How a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind.
William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he...
Want to see with your tongue? Boing Boing's David Pescovitz looks at technology that blurs the boundaries between our five senses.
What if you could see with your skin? Or taste what you see? While those kinds of experiences might suggest a mental disorder, or an acid trip, the ability to substitute your senses by choice is on the horizon. A...
The Global Lives Project is creating a video cross-section of humanity.
Rumi Nagashima, 22, navigates Tokyo in her wheelchair on the way to a girl scout meeting where she’s the troop leader. In Ngawle Village, Malawi, Edith Kapuka, 13, is playing ball with her school friends before walking a trail to her small hut. Across the world in San...
A host of shady online services is making it easy to lie and cheat.
Are you sick of lying, cheating, and stealing the old-fashioned way? Of course you are—it’s too hard. Who wants to spend all that time and effort cooking up excuses, ruses, and swindles to deceive unwitting victims, when you could be enjoying your ill-gotten gains?
Good...
Social media meets social unrest in Guatemala
Guatemala is in the throes of its most intense political convulsions since a bloody 36-year civil war ended in 1996. A president accused of assassination by the victim himself, from beyond the grave; government officials accused of corrupt dealings with one of the country’s largest banks;...
Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin explains how fast people can still enjoy slow food.
When the economy took a nosedive, I did the same thing a lot of other Americans did: I looked at my household expenses and my lifestyle with newly frugal eyes, and began thinking about costs and personal priorities in new ways. That included food.
Rethinking...
Water levels are falling in America's largest reservoir. If it dries up, so could power and water for much of the Southwest.
Imagine Nevada’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, as a great sand pit, and imagine the population of the western United States as a colossal ostrich burying its head in the pit....
Xeni Jardin is a co-editor of Boing Boing, and producer of the blog's daily Boing Boing Video program. In March, 2009, she traveled to the West African nation of Benin. Following are excerpts from her travel journal. Longer form video and audio features are planned for future release through Boing Boing Video.
1.
A few days before we...
Boing Boing's David Pescovitz on the merits of burying your dead yourself
As cyberspace becomes a “layer” on top of the physical world and we spend more of our lives online, a new-found appreciation emerges for authentic experiences, interactions, and goods. I think that’s part of why so many people are...
Boing Boing's Joel Johnson on why Amazon's Kindle 2 is the next step towards ubiquitous e-book readers
Today Jeff Bezos held up the Amazon Kindle 2 in front of a lecture hall filled with journalists and outlined his vision for the white slab e-book reader: "Every book ever printed in every language available for download in...
