Five Levels of Ruin — And Where Our Civilization Ranks

Advertisements are a scourge upon society, the environment, and ultimately ourselves. They are among the worst that capitalism has to offer. Why not get rid of them?

Governments may say they’re doing all they can to halt the climate crisis. Don’t fall for it – then we might still have time to turn things around

Workers are fed up. More than two years into the pandemic, many have burned out, quit their jobs or are struggling to make ends meet as record inflation takes a huge bite out of their paychecks.

Allies want to empower him to purge potentially thousands of civil servants.

How did a Usenet troll and encryption genius become a criminal mastermind? For a man who built an empire in pixels, Paul Le Roux seemed like a digital phantom. After his name surfaced in the press in late 2014, I spent the better part of a year trying to understand him through the same means by which he’d directed his massive pharmacy business: the Internet. Late at night, I would open my laptop and plunge into an online wormhole, searching for clues about who Le Roux had been and what he became.

Climate scientists have been clear that if we want to reduce carbon emissions and slow the pace of global warming, one crucial step is moving from a transportation system run on fossil fuels to one powered by electricity. But it's possible that doing so might neutralize other toxic aspects of the petroleum industry, such as volatile prices and armed conflict.

As the bankers from J.P. Morgan’s London offices stepped off the two-hour private flight from Johannesburg onto the hot runway, soldiers sporting sunglasses and semiautomatics watched them closely. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s brutal civil war had ended several years earlier, but peace remained tenuous, and the Lubumbashi airstrip was still heavily militarized.

That winter of 2003—you remember it, and so do I—the world assembled, arms linked, to protest the prospect of war in Iraq. What times those were, and how the passions swelled. The fervor of the public reached a peak on February 15th, when millions of people in more than sixty countries claimed the streets, voicing their opposition. “listen to us,” a sign in London read. In New York, demonstrators stormed the avenues with a huge inflatable globe. Young and old turned out, and citizens and foreigners. A few weeks later, the United States was at war.

Lorelis García de la Torre hails from the Cuban city of Camagüey but has always loved the stately old colonial homes of Havana, many crumbling and long past their glory days. She left Cuba in 2006, first for Spain and then Canada. Shortly after, the country’s tourism industry heated up, with aspiring entrepreneurs buying up properties to turn into casas particulares, private homes available for rent. In 2014, she made an offer on a two-story house in the neighborhood of Vedado.

No other business in history has ever exceeded a valuation of $3 trillion, but Apple recently did so, in part, by exploiting its most vulnerable employees and discounting their well-being. Apple easily has the financial resources to be the exemplar of a modern, progressive workplace, but instead has established itself as the paradigm of capitalist greed.

In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How?

“I’m in shock,” said Cavier Coleman, a New York-based photographer and artist, the day after Heather Rhiannon Morgan was arrested. “She’s a great person.” The two had been friends for nearly five years; he remembered that she would bring him bags of pecans from her grandmother’s tree, and was passionate about making sure her friends were treating the coronavirus seriously.

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you're wide awake. There's cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where's the plane? You're 6 miles up. You're alone. You're falling.

For most of his adult life, Thor Vikström has watched the seasons change and the birds come and go from the small Quebec island he's owned that sits opposite his riverside home in Laval, Que. At 93, he says he's at peace knowing the land — nestled between Montreal and Laval — will remain protected long after he's gone now that he's donated it to the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

On the eve of her execution for treason in February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, penned a letter to King Henri III of France and secured it with a paper lock that featured an intricate spiral mechanism. So-called "letterlocking" was a common practice to protect private letters from prying eyes, but this spiral lock is particularly ingenious and delicate because it incorporates a built-in self-destruct feature, according to a new paper published in the Electronic British Library Journal.

Five longreads on the culture and creativity that games have spawned.

Thousands of players flocked to a digital world filled with draconian rules, slavery, and anti-Semitism—and tested how far “just a game” can go.

Jin Lifen never bothered to explain how she had suddenly become the mother of twins. One day in 2017, she showed up in her village, Zaokeng, with two infant daughters, and paid no mind to the puzzled stares and hushed gossip. In the conservative community, set in the hilly interior of Zhejiang province, an unmarried woman having children is itself cause for consternation. Moreover, some of the villagers had heard the whispers that Jin was infertile. The out-of-the-blue arrival of newborns raised all kinds of questions, and even Jin’s own mother didn’t know the answers.

Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any...