Posted inUncategorized

It’s a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It’s called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all […]

Posted inUncategorized

Businessweek's Sheelah Kolhatkar: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. *** Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year: “Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but […]

Posted inUncategorized

Self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly. But how comfortable can we get with the idea? Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is […]

Posted inUncategorized

Survivors and crew members recount the Costa Concordia crash, in which 32 people lost their lives:  The Concordia’s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the […]

Posted inUncategorized

A writer visits the home of Bryan Saunders, an artist known for his self-portraits created under the influence of a variety of drugs: We turn to the next one. ‘Whoa,’ I say. This one could not be less Xanax-like. The drawing is spindly and paranoid, and the page is patterned with real-life bullet holes. They […]

Gift this article