Residents of Metro Vancouver are about to participate en masse in a fascinating behavioral experiment. If you care about happiness in cities, you should pay attention to the results, because this kind of experiment is being repeated in cities across the continent. In the 2013 election campaign, B.C. Premier Christy Clark pledged Metro Vancouver would not be taxed in new ways for transportation without getting a chance to vote on it.

When I visited him last month in Moscow, Kirill Yerokhin was in his living room, which had been decked out as if for a family celebration. Platters with fruit, thick pink and white slices of pastila, the Russian sweet, and piroshki, little buns with sweet and savoury fillings, covered the coffee table. From a dozen wooden frames on the wall, Marshall Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest war hero and Yerokhin’s grandfather, looked down.

Kanye West would be the first person to tell you he belongs on this list. The dude doesn’t believe in false modesty, and he shouldn’t. Kanye’s belief in himself and his incredible tenacity—he performed his first single with his jaw wired shut—got him to where he is today. And he fought for his place in the cultural pantheon with a purpose. In his debut album, over a decade ago, Kanye issued what amounted to a social critique and a call to arms (with a beat)...

It sounds crazy, but 2.1 million people in the United States still use AOL dial-up to connect to the Internet.

Commencement 2015

SpareFoot infographic shows which places in the U.S. are seeing the biggest influx of people.

In a fluorescent-lit hallway at a Long Island nursing home, Judd Apatow sits on an overturned box beside a collapsed wheelchair, marking a two-page printout of jokes. It's 8:40 a.m. on May 19th, 2014: the first day of production on Apatow's fifth directorial feature, Trainwreck. Residents mill around on walkers and canes; one wants to enter the home's glassed-in sitting porch, but Apatow has transformed it into a set. A production assistant tasked with directing elderly traffic reroutes her...

Don't worry -- you aren't doomed to failure.

At the forty or so seminars I give yearly, I always ask the same question: "Who here has ever received a bad handshake?" Invariably everyone raises their hands—no surprise there. Perhaps you’ve wondered, as I have, “How can so many people get something so simple as a handshake wrong?” What's even more startling is how long we remember those bad handshakes.

It’s been proven that sarcasm can help to make a person three times more creative, but of course you already knew that because when it comes to sarcasm you’ve got it all covered. Not only are you cutting edge with your wit, but you can almost get away with anything because no-one can ever work out if you really mean what you say. You *might* know the following if you’re sarcastic too…

….that Battleland contributor Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney’s penetrating countenance gazed out from Time’s red-bordered cover asking U.S. Defense Spending: Are Billions Being Wasted? The cover story (we’ve put it outside the paywall — Special Limited-Time Offer to read it for free!) — instantly made Spinney the poster child for Pentagon insiders distraught at the profligacy of the Reagan Administration’s military buildup.

Ian Hancock is not a gypsy. He is a Romani. The difference in nomenclature is so important that Hancock, a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies at The University of Texas at Austin since 1972, has devoted most of his adult life to dispelling ignorance about the ethnic group into which he was born.

This was no fly-by-night decision. Ted Richards loves his parrots so much that he had his face and eyeballs tattooed to look more them. If that wasn't bird-brained enough, the 56-year-old resident of Bristol, England, went even further by having his ears removed in a six-hour operation.

Japan has a reputation of being a homogeneous, mostly harmonious society. There are few foreigners, linguistic differences are rare and on the surface class distinctions are largely absent. But, as Mike Sunda discovered, there is one, often hidden, exception: Japan's untouchables. In the corner of a pristine room tucked away in Tokyo's Shibaura meat market is a table topped with a stack of crudely composed hate mail - evidence of a prejudice that dates back to medieval times.

"Mister Sid" has finally called it a day. Sidney Richardson, 90, retired last week from Gadsden's Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant, 72 years after he was hired. Richardson was the longest-serving hourly Goodyear employee for the corporation worldwide. More than 9,000 employees have been hired at the plant since Richardson, as attested by his time clock card - No. 0912. New employee cards have passed the 10,000 mark. He was the only remaining employee with a "zero" number.

It’s both the coolest — and also in some ways the most depressing — psychology study ever. Indeed, it’s so cool (and so depressing) that the name of its chief finding — the Dunning-Kruger effect — has at least halfway filtered into public consciousness. In the classic 1999 paper, Cornell researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that the less competent people were in three domains — humor, logic, and grammar — the less likely they were to be able...

Shia LaBeouf the performance artist is on the loose again and we couldn't be more excited. By now you've heard about his latest stunt, #allmymovies, right? According to The Guardian, the actor is currently at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, watching all of his movies back to back. That is correct, all of his movies. Shia tweeted the address for the event this morning so that you can sit alongside him and lose yourself in the cinematic work of Shia. Disturbia-ing, right?

It was a fair question, but the last I expected from a North Korean. Mr. Gang, I’ll call him, is a wealthy, middle-aged businessman from Pyongyang. We met outside the North a few weeks ago, waiting for the same flight. I was on my way to visit North Korea with a group tour, and Mr. Gang was headed home. He was glad to meet me, he said. I was the first American he’d ever spoken to, and the first Westerner he had ever met who spoke Korean. He shook my hand and...

Dustin Brown wanted a secure grip on the two knives he had selected to slaughter the children. Before leaving his Morton, Illinois, home on the afternoon of October 13, the 19-year-old wrapped each knife's handle carefully with duct tape. He then pulled on a pair of grippy gloves. The one-mile journey to the public library gave Brown one final chance to rehearse the plan he had contemplated for the last two weeks. Five-inch blades jingled together in his backpack all the while.

Emma Morano, Europe’s oldest person and the second-oldest in the world, marked her 116th birthday by offering to sing her favourite song for visiting well-wishers, Italian media reported. Morano, one of only two women alive certified to have been born in the 19th century, reached the milestone on Sunday in her one-bedroom flat in Verbania, a small town in the Piedmont region of north-west Italy.