Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes: One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon […]
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Sponsored Longreads: Read the First Chapters of 'Challenger: An American Tragedy'
The following is an excerpt from Open Road Media’s Challenger: An American Tragedy, the new book by Hugh Harris, NASA’s “voice of launch control,” who recounts the shuttle tragedy that occurred nearly 30 years ago. Buy the book now. *** Chapter One: A Look Back Twenty-Eight Years Challenger was a spacecraft designed to transport, protect, and nurture […]
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The creator of The Wire remembers a young man whose life as a 15-year-old drug dealer in Baltimore was depicted in his book The Corner: At first, he was content with the book we wrote about his world. By the time The Corner was published it was something of an epitaph for people who were […]
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Are We Puppets in a Wired World?
A look back, and ahead, at how the Internet is evolving to capture our data—and what organizations will do with it next: “There is no doubt that the Internet—that undistinguished complex of wires and switches—has changed how we think and what we value and how we relate to one another, as it has made the […]
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The Generator Society
In the 1970s, 19 families made their homes on Bald Head Island, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands: “They went for jogs and spotted sunning alligators and foxes that seemed to wonder who they were and why they were there. They watched loggerhead sea turtles trudge up onto the sand to lay their eggs and […]
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Dead Calm
The writer on working for a chemical company and his suspicions that the chemicals were affecting his health: “The substance in question is quillaia bark. Quillaia bark is stripped from trees in Chile, bound by heavy wire in bundles the size of washing machines, loosely wrapped in coarse burlap, stacked on pallets, and dropped by […]
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The Old Man and the Tee
A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming: “Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing […]
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Are Babies Born Good?
Researching the moral decisions of infants: “The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there. ‘When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,’ Charles Darwin wrote […]
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This Land Is My Land
The story of a property-line feud between two families in North Georgia: “The main bridge between the families was the fast friendship of Jewell Crane’s father and Lewis Dempsey’s father. The old men agreed that neighbors should talk and cooperate. Thus, when it came time in the early 1980s to fence off the southern part […]
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The Devil on Paradise Road
A man murders a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State on New Year’s Day leading to an active manhunt in subfreezing temperatures. “The SWAT guys found climbing notches in the roadside berm and postholes leading into the trees. No innocent park visitor would continue to posthole up to his crotch. This had […]
