Jacob Weisberg's Blog, page 2327

Study: People Don't Want More Apps

Google and Apple's mobile platforms each boast about 1.2 million apps right now, and the race to develop hit apps never stops. But using data from the digital analytics firm comScore, Quartz points out a surprising trend: Most smartphone owners in the United States download zero apps per month.

Actually, maybe it's not so surprising. How often do you download a new app? For most of the non-tech journalists I know, zero in a typical month sounds about right. And the comScore data shows that 65...

Your Mother-in-Law Loved Chef

“If you want to be an artist, do it on your own time,” barks Riva, the profit-maximizing restaurant owner Dustin Hoffman plays in Chef, at his creatively frustrated head chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau). Though Favreau—who also wrote, directed, and produced the movie—has played down the parallel in interviews, it’s not hard not to see Favreau’s personal stake in that moment. Favreau has spent nearly a decade helping to build Marvel into a massively successful global brand. He directed the first...

Watch Beyoncé’s Flawless Performance at the VMAs

Though MTV’s Video Music Awards are ostensibly intended to honor the year’s biggest names in music with a handful of “moonmen” statues, it’s generally the GIFs and memes generated from the night that are most talked about. And at this year’s show there was no bigger viral spectacle than Beyoncé, who closed out the VMAs with a flawless, 16-minute medley of songs from her 2013 self-titled album with her husband, Jay Z, and daughter, Blue Ivy, in the crowd.

The two then joined a tearful Beyoncé...

Are Humans Any Good at Pheromones?

Excerpted from Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Tell Us About Human Relationships by Jennifer L. Verdolin. Out now from Prometheus Books.

As if your face, your eyes, your symmetry, your hair, your waist, your teeth, and sometimes even your feet weren’t enough, there’s even more going on than meets the eye, and this other consideration may just be the ultimate deciding factor in initial mate attraction—it’s how you smell. When discussing mating systems with my students, I alwa...

Photos of 1920s Philadelphians, Hanging Out on Their Stoops

The Vault is  Slate 's history blog. Like us on  Facebook , follow us on Twitter  @slatevault , and find us on  Tumblr.  Find out more about what this space is all about  here .

Photographer John Frank Keith wandered Philadelphia in the 1920s, capturing scenes of people in front of their houses. The photographs tightly frame groups of people—drinking, playing, babysitting, hanging out—against backdrops of South Philadelphia brick and concrete. The Library Company of Philad...

LinguaFile II: Can You Guess the Mystery Word?

Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 41: LinguaFile II

Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙  Download  ∙ Play in another tab

Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss a mystery word or phrase with Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer. For more on the mystery word, visit Zimmer’s Word Routes column on Vocabulary.com.

You’ll find every Lexicon Valley episode at slate.com/lexiconvalley, or in the player below:

Send your thoughts about the show to lexiconvalley@slate.com...

SpaceX and ESA Suffer Launch Problems

It hasn’t been the best week for uncrewed space launches.

On Friday, Aug. 22, 2014, SpaceX was testing a new configuration of their F9R vertical launch and landing rocket — essentially a Falcon 9 first stage booster adapted to land on its tail after launching a payload into space — when something went wrong. It was already a few hundred meters in the air when the software onboard detected the malfunction and aborted the mission by exploding the rocket. This is done to prevent the possibi...

How Big of a Problem Is Space Contamination?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Robert Walker, writer of articles on Mars and space:

For me, the No. 1 issue that is rarely discussed is contamination of the solar system by Earth microbes and of Earth by samples returned from space. It is not so much that the issues are not discussed at all. There are many papers and workshop reports about them. The problem is that they are rarely discussed by the public and are ignored in news reports. So there is hardly any public awa...

Are You Man Enough for the Cockatiel?

Zayn Malik from One Direction has one. Soccer star Olivier Giroud has one. (What style-conscious European footballer doesn’t?) Justin Bieber and Tilda Swinton each have had one for a while. In fact, the first time I asked my barber to cut my hair in this style, I requested “a Bieber-Tilda”: You know, shaved on the back and sides, and foofy and floppy on top.

Bieber-Tilda notwithstanding, the fact remains that, despite its exploding popularity, there is no official name for this hairdo. It’s n...

The Ice Bucket Challenge Isn’t Going Away

As long as there is an Internet, stupid stunts will occasionally go viral. Remember planking? Icing? They flare up, they go away, little harm is done.

The Ice Bucket Challenge, however, is different, because it’s not going away. The challenge started in July, at least in its present incarnation, but it wasn’t until Aug. 13 that the ALS Association put out its first press release about the phenomenon. The charity tallied $5.7 million in donations in the two weeks between July 29 (when my frien...