GM'S HIT AND RUN

Countless articles have been written about General Motors and its massive recalls earlier this year. What hasn’t been fully told is how GM might have gotten away with multiple counts of consumercidewere it not for the efforts of three men: a Georgia lawyer, a Mississippi mechanic, and a Florida engineer.

HELPS TO HAVE A MOP TOP

Boyan Slat is a 20-year-old on a mission — to rid the world's oceans of floating plastic. He has dedicated his teenage years to finding a way of collecting it. But can the system really work — and is there any point when so much new plastic waste is still flowing into the sea every day?

MOSTLY HONORABLE JUDGE KARA BROWN

Shade. What is it? What is it not? Is it necessary? Recently, I have been troubled by the cavalier and largely incorrect ways that many have been using the term "shade." The same people who thought Miley Cyrus was good at twerking have helped dilute shade into pretty much any instance where one person insults another. Somebody must dedicate themselves to preserve the integrity of the definition of shade. And that somebody is me.

NOW IT'S ALL BANKS AND STARBUCKS

"SimCity," the classic PC game that makes mayors out of middle schoolers, turned 25 last week. Well, actually that’s a common misconception  —  the IBM version of "SimCity" was released in October of ‘89, but the original came out in February. I found this out from Will Wright, the game design guru behind "SimCity" and the genre of games it spawned, whose mental history of the legendary game is far more accurate than the Internet’s. “I think everybody just puts too much trust in Wikipedia,” he said.

UNRAVELLING A MODERN LABOR MYSTERY

​Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Most of the big names in technology are men. But a lot of computing pioneers, the ones who programmed the first digital computers, were women. And for decades, the number of women in computer science was growing. But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.