quote [ Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies?
And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?

I think game theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust –
and how we can fix it! So, to understand all this...


...let's play a game. ]

quote [ Almost every step led to a snap or a soft thwack.

Fallen branches cracked under my feet. Ferns brushed up against my calves.

This past June, I was with my reporting partner Scott Detrow searching for something in this grove of hemlocks.

Metal debris from Flight 93 found this year on the grounds of the national memorial.

A reminder, really. ]

quote [ Early on in “Unraveled,” a new book about the dark underbelly of fashion, the author, Maxine Bédat, describes walking through a factory in Guangdong, China, that specializes in acid-washing jeans, picking her way over dark puddles of “iridescent, bubbling content” that had spilled from industrial washing machines and was sloshing around on the floor. ]

quote [ In the 1980s, a group of young engineers at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston realised that the 1960s Apollo-era mission control set-up would struggle to handle the more complex challenges of flying the space shuttle.

The engineers’ concerns fell on deaf ears; Nasa knew and trusted the Apollo-era systems, which had successfully sent humans to the moon. Undeterred, the renegade group – who subsequently called themselves ‘the pirates’ – began to code new software for the mission control sub-systems in their free time, using borrowed equipment from Nasa suppliers. ]

quote [ Rugball, a Russian-invented sport that combines elements of basketball, wrestling and rugby, hopes to go mainstream after a sudden surge of public attention. ]

quote [ Jeffrey Berns wants to build a tech oasis in the Nevada desert. Do others share his utopian vision? ]

quote [ In 2019, the U.S. Navy's Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) filed a number of seemingly out of this world patents that could, in theory, revolutionize not only military aviation, but just about everything. Chief among these strange new inventions is a High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator, which if functional, could produce massive amounts of power with far reaching military and commercial implications. Interestingly, the patent also closely resembles longstanding theories posited by UFO researchers about the means of propulsion seemingly employed by alien visitors to our world. ]

quote [ In March of 1954, with his place in the major leagues far from assured, Hank Aaron was granted a start in a Milwaukee exhibition game versus Boston, only because Bobby Thomson, the regular left fielder and Aaron’s idol, had just broken his ankle. ]

quote [ Rats that learn to drive are more able to cope with stress. That might sound like the fever-dream of a former scientist-turned-car writer, but it's actually one of the results of a new study from the University of Richmond. ]