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Results 1 - 10 of 14
January 12, 2009
The Political Scene
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Greening the Ghetto
- PROFILE of environmental activist Van Jones. A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of Green for All—a group focused on broadening the appeal of the environmental movement and bringing jobs to poor neighborhoods—visited New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop was at the New…
January 05, 2009
AUDIO
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Joy Revision
- In this issue, Ariel Levy writes about “The Joy of Sex.” Here Levy talks about the genesis of Dr. Alex Comfort’s original 1972 edition, how society has changed since then, and whether the new revised edition still fills a societal need.
December 17, 2008
Blog: The New Yorker Blog
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2008: The Year in Shouts & Murmurs
- Here are some highlights from this year’s humor writing in The New Yorker. The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen: The door to the vault must have accidentally been left...
December 15, 2008
A Reporter at Large
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Atomic John
- A REPORTER AT LARGE about John Coster-Mullen’s painstaking research into the inner workings of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. The writer first came across John Coster-Mullen’s name in 2004 after attending an exhibit by the artist Jim Sanborn that included what appeared to be exact…
September 15, 2008
A Reporter at Large
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The Long Dig [ABSTRACT]
- A REPORTER AT LARGE about engineer Martin Herrenknecht and tunnelling machines. The people of Allmannsweier, Germany, have never really grown used to the giant mechanical worms outside their village. When the worms first appeared, nearly thirty years ago, they were just little machines, built by a local engineer named Martin…
July 21, 2008
Annals of Science
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Surfing the Universe
- ANNALS OF SCIENCE about physicist Garrett Lisi’s “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Writer describes Lisi giving a talk at a conference in Morelia, Mexico in June of 2007. The conference was attended by the top researchers in a field called loop quantum gravity, which has emerged as a leading…
July 28, 2008
Annals of Science
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The Eureka Hunt [ABSTRACT]
- ANNALS OF SCIENCE about insight. On August 5, 1949, a firefighter named Wag Dodge survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch, in Montana. In a moment of desperate insight, he devised an escape plan by igniting the ground in front of him and laying down on the…
July 07, 2008
A Reporter at Large
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The Island in the Wind
- A REPORTER AT LARGE about a Danish community’s shift to renewable energy. Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. It has twenty-two villages and, for…
May 12, 2008
A Reporter at Large
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Birdbrain
- A REPORTER AT LARGE about Alex, a talking African gray parrot, and his owner, Irene Pepperberg, who researches animal cognition and speech. Tells about an address given by Pepperberg at the Midwest Bird Expo to an audience of admirers who had helped support her research with Alex. Pepperberg had worked…
March 03, 2008
Annals of Science
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Numbers Guy
- ANNALS OF SCIENCE about Stanislas Dehaene’s research on numerical cognition. One morning in 1989, a former sales representative entered an examination room with Stanislas Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris. Three years earlier, the man, whom researchers refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brain hemorrhage that left…
