The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague At this point, it’s a losing battle. Bats with noses dusted by the Geomyces destructans fungus that causes WNS were seen for the first time in early 2006, in upstate New York. One year later, biologists realized that WNS could kill bats in large numbers. By 2008, mortality […]
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Rich Ziade: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Rich Ziade is partner and lead strategist at Arc90, notable for many things including creation of the wondrous Readability app. (Ed. note: We know: One of the stories below is from 2009, and another is from 2007.) *** • Paul Graham ruminates over the deflationary value of stuff. • Zak Smith debates which is more […]
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Amy K. Nelson's Top 6 Longreads of 2010: Murder mysteries, baseball, The Price Is Right
Amy K. Nelson is a writer for ESPN.com. (She and Elizabeth Merrill also wrote this great longread about sports and infidelity.) *** Longreads asked me to compile my Top 5 of 2010. An impossible task, and I know a few of mine are on other people’s lists. Here’s what I drew up: The Case of the […]
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Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game
Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game “These wack-jobs who spend 20 hours a week stacking coupons? That stuff drives us batty,” says John Morgan, executive director of the Association of Coupon Professionals. “They dance all over the rules. These zealots may be following the letter of the law, but I don’t think […]
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Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street “The kind of trading strategies our system uses are not the kind of strategies that humans use,” Kharitonov continues. “We’re not competing with humans, because when you’re trading thousands of stocks simultaneously, trying to capture very, very small changes, the human brain is just not good at that. We’re […]
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Peter Smith: The Best Food Longreads of the Year
Peter Smith: The Best Food Longreads of the Year Stories from Wired, Conservation Magazine, Edible Geography, Saveur, Slate, National Geographic, GQ and Prospect.
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Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die.
Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack […]
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Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code Mohan Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, […]
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How Egypt's Leaders Found 'Off' Switch for the Internet
How Egypt’s Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the […]
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“Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, […]
