This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones.

In most reasonably large towns in the United States and Europe, you can find, on some important public square or street, a professional theater. And so, in various quiet neighborhoods in these towns, you can usually also find some rather quiet individuals, the actors who work regularly in that theater, individuals whose daily lives center around lawns and cars and cooking and shopping and occasionally the athletic events of children, but who surprisingly at night put on the robes of kings and wizards...

Who could have imagined a decade ago that the politics of dairy farming would be discussed in an Oscars' acceptance speech? As a dairy farmer I actually agree with Joaquin Phoenix's comments that people have become disconnected from the natural world, but his call to switch to completely plant-based has environmental and nutritional consequences, so I believe we have to strike a balance.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

The numbers speak for themselves.

With strong telescopes, scientists say they can still detect faint echoes of the Big Bang. Sometimes I wonder if maybe they’re picking up cosmic interference from a different signal event that won’t fade away. I’m talking about the Baby Boom.

That’s how long I want to live: 75 years. This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.

“I think there was a common thread among all of us,” says Sheldon Yellen, CEO of Belfor, “that we really are just everyday people, wanting to do everyday good.” This quote is from back in 2013, when Yellen, an incredibly wealthy man and reputed former mobster (Forbes estimated his net worth at $320 million back in 2017) was sitting at a table with other leaders of large American companies.

The worn hinges squeak as I pull the heavy wooden door open. Inside is a cavernous room, its walls made of stone. Looking back at me is a fireplace with a wrought-iron log holder that reminds me of an overgrown spider. The stone surrounding it is scarred with black ash.

There’s some backstory to the current Rudy Giuliani drama I’d like to share. After he left the mayoralty at the end of 2001 Giuliani made tens of millions of dollars on his reputation as “America’s Mayor” and a 9/11-based terrorism and security expert under the shingle Giuliani Partners. In the nature of things that rep was more valuable abroad than at home. He cashed in big time. That went on for about 15 years with a brief timeout for his failed 2008 presidential bid. He also had his own law firm Bracewell Giuliani, before leaving the firm to join Greenberg Traurig in 2016.

America, home of the brave, land of the free, is watching. Tens of millions of cameras are watching people across the country. The total number of cameras in the world could reach 45 billion by 2022, when the global video-surveillance industry is forecast to reach $63 billion.

The message from Israel arrived on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon for 36-year-old Beau Villereal. At his family’s sprawling 42-acre property outside Live Oak in Florida’s rural north, Villereal sat alone in his bedroom trawling for news about Donald Trump to share on the rightwing Facebook page he runs with his mother and father.

The “deja vu”, as I termed it, began creeping over me again. Each time it happened, I tried to fight it off, as if it were a war waged within my mind. I knew that I only had a short time to get away from people before they would notice something wasn’t right. I’d usually escape to the bathroom and lock the door, where the throes of this thing could overtake, and I could return to normal as if nothing ever happened.

The world’s most polluting companies could be sued for their contributions to global warming, a major human rights inquiry has found in what has been described as a “landmark victory for climate justice”. The head of a Philippines Commission on Human Rights panel, which has been investigating climate change for three years, revealed its conclusions on Monday that major fossil fuel firms may be held legally responsible for the impacts of their carbon emissions.

There’s a reason so many people find the art world to be impenetrable and elitist - it’s designed to be. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting my local art gallery; it’s a great place to take the kids, and often, I discover beautiful and thought-provoking pieces. But sometimes, I feel downright frustrated by the works that have been chosen for inclusion.

On Thursday morning, the President of the United States sent a tweet to his 60+ million followers blasting a 16-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome who has rallied efforts at fighting climate change around the globe.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has debuted its first-ever broadcast campaign, aimed at making the ownership of a “.ca” website a point of national pride for business owners. The CIRA is the organization responsible for policies related to the internet in Canada, as well as the country’s involvement in international internet governance, but its primary task is managing Canada’s “.ca” top-level web domain.

My name is Kathryn Spiers. I was at Google for just under two years. I worked on the Platform Security team, focusing on Chrome’s use within Google. Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my co-workers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web.

The story of the arrival of the iPad is one that’s been told before. Apple’s developers originally designed a tablet like the iPad but CEO Steve Jobs wanted a phone, first. So we got the iPhone.

As Americans watch the political drama of impeachment against President Donald Trump unfold in Congress, it seems clear that Democrats and Republicans seem to occupy entirely different planes of reality, speaking in opposite terms about the same issues. It is a reflection of the political polarization in the nation at large that social scientists have struggled to understand.