What can the philosophy of games tell us about our odd impulse to scare ourselves? By Elisa Gabbert

At this year’s National Conservatism Conference, a right-wing army prepares to rise. By Hamilton Nolan

Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum

At the conversational AI conference. By Laura Preston

The Waterboys

Half of the world’s pigs are in China. By Jason Gale, Hannah Dormido, Adrian Leung.

Just when the smallest jet should have been replaced with a new model, the company fell into tight-fisted hands—with fatal consequences. By Clive Irving.

When the Australian security consultant Julian Gutmanis was summoned to a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2017, what he found made his blood run cold. By Martin Giles. (Mar. 5, 2019)

Nuclear power plants are so big, complicated and expensive to build that more are shutting down than opening up. An Oregon company, NuScale Power, wants to change that trend by building nuclear plants that are the opposite of existing ones: smaller, simpler and cheaper.

Some 18 million barrels of oil transit through every day. The economic impact would be catastrophic. By Scott Ritter.

The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from tundra, warn Merritt R. Turetsky and colleagues.

Murdoch and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. What do they want?

Women in Canada, Iceland, Taiwan, Australia, and the UK talk about their universal health care systems. By Clio Chang.

When tropical forests become firestorms and the Sahara turns green. By David Wallace-Wells.

The December 18 fireball created the biggest airburst since the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. By Becky Ferreira.

That disastrous rock may now look to have been a Beta Taurid passenger. By Robby Berman.

I, for instance, elect to walk on certain streets, not others. The elevator doors slide open, and there’s one man inside: I evaluate his size against mine, calculating how well, if I had to, I could fight him off. I check the backseat of my car before getting in, just to make sure no one’s waiting there. I don’t leave my drink unattended. By R. O. Kwon.

Singapore, like every big city, has been overrun with new car service apps. By Yoolim Lee.

"The day I found out I was pregnant, I installed an app on my phone that guesstimated — in exclusively fruit and vegetable comparisons — the size of my might-be child. My pregnancy made it from the size of a sweet pea to the size of a blueberry, and during that time I kept a wire-bound journal with “Sweet Pea” written on the cover." By Kristen.

We underestimated him once. Let’s not do it again. By Matt Taibbi.