Daniel Rourke /stream

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When I heard about the tragic murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson, who was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack in Oakland last month, I could feel my heart begin to…

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Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far…

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How many times did I say it – to myself, out loud alone or out loud to others, throughout my childhood? ‘I wish I were a boy.’ The words were mine,…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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Imagine a world where there is no food for us to feed on, and the only way to survive is to resort to cannibalism. A group of British researchers has envisaged…

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It’s ok. You can say it. Everyone else seems to be saying it now anyway. It might even make you feel better. It’s too late.

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The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.

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IF you ever have the good fortune to see a Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the experience might go like this: On a sunny morning in Yosemite National Park, you walk through…

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

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Vast amounts of electricity go into feeding the Bitcoin delusion. Fortunately, it's unlikely that the digital currency will survive long enough to generate the environmental disaster that would arise if it…

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Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole…

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Deep in the arctic, inside over 400 feet of rock, a huge cache of seeds is stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in case of some global emergency. Today, the…

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When I heard about the tragic murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson, who was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack in Oakland last month, I could feel my heart begin to…

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Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far…

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When imagining civilizations on other worlds, we tend to stick to the familiar. Aliens in the popular imagination are not all that different from us — they often have eyes and ears, walk…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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It’s ok. You can say it. Everyone else seems to be saying it now anyway. It might even make you feel better. It’s too late.

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There are good reasons to worry about the future of humanity. Do we have a future, and if so, how much and what kind? For most people, it’s easier to feel…

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The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed, amid the hot invective and dry mockery of daily events in your social-media feeds, reports of the glaciers melting at each pole.

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From Trump to climate change, this multiheaded crisis presages collapse. And there’s no hope of exiting the ‘other side’ if political alternatives are shut down Please don’t read this unless you…

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IF you ever have the good fortune to see a Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the experience might go like this: On a sunny morning in Yosemite National Park, you walk through…

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

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BuzzFeed has achieved an outrageous amount of success in recent years, reaching an estimated 203 million people a month, including 112 million in the US alone, according to Quantcast. There are…

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Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole…

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Deep in the arctic, inside over 400 feet of rock, a huge cache of seeds is stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in case of some global emergency. Today, the…

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The scariest thing about Mishka Henner’s “Feedlots” photographs is that they are so beautiful. In one photograph from the series, a pool of bright red swirls interrupts a field of greyish boxes.