On August 11, 1994, a man in Philadelphia sat down at a computer and bought a CD. The album was Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, the price was $12.48 plus shipping, and the seller was a young company called NetMarket. Nothing about the object...
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You mention hiking boots over dinner. The next morning, an advertisement for hiking boots appears on your phone. You never remember searching for them. The coincidence feels too precise, and...
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Ask the meaning of life in the right corner of the internet and there is a good chance someone will answer with a number: 42. It has become one of popular culture’s most durable private joke...
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A penguin standing on ice looks as though someone designed a bird with a torso, two feet and almost nothing in between. Its legs seem impossibly short, and when it starts walking, the famili...
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Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
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Every few years, a headline or social-media post seems to announce the same piece of cosmic good news: Pluto is a planet again. For anyone who learned the old nine-planet Solar System in sch...
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You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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You open a social-media app to check one headline. A war update leads to a natural disaster, which leads to political outrage, an economic warning and a frightening health story. Twenty minu...
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For decades, coffee has occupied an awkward place in conversations about heart health. It contains caffeine, a stimulant that can temporarily raise blood pressure and make some people feel t...
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When artificial-intelligence stocks surge, most attention goes to the companies designing the chips. Nvidia became the emblem of the AI boom because its GPUs perform much of the enormous par...
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