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Hanoi’s New Arms?
Dan de Luce and Keith Johnson at Foreign Policy report that the U.S. ban on arms sales to Vietnam is likely no more. The White House appears poised to end a ban on arms sales to Vietnam in time for a landmark visit by President Barack Obama later this month, despite misgivings from some lawmakers and human […]
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How to Waste $1.4 Billion
Scientific American highlights a new study on the effectiveness of a $1.4 billion U.S. program to promote abstinence until marriage in order to prevent the spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. The program has proved inadequate, to say the least: A rigorous comparison of national data from countries that received abstinence funding under the 2003 U.S. President’s […]
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Zingers in Pakistan
This story of the introduction and evolution of the KFC “Zinger” in Pakistan is surprisingly gripping. Here’s what happened when KFC first opened in Pakistan in 1997: People jammed into the glass-fronted restaurant for days on end. At one point, KFC had to call in the Karachi police for help managing the door. Far from […]
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How Hackers Manipulate Waze (and Other Apps)
Kashmir Hill at Fusion shares the findings from a research team at University of California-Santa Barbara: Here’s how the exploit works. Waze’s servers communicate with phones using an SSL encrypted connection, a security precaution meant to ensure that Waze’s computers are really talking to a Waze app on someone’s smartphone. Zhao and his graduate students discovered they […]
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Blog Love: Lady Geek Girl and Friends
Lady Geek Girl reminisces nostalgically about Return of the Jedi. She also picks apart the themes of the infamous golden bikini scene. An excerpt: There is a part of me that wants to dismiss the slave Leia issue. As Carrie Fisher herself has pointed out, Jabba forces her into a sexualized and objectifying costume and attempts to enslave […]
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Curious About Apple Watch?
Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has you covered. He’s spent a year wearing the device, and he breaks down its successes, its failures and its potential in layman’s terms (i.e. he talks about battery life, the fitness components and wristband design instead of trying to wow the reader with his technical knowledge of the product). I […]
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Breaking Down the Evangelical White Savior Complex
Oy vey. This article from The Washington Post — “My wife and I are white evangelicals. Here’s why we chose to give birth to black triplets” — has some problems, to say the least. A few examples: I grew up as a child of evangelical missionaries in Honduras, very aware of racial diversity because I was the blue-eyed, […]
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Paul Ryan Face Plants
David Dayen has some harsh (and fair) criticism of Paul Ryan’s work as Speaker of the House so far: By the end, Boehner had come to hate the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right cabal that brought on his ouster through its relentless opposition to compromise. But Ryan merely fears the Freedom Caucusers, unwilling to cross […]
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An Exercise in Trading Places
I really like this article from Esquire, examining the different lives of four men across the income spectrum. It’s hard to imagine the way other people live—how they plan their finances, what keeps them up at night, what they do on a daily basis—especially if, like me, you’ve never been exceptionally rich or exceptionally poor. Esquire‘s […]
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Stories of Conversion
Kelsey Osgood asks: “Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?” In this collaboration between Longreads and Atlas Obscura, Osgood profiles two cases of Amish conversion: one successful, one unsuccessful. She writes of her experience in an Amish church: I sneak a few furtive glances around the room, and then look up to Alex, who is […]
Timothy Pate 