"The contemporary customer is mad as hell—fed up with inept service, indifferent employees, and customer-service departments that are harder to negotiate than Kafka’s Castle."

"Apple has unveiled a new music social network that could rival Facebook and Twitter, as well as an Apple TV that can stream movies and television shows directly from the Internet."

A new book tells the story of how a Parisian perfume magnate persuaded Proust's family not to destroy his effects, among which were his manuscripts and famous overcoat.

"A small fleet of privately developed spacecraft will head into orbit in the next few years." Technology Review looks at which companies are most eager to explore the final frontier.

"The universe was not created by God, scientist Stephen Hawking has said in his new book. Professor Hawking believes the laws of physics were behind the Big Bang instead."

 “Impossible, you say?” one of the early pages asks rhetorically in Art of McSweeney’s, a study of the art of the quirky periodical McSweeney’s Quarterly. “Nothing is impossible when you […]

Keith Olbermann helped MSNBC craft a model that allowed the network to adhere to one ideological segment of viewers over another, creating the incentive to brand themselves in terms of ideology rather than news.

Everyone in jail claims to be innocent, but attorney and law professor Barry Scheck has proven that many of these convicted criminals may actually be telling the truth. Scheck is […]

The Montessori method is easily the best-known system of self-directed learning in formal education. Now, Montessorium is putting the 100-year-old educational tradition at the fingertips of today's children with two […]

Props to my colleague Lindsay Beyerstein for this great catch yesterday: Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle's campaign received a donation from someone who listed her employer as "husband" and her […]

Being able to retain some sense of control during his kidnapping—albeit small—helped Alpert overcome the trauma of the experience.

Humanizing yourself and creating a bond with your captor enhances your chances of survival, but sometimes you will also need to be deceptive.

The NYPD and FBI both agree that Alpert should not have survived his kidnapping; Alpert shares with us the strategies he used to stay alive.

Former federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped at gunpoint on his 38th birthday, kept his wits during the harrowing 25-hour ordeal, convinced his captors to release him, and then helped […]

A conversation with the writer and kidnapping survivor.

If the current activity around the world wasn't enough, I just found a report that Nevado del Huila in Colombia had an ash-producing explosive eruption today. The Colombian government is […]

As ballot papers for Labour’s leadership land on doorsteps this week, those charged with electing the next Leader of the Opposition, namely party members, MPs and affiliated trades unionists have […]

Now that I have dispensed with the pleasantries, we can get back to volcanoes! The volcano that many of you have been following is still Sinabung in Indonesia. After a […]

Every choice we make involves calculating the risk versus the reward, but if we mistake luck for skill, as was the case on Wall Street, these calculations become meaningless.

Survival expert Laurence Gonzales explains how to increase your chances of surviving some of the most common deadly scenarios.