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Jellyfish are wreaking havoc on human inventions like nuclear power plans and aircraft carriers—and they’re changing the ocean permanently, according to Lisa-ann Gershwin’s book Stung!: “Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just […]

Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”: “There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of […]

An excerpt from Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, about growing up in Nigeria during a time when his country was breaking free from British colonialism, and writing Things Fall Apart: “When I wrote Things Fall Apart I began to understand and value my traditional Igbo history even more. […]

Two years after Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, the writer returns to the small town of Onagawa, which was wiped out: “Through repeat visits and long stays as a volunteer relief worker, I would come to know Fujinaka and post-tsunami Onagawa well. Most of my fellow volunteers that summer were Japanese from undamaged prefectures—students with […]

On the future of drones in America: “But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the regulatory environment starts to relax. At last year’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas, more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados and surveying agricultural […]

How a nine-person video game company is bringing little known Japanese games to the U.S.: “If you play video games, you’ve probably played something that came out of Japan. Many of gaming’s biggest and brightest series—Mario, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil—were developed by Eastern companies, then translated and programmed for North American or European machines. “But […]

How two best friends rehabilitated the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise, and what’s coming next as the popularity of mixed martial arts expands globally: “The UFC has border-hopped since 2007, first into Europe and Canada, then Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, and the Middle East. The next step is both simple and excessively difficult. Any international fan […]