Bradford Plumer

I'm thinking about a new career in amateur sub-building. Here's 34-year-old Tao Xinglai showing that anyone can do it, really. All it takes is a little ingenuity and scrap metal:
Total budget? $4,400. Of course, if we wanted to take it up a notch, there's Peter Madsen, who built the largest homemade sub in the world, the UC3 Nautilus:...

Suppose human civilization collapses one day. That's not such a zany notion—lots of past civilizations have collapsed. Maybe there's nuclear war, or giraffe flu, or maybe the Yellowstone supervolcano finally heaves and spews. It's a fat disaster...

Annie Hall is pretty much a perfect film. But as David Kimmel describes in I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes at the Great Romantic Comedies, it didn't start out that way. The original version of the film was an epic disaster, in dire need...

There are plenty of English-language writers who sell a lot of books overseas—it's not uncommon for even lesser-known American authors to get their novels translated into multiple languages. But the reverse doesn't hold nearly as well. Only a very...