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Air Conditioning Is Boiling the Earth and Making Us Weak: An Interview with Author Stan Cox
It hit 95 degrees in Chicago on Monday, making it the hottest Memorial Day in the city's history. It was hot enough to result in a number of heat warnings instructing individuals to avoid the outdoors while staying in air conditioned spaces. Are we now...
Neil Armstrong Gave an Incredibly Rare Interview to Whom?
Upon becoming the first man to step foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong uttered perhaps the most famous line in American science history. And, well, he hasn't said much since. Armstrong is notoriously hard to interview, and compared to fellow Apollo 1...
Recording at the Bottom of the Marianas Trench: An Interview with Luke Temple of Here We Go Magic
We caught them for a minute while they're touring and picking up famous hitchhiking cult film directors.
Mars in an Ice Cave
Last year's Mars 500 simulation - in which six men locked themselves inside of a spacecraft-like environment in the outskirts of Moscow for 520 days - may have been scientifically "accurate" but "looked":http://motherboard.vice.com/2010/8/12/mars-bound...
The Idiocy of Demonizing Bradley Manning: An Interview with Civil Rights Lawyer Chase Madar
Bradley Manning has now spent close to 700 days in jail without trial. Chase Madar’s _The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History_ is "being published this month":http://www.orbooks.com...
The Truth about America's Highway Killers: An Interview with Author Ginger Strand
In the special Bicentennial Issue of Life, the nation’s interstate system was described as, “The most grandiose and indelible signature that Americans have ever scratched across the face of their land.” This statement remains truer than the magazine’s...
How to Be An Activist Filmmaker: An Interview with Chris Rogy of Witness
I recently had time to catch up with Chris Rogy, who's currently part of the group at Witness developing best practices for activist filmmakers. (Full disclosure: He's a friend of mine.) We chatted about everything from Witness' "How to Film Protests...
Meet the Guy Who Designed North Korea’s Website for $15
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is a country of non sequiturs, exemplified by how the late Kim Jong Il's prodigious affinity for Hennessy stands in stark contrast to the generations of families on IT (and food for their people, but...
Analog Still Rules: An Interview With Record Store Day Co-Founder Michael Kurtz
In the last half decade, "Record Store Day":http://www.recordstoreday.com/Home has inspired some bizarre limited edition offerings. This year, for example, you can snag a split 7” featuring Toronto indie cooer Feist and her polar opposite, Atlanta...
Why Thomas Friedman is Always Wrong: An Interview With Journalist Belen Fernandez
It has been over thirty years since readers of the New York Times were first subjected to the vacuous prose of Thomas Friedman. Back then he was simply a reporter covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, not yet the full-formed apologist for Empire...
Swarming Robots Won't Kill Us All: An Interview With Quadrotor Inventor Vijay Kumar
I was sitting at my desk, munching an embarrassingly-gargantuan chocolate-granola cookie and musing, “What on Earth are the latest developments in the infinitely fascinating field of robotics?” (This is something I think about a lot.) Then I vaguely...
How and Why to Make a Movie about the 'War for the Web': An Interview with Michael Wooldridge
Like most big engineering feats in modern history, the Internet began as a military and university affair in the United States (ARPANET). The World Wide Web would follow about two decades later, when it emerged as a side project out of a European...