Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
Two recent suicide clusters by high school students have rocked a community in Palo Alto, a San Francisco Bay area city. Diane Kapp talks to students, family members, psychiatrists, and community leaders to get a sense of why the suicides occurred and what’s being done to prevent them.
Will Art Save Our Descendants from Radioactive Waste?
In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Energy recognized an ethical obligation to store nuclear waste in a manner that would protect future humans from its health hazards. But there was a catch—low-level plutonium remains hazardous for 24,000 years; our best containment systems will only last for 10,000 years. Two decades later the government found an unlikely solution: they commissioned two teams of anthropologists, artists, linguists and semioticians to develop “markers” that would warn humans ten millennia into the future—when no known languages and cultural symbols are expected to remain.
Elon Musk’s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla
“In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.” An excerpt from Ashlee Vance’s new book, on how Musk almost went bankrupt trying to keep both SpaceX and Tesla afloat, all while his personal life was unraveling.
The Last Day of Her Life
Sandy Bem discovered she had Alzheimer’s and resolved to end her life before she lost her mind.
Tested Under Fire
A detailed account of the events surrounding the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan was shot, Al Haig famously declared that he was “in control,” but it was the vice president from Texas who calmly took control of the situation.
Will We Ever Understand the Beginning of the Universe?
A deep exploration of cosmology and the issues we face when it comes to understanding what we still don’t know: “Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it.”
Q. Sakamaki and the Art of the Socio-Photo-Documentary
“Here, I see many barriers, many conflicts—between class, between race, between cultures, between ideologies, between jobs.”
Blue Bell’s Rocky Road
After a series of recalls, the future of Texas’s favorite ice cream is in doubt.
Theorizing the Drone
What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?
Casualties of Conservation
Tanzania’s ecotourism industry may be saving the country’s animals, but it’s threatening indigenous peoples.
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