Longreads

Why did America give up on charging for parking? A proposed solution to congestion and sprawl:

"There’s plenty to hate about driving—traffic jams, car accidents, speeding tickets—not to mention the endless headache of finding a spot to park. So what if you discovered an invention that could wean us from our vehicles, combating suburban sprawl and making city streets less dangerous, congested, and polluted? Well, that device has been around for nearly 80 years: It’s called the parking meter.

"Contrary to popular belief, the parking meter was originally designed to keep traffic moving and make more spaces available for shoppers, a measure often lauded by local businesses as much as the public who paid their hourly rates. Beginning with the first parking meter, installed in 1935 on the corner of First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, and spreading clear across the United States, the device was hailed as the great solution to our parking woes. Yet decades of poor meter implementation, inane off-street parking requirements, and technological stasis slowly turned our city streets into a driver’s nightmare."

(via The Browser)

Brett Sharenow is presiding over the Pepsi Challenge of lightbulbs. The CFO of Switch, a Silicon Valley startup, Sharenow has set himself up in a 20-by-20 booth at the back of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, and he’s asking passersby to check out two identical white shades. Behind one hides a standard incandescent bulb, the familiar lighting technology that has gone largely unchanged since Thomas Edison invented it 132 years ago. Behind the other is a stunning, almost art- deco-style prototype that holds 10 LEDs and a secret fluid. It’s a liquid-cooled bulb, as radically different from Edison’s invention as anything that’s ever been screwed into a standard socket and, Sharenow hopes, the next big thing in the $30 billion lighting industry. The challenge: Can you tell which is which?

Street Math in WildStyle Graffiti Art 1997 Josephine Noah Wildstyle is a form of graffiti composed of complicated interlocking letters, arrows, and embellishment. Like all forms of graffiti…

I was calling Sleets because I wanted to talk to the man who invented the high five. I'd first read about him in 2007 in a press release from National High Five Day, a group that was trying to establish a holiday for convivial palm-slapping on the third Thursday in April. Apparently, Sleets had been reluctantly put in touch with the holiday's founders, and he explained that his father, Lamont Sleets Sr., served in Vietnam in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry -- a unit nicknamed The Five. The men of The Five often gathered at the Sleets home when Lamont Jr. was a toddler. They'd blow through the front door doing their signature greeting: arm straight up, five fingers spread, grunting "Five." Lamont Jr. loved to jump up and slap his tiny palms against their larger ones. "Hi, Five!" he'd yell, unable to keep all their names straight.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our LivesBy Steven Levy(Simon Schuster, 423 pp., $26) The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)By Siva Vaidhyanathan(University of…

by Frank Brady LAWRENCE LIPKING on THE GENIUS AND MADNESS OF BOBBY FISCHER WRITING THE LIFE of a genius can make someone feel like a…

The task of reverse-engineering Stuxnet's complex payload fell to Nicolas Falliere in Symantec's Paris office. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired) Back at Symantec, Chien and colleagues were taking a crash…

Feedback loops are powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior. Just as important, they can encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. Illustration:…

HBR.org JulyAugust 2011The Unselfish Gene Artwork: Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset, Flamme, 2009 In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in