In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
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Posted inBooks, Current Events, Member Pick, Story
Putin’s Rasputin
Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
In the Age of the Psychonauts
Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.
Posted inNonfiction
Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia
History may have pigeonholed her as Renaissance Italy’s most notorious seductress, but it’s high time we give the Duchess of Ferrara a closer look.
Posted inNonfiction
Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela
In light of recent events in crisis-ridden Venezuela, its last vertebrate paleontologist puts together key pieces of the baffling puzzle that the country has become in the past couple of decades.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Story
Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology
Read an excerpt adapted from Alec Nevala-Lee’s book, Astounding.
Posted inStory
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids
Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.
Posted inReading List
Sex Work and Workers: A Reading List to Get You Beyond Law & Order SVU and Pretty Woman
The best way to learn what being a sex worker is like is to listen to sex workers.
Posted inNonfiction
The Geography of Risk
Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth, so why do taxpayers have to pay for the hurricane damage to rich coastal communities?
