The cult of extreme productivity has robbed us of the ability of enjoying our own company.

Donald Knuth, master of algorithms, reflects on 50 years of his opus-in-progress, “The Art of Computer Programming.”

In May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agency’s funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts. Against objections that so many artists and writers were socialists, Braden writes, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s [socialists] were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

The genre-stretching game broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades’ most storied video game studios

When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago, it did not go gently into that good night. Rather, it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico that caused chaos throughout the world's oceans, new research finds. The 9-mile-across (14 kilometers) space rock, known as the Chicxulub asteroid, caused so much destruction, it's no wonder the asteroid ended the dinosaur age, leading to the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction.

Gone forever.

I learned English—and Western culture—watching American movies in smoky minibuses.

The long read: Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide influence campaign of astonishing scope and ambition

As the fortune of war shifted against Nazi Germany by the mid of 1942, its leadership increasingly placed their hopes in the development of Wunderwaffe (Miracle Weapons) to turn the tide back in their favor. Many of such weapon designs never went further than the concept stage and that which went into combat service, suffered from frequent reliability issues as their production was rushed. While never made in significant numbers to make an impact, their pioneering designs and technology would leave a lasting impact on not just future weaponry and in other fields as well.

Tablets from some of the world’s oldest civilisations hold rich details about life thousands of years ago, but few people today can read them. New technology is helping to unlock them.

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long - the story goes - was a gesture of Britain's benevolence.

For years, the incredible discovery of the Titanic's wreckage at the bottom of the ocean in 1985 was thought to have been a purely scientific effort. But Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, said that the expedition was part of a secret US military mission to recover two sunken nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean.

Rotem fought Nazis in city streets, later helped rebels flee through sewers; Netanyahu says, 'His story will forever be with our people'

On the ineffable magic of four little manuscripts of Old English poetry

Looking to the future has always defined humanity. Will A.I. become the best crystal ball of all?

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

Vardø, Norway, makes Salem look like a walk in the park.

How to make the trip from Sijilmasa to Oualata, circa 1352. By François-Xavier Fauvelle.

New methods are allowing a group of scientists to reëxamine the world’s libraries and archives, in search of the hidden lives of authors.

In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.

Think of the worst thing you can possibly imagine that one human being might do to another and know that what really took place was a hundred times worse… By Matt Haughey.

In 1998, the Sega Dreamcast changed the whole face of console and games design, but it was haunted by an unbeatable competitor.

The family of Vernon Dahmer learned Tuesday of a Confederate battle flag placed on the civil rights martyr's grave.

The Tokalı Church, one of the oldest rock-cut churches in Cappadocia featuring precious frescoes, is being restored by experts from Turkey's Ministry of...

At the bottom of a sacred lake two massive ships lay in ruin, remnants of a mad emperor. By Paul Cooper.

When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev.

The storied Knights of Malta shaped the Maltese capital of Valletta into a ‘city for gentlemen’, but how much longer can chivalry survive in the modern age?

Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company—and the Internet.

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein in which he grapples with the concept of religion is being auctioned in New York on Tuesday. The so-called "God letter" was written in 1954 and is expected to fetch up to $1.5 million (£1.2m). The Nobel Prize-winning scientist, then 74, wrote the one-and-a-half page note to German philosopher Eric Gutkind in response to one of his works.

In the mid-20th century, with a new millennium looming, some science-fiction writers and human-interest reporters began speculating wildly about what humanity’s future might look like....

The inventor of the water bed is reprising and updating it for a Casper world.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and injuring more than 1,000 others. Within the week, the US had officially entered World War II.

One veteran Mississippi teacher is forgoing textbooks for the local archives.

In the era of pods, the iconic item has become an endangered species.

A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart—then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley—gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.