JONATHAN LIU
The Problem with Christopher Nolan? He's Fundamentally Uninterested in Cities
Christopher Nolan doesn't care about Gotham City, or any city.
How to Get an Internet "Terrorist" To Plant a Bomb (If You're the FBI)
Last Friday, the U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force announced the arrest of Adel Daoud, a suburban Chicago teenager who’s since been said to be “enamored with Osama bin Laden and intent on killing Americans.” Daoud is charged with planting a bomb outside...
Does the Suit Make the Swimmer? A History of Olympic Swimwear
Casual Olympics watchers will have noticed: The male swimmers are topless again! You can see the ladies’ knees once more! And…they look rather more like Grey aliens than last time. The changes were three years in the making. After a season of off...
The Latest Patents Show New Drones Will Bounce, Swarm, and Transform
Every month, over 40,000 applications are made with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. About half that number of actual patents are granted monthly—usually after several years of review and refinement. (Legit patent applications are published 1...
The Big Winner of ObamaCare Decision: Nate Silver
Minutes before we learned Chief Justice Roberts had sided with the majority in ruling the Affordable Care Act constitutional, between 70% and 80% of savvy reality arbitrageurs on InTrade were predicting with their dollars that the Court would strike...
Queen Victoria is the Internet's Latest and Greatest Oversharer
A month ago, at the push of a button and as a diamond jubilee gift to the world, Queen Elizabeth II put her great-great-grandmother’s complete journals online. Like WikiLeak’s Cablegate page, Queen Victoria’s Journals combines Web 1.0 aesthetics with a...
Dear Mainstream Media: On the Internet, It's Clear You're a Sloppy Arrogant Cur Who Hates Your Readers
Late Sunday night (11:04 PM EDT to be exact), the season finale of Mad Men ended. With the Twitter instant-reaction window closed, proper recapping of “The Phantom” began in earnest. By Monday morning, a philistine who somehow missed the show—on any...
Propaganda from Bloomberg's Latest War on Pleasure
First they came for the cigarettes, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cigarette. Then they came for the artificial transfats and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an artificial transfat. Now they’re coming for sugary drinks over 16 fluid...
What Does the Facebook IPO Mean In Terms of Greece?
Facebook (FB) started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange around 11 AM this morning. The opening price, just decided last night, was $38 per share. (As you might have noticed in the year-long build-up to today, the powers that be seem to be...
Battleships Are the Worst Possible Choice for Fighting Aliens
Transformers, the concept, is the defining ontological challenge of our time. Clue, the film, is a definitive text of the American avant-garde. So the problem is not, as various troglodytes might claim, a toy-based movie in the abstract. No, Battleship...
The F-22 Blues
The stealthiest, priciest, sexiest fighter jet ever built is choking - and maybe poisoning - its pilots.