A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded ...

There are also features on such classic stand-alone comics as Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles by Jack Kirby; the first ...

The first time Tom Ray released his tiny hand-made creature into his computer, it reproduced rapidly until hundreds of copies occupied the available memory space. Ray's creature was an experimental ...

Glicol is a free music programming environment that runs in your web browser — no installation needed. As someone who dabbles in music coding, I like how it lets you connect audio nodes (like ...

Gar’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here. One of the most popular posts I’ve included in Gar’s Tips & Tools is Scott ...

Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons and Futurama, once told me that he was inspired by my countdown clock, and wanted to use it in Futurama. In my version I found actuarial tables to calculate my ...

In the world of scenario planning, the fact that something is unthinkable should not prevent us from considering it. The breakup of the Soviet Union was unthinkable almost until the day it happened.

A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and ...

You can spend a lot of money on an acoustic guitar these days and end up with an instrument that doesn’t improve with age, either tonally or aesthetically. With CNC machines and other robotic aids, ...

The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders. And the internet is intangible, like spirits ...

Out of nothing, nature makes something. First there is hard rock planet; then there is life, lots of it. First barren hills; then brooks with fish and cattails and red-winged blackbirds. First an ...

China is the question mark in the equation of the world. Its answers affect the destiny of everyone else on the planet. Which way will it head? Contemporary China is an island. Although it is not ...