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Our world is increasingly automated, so what exactly will drive our economy, our jobs, and consumer demand into the next century? “We live like gods, and we don’t even know it. “We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures […]

An excerpt from Howe’s new book on how internal arguments, drugs, failed feminism, and the exploitation of minority characters in comic books and the freelance writers and artists who drew them, changed Marvel Comics during the late ’60s and early ’70s: “‘I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam,’ said Starlin, whose hobbies […]

The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass: “To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and […]

Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next: “In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then […]

Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the […]

In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped […]

[Not single-page] The research, financed mostly by NASA and published initially in the online edition of Science, jolted the scientific community. If confirmed, scientists said, the discovery would mean that this high mountain lake hosts a form of life distinct from all others known on Earth. It would open up the possibility of a shadow […]

Richard Beckman says he’s not particularly fond of Mad Dog, a nickname he earned as a sales executive at Condé Nast, the magazine publisher where he spent 24 years. He finds it demeaning, and says it is belied by the fact that he is actually shy and quiet. In several meetings, he does display an […]