Inside Google’s secretive Ground Truth program—and why it suddenly makes sense that they are working on a self-driving car: Let’s step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles […]
The Atlantic
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In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context: Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American […]
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[Fiction] A run-in with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer after a rodeo: Victor saw Nachee and Billy Cosa looking toward the entrance and turned his head to see a Riverside County deputy talking to the manager. Some more law was outside. They’d go around to the kitchen and check on Mexicans without any papers. […]
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A call for women and men to have a more honest conversation about work-life balance: Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power […]
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Once an enemy of the U.S., Vietnam is growing as a country, and has become a key ally “as a counter to China’s rising power”: Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than the country’s recent purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert […]
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[Fiction] The pressure of exams and college acceptances, and the decisions that stem from it: In the first quarter of sophomore year, Cindy got an A-minus in Chemistry, and Paul Takahashi caught up to her. We liked Paul okay, but once he’d won the top spot, we had trouble maintaining our good feelings toward him. […]
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Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public: Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company […]
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The quest for the perfect dairy cow—starting with Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, a bull who has 50,000 markers on his genome that make him the best sire at the moment: While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is […]
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[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom: The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter. ‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’ ‘Is […]
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What it’s like to be one half of a couple where one partner is HIV positive, and the other is not: We go to the mall and spend too much. We go to multiplexes and laugh at bad horror movies. We scrape by, for several months, on turkey sandwiches and canned soup and whatever meals […]