philosophical superstar Slavoj Žižek, about which more below.) Over the years he's developed a reputation as a rigorous philosopher in the "continental" tradition, playing a major role in the Anglophone reception of tricky French thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Yet he's also proved to be passionate about making philosophy an accessible part of contemporary culture — for instance, through "The Stone," an opinion series he organizes for the New York Times.

I WAS HAVING TROUBLE writing about cartoonist Alison Bechdel's book about writing a book about her mom. A graphic memoir like her first book, Fun Home, it seemed a remarkably self-sufficient thing:…

Limited lifeline: Zuhura Hussein, who does outreach in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, has the names of many TB sufferers and HIV-positive clients on her phone but no technology to track them. Credit:…

People flooded Foxconn Technology with résumés at a 2010 job fair in Henan Province, China. When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California…