Bradford Plumer

I'm thinking about a new career in amateur sub-building. Here's 34-year-old Tao Xinglai showing that anyone can do it, really. All i...

Suppose human civilization collapses one day. That's not such a zany notion—lots of past civilizations have collapsed. Maybe there'...

Annie Hall is pretty much a perfect film. But as David Kimmel describes in I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes at the Gr...

There are plenty of English-language writers who sell a lot of books overseas—it's not uncommon for even lesser-known American authors t...

Due to a series of increasingly frivolous Google searches, I just spent half an hour reading up on the history of Sunday-morning cartoons in...

What's the world's most throat-chokingly difficult language? Here's a worthy contender: On balance The Economist would go for ...

Huh, I had no idea that James A. Garfield was credited with discovering a novel proof for the Pythagorean Theorem (a clever one, too, invol...

Ethan Watters has a fascinating New Scientist report on how U.S. drug companies are basically "exporting" Western notions of men...

The Kabukicho district in Tokyo is famous for, among other sleazy wonders, its host and hostess clubs. The idea here is simple enough: In a ...

Famous chess players often get asked the same thing by reporters: "How many moves can you see ahead?" The query crept up, inevita...

Excuse me, but I'm on a Wikipedia bender lately. I just can't stop clicking. So here we go: The Bone Wars ? This was a real thing? O...

In a chat with The Philosopher's Magazine , David Chalmers lays out his theory of the "extended mind," arguing that our cogni...

      Here's a good Monday diversion: Wikipedia's master list of color names . Learn your cobalts and ceruleans and cyans. Some of t...

Over at The Nation , architect Teddy Cruz walks us through Tijuana, which has been built, in large part, using waste materials from neighbo...

My friend Francesca Mari has a great critique of the new film adaptation of Revolutionary Road : Instead of adapting the novel, scriptwrite...

Here's a topic that's always mystified me. Go back to the late 17th century. Newton and Leibniz had both independently developed cal...

Are most parents closet Marxists? Caleb Crain says of course they are: After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their ...

Oh, man. Back in October, I ran across some evidence that the supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park capable of obliteratin...

So there's the good jetlag, the kind where you return home from parts unknown, collapse at 9 p.m., wake before dawn, and are just the mo...

It's never that surprising to hear that some companies aren't quite as eco-friendly as they claim to be, but sometimes the examples...

Talk about unnerving: In this month's New York Review of Books , Marcia Angell argues that "it is simply no longer possible to bel...

Well, lookit what we got here. It is possible to embed music on your lowly little blog! Very nice, and a bouquet of lilacs dispatched to La...

Over the holidays, I picked up an old, yellowing copy of Mike Royko's Boss , his best-selling and unauthorized—to put it lightly—1971 bi...

As it tends to do, New Year's Day came and went this year, and, as always, I made a few half-hearted New Year's resolutions—that...

Okay, this here blog's taking a wee vacation (as if you couldn't tell). For now, I'm helping run The New Republic 's new env...

Depressing : "Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that...

"Hey, what's with the dearth of great free content 'round these parts?" Well, sorry, I've been waylaid with the flu or...

Why is green tea so popular in Asia while black tea is all the rage in the West? Tom Sandage's A History of the World in Six Glasses pr...

Pulled up from The New Republic 's archives, a great 1997 piece by Wire -creator David Simon that recounts, among other things, an amus...

Yes, I know. Any discussion of either Kingsley Amis, hangovers, or (especially) Kingsley Amis' thoughts on binge drinking and its conseq...