Automattic

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants […]

After weeks of surveillance, the Home Depot security officers knew they were onto something big, but they didn’t quite know how big. They didn’t know that the events of that day would unleash a bizarre yearlong investigation that will culminate in Oakland next week with the beginning of the sentencing process for Davenport, Hay, and […]

Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in […]

A century ago, on March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, perished after a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Even after the fire, the city’s businesses continued to insist they could regulate themselves, but […]

Crispin had done its own behavioral research, lurking in kitchens around the Boulder area. Staffers had watched suburban moms unpack their groceries and studied where kids looked for snacks when they got home from school. Kids seldom went to the refrigerator; instead, they went straight for the cupboards or the pantry. If they did go […]

And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds. Outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek […]

Once deified, now demonized, teachers are under assault from union-busting Republicans on the right and wealthy liberals on the left. And leading the charge from all directions is a woman most famous for losing her job: the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.

To be sure, the President’s control over foreign affairs had been growing since the Theodore Roosevelt administration (and still grows today). TR’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone preceded Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I, which was a prelude to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s management of the run-up to the victorious American effort in […]

It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that Ive is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false—he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out […]

To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia […]