The Big Blue-green Monster: Wal-Mart is pushing us toward sustainability more than you could ever imagine.

In 2005, Wal-Mart was a piñata that liberal critics loved to bash, owing to a litany of sins ranging from low wages to union busting to encouraging sprawl. So when Lee Scott, the CEO at the time, bounded onto the stage at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and announced that energy-efficiency would be “at the heart of the company,” it seemed…

What the health care debate and the credit crisis have in common

Did you hear? Barrack Hussein Obama wants to pull the plug on your granny, so he can plug in his hybrid! In the meantime, he’ll make you sit before a Death Panel—to distract you, as he tries to raise Lenin’s ghost at a Kenyan séance led by Witch Doctor in Chief, Jeremiah Wright.

Those hideous distortions pale against what’s actually being floated about Obama and his health…

Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG draws daring connections between architecture, science fiction, and pop culture—and draws an audience.

If you’ve never visited BLDG BLOG, you should—and this month, the blog has been transformed into a book aimed at both newbies and fans. The premise takes some explaining—the blog is a quixotic, oddball experiment. Geoff Manaugh started it in 2004, when he was working as a non-profit grant writer in Philadelphia. He was devouring science magazines and pop…

The Beast from Bentonville (and the world’s largest private employer) announced that it’s backing employer mandates for health care. That’s not all it’s been up to.

Hell froze over yesterday, a pig took its tentative first flight—and, in related news, Wal-Mart may have just secured the title of The World’s Mightiest Advocate for Progressive Causes.

That title claim became undeniable with Wal-Mart’s announcement that it’s endorsing the idea of compelling large companies to provide health coverage. Its…

Can augmented reality technology finally make it easy to do the right thing?

Last week was huge for a young technology called “augmented reality”—and that’s important even if you’re not a nerd, because it should revolutionize the way we approach social causes. Sure, many current examples of augmented reality are trivial, but hear me out.

Augmented reality allows you to see, in real time, data about your surroundings. It’s different from having the internet on your phone—you…

Michael Pawlyn’s pioneering designs mimic nature’s closed-loop systems to help us thrive in extreme resource scarcity.

Most “green building” solutions are actually obvious: extremely good insulation, smart ways to use natural ventilation, and, perhaps, ways to reduce water use or recycle water. If you want to get fancy with it, throw in a solar panel or two; add on a couple of smart energy meters.

But what’s next? What’s the future of green, after we address those…

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are cataloging the world’s weirdest places to foster a new age of curiosity.

An enormous concrete dome that seals off the crater left by an atomic blast. The ancestral home of a nearly forgotten Kentucky family, which had four children born with bright blue skin. The hiding place of a memoir written by an infamous 19th-century fugitive—and bound in his own skin.

They’re all real places you can visit. And they’re all…

The Big Blue-green Monster: Wal-Mart is pushing us toward sustainability more than you could ever imagine.

In 2005, Wal-Mart was a piñata that liberal critics loved to bash, owing to a litany of sins ranging from low wages to union busting to encouraging sprawl. So when Lee Scott, the CEO at the time, bounded onto the stage at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and announced that energy-efficiency would be “at the heart of the company,” it seemed…

What the health care debate and the credit crisis have in common

Did you hear? Barrack Hussein Obama wants to pull the plug on your granny, so he can plug in his hybrid! In the meantime, he’ll make you sit before a Death Panel—to distract you, as he tries to raise Lenin’s ghost at a Kenyan séance led by Witch Doctor in Chief, Jeremiah Wright.

Those hideous distortions pale against what’s actually being floated about Obama and his health…

Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG draws daring connections between architecture, science fiction, and pop culture—and draws an audience.

If you’ve never visited BLDG BLOG, you should—and this month, the blog has been transformed into a book aimed at both newbies and fans. The premise takes some explaining—the blog is a quixotic, oddball experiment. Geoff Manaugh started it in 2004, when he was working as a non-profit grant writer in Philadelphia. He was devouring science magazines and pop…

The Beast from Bentonville (and the world’s largest private employer) announced that it’s backing employer mandates for health care. That’s not all it’s been up to.

Hell froze over yesterday, a pig took its tentative first flight—and, in related news, Wal-Mart may have just secured the title of The World’s Mightiest Advocate for Progressive Causes.

That title claim became undeniable with Wal-Mart’s announcement that it’s endorsing the idea of compelling large companies to provide health coverage. Its…

Can augmented reality technology finally make it easy to do the right thing?

Last week was huge for a young technology called “augmented reality”—and that’s important even if you’re not a nerd, because it should revolutionize the way we approach social causes. Sure, many current examples of augmented reality are trivial, but hear me out.

Augmented reality allows you to see, in real time, data about your surroundings. It’s different from having the internet on your phone—you…

Michael Pawlyn’s pioneering designs mimic nature’s closed-loop systems to help us thrive in extreme resource scarcity.

Most “green building” solutions are actually obvious: extremely good insulation, smart ways to use natural ventilation, and, perhaps, ways to reduce water use or recycle water. If you want to get fancy with it, throw in a solar panel or two; add on a couple of smart energy meters.

But what’s next? What’s the future of green, after we address those…

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are cataloging the world’s weirdest places to foster a new age of curiosity.

An enormous concrete dome that seals off the crater left by an atomic blast. The ancestral home of a nearly forgotten Kentucky family, which had four children born with bright blue skin. The hiding place of a memoir written by an infamous 19th-century fugitive—and bound in his own skin.

They’re all real places you can visit. And they’re all…

Why the problem of fixing our buildings is so vague—and what we can do about it

We’re hardwired to address the smaller problems that we can see, rather than the big ones that we can’t imagine. There’s no better—or more important—example of that problem than the current debate over energy use.

I’d wager that if you polled even well-informed citizens, they’d rank fuel efficiency as the number one problem we face, in trying to reduce carbon emissions.…

Eleni Gabre-Madhin knows that efficient markets can save lives.

In 1984, she was an undergrad studying economics at Cornell when a famine struck in Ethiopia, her homeland. Researching the unfolding tragedy for a paper, she stumbled on an alarming, seemingly impossible fact: Even as 1 million people in the country’s northern reaches starved to death, there were grain surpluses in the south. But there was simply no way for grain growers to know exactly where their…

Mark Kurlansky’s new book revives an abandoned WPA writers project.

Food journalism almost always focuses on the ideal instead of the everyday—it tells us more about our dreams than about the lives we live. One exception is the new book by Mark Kurlansky, who’s best known for Salt and Cod, books that traced how two food commodities came to shape the world. The Food of a Younger Land gathers dispatches collected across America in the 1940’s by a forgotten…