A recent paper (Bennett et al. 2009) announced the discovery of 1.5 million year old fossilized footprints from Ileret, Kenya, almost certainly belonging to Homo erectus (see also this commentary article by Ann Gibbons). Homo erectus was already known from fossils such as the Turkana Boy to be very ...

As Albany lawmakers ponder which of a half-dozen Ravitch plan variations they might support, the possibility looms that no solution may come in time. New Yorkers could see their fares rise 25 percent while service is cut back -- a twin catastrophe in this tough economic time. Yet no big new ideas ar...

Traditional Media in Transition chronicles the challenges and innovations undertaken by leaders in media, entertainment and technology. In this premiere episode of Traditional Media in Transition, the Hard Rock International, a 35-year-old brand, takes its eclectic Americana for a wild ride through ...

To the National Theatre for David Hare’s one-man show on Berlin. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. Quite simply, it was embarrassingly, exasperatingly awful. Hare, in person, is a fan of the southern English amateur/eccentric shtick. He makes much play ...

So, I’m looking around trying to find something I haven’t seen 12 times on other pages (it’s been a slow week for news items – you can only gush over the same 3 things at the big magazines for so long), and I find something from the long distance echo department (a boyhood euphemism for I sa...

Bachmann likes to portray herself as a fiscal conservative, fighting against government waste and pork-barrel spending. But when Bachmann was in the Minnesota State Senate, she co-sponsored a bill for a ridiculous boondoggle called Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). Bachmann was one of the original Pod S...

Censorship continues to pose problems for historians and academics in Russia. Orlando Figes, a history professor at the University of London, just finished writing a book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia , that does not sit well with the Russian government's desire to instill...

Best I can gather, Bruce Sterling just spun everybody’s head around from a New Zealand pulpit with a fantastic blizzard of words about the silly vagueness of Web 2.0, and offered up as its replacement a monumentally vaguer futuristic apparition he calls the Transition Web. And nobody’s r...

An ITDP proposal for BRT on 34th Street. Rendering by Luc Nadal and Mark De Decker. This is the third of four installments in our interview with ITDP director Walter Hook about Bus Rapid Transit in New York City. Be sure to catch the first and second parts if you haven't yet. In this installment Hoo...

At Qweerty one of a breed that's all too common. When Feminists talk about the Patriarchy, and the arrogance of male privilege, this is what they mean.: At the risk of sounding controversial, I visit Queerty because I am a gay white male. I have no interest in 'women issues'. While I'm not opposed t...