The dust of the Sahara swirled through the classroom's open windows. Inside, 24 teachers clustered around slanted wooden desks, pushed together to make four discussion groups; the school had no electricity, no running water, no library. There was no air conditioning-one of the teachers had tucked a towel into his collar, the only concession to the heat.

At 6:30am on Tuesday, May 24, someone began banging on the front door of Justin Shafer's home in North Richland Hills, Texas. When Shafer and his wife answered the door, they found a dozen FBI agents with guns drawn. Shafer, 36, still in his boxer shorts, was allegedly handcuffed, according to a Daily Dot report .

In his new book, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling , Adam Kucharski details how trying to understand dice games led one mathematician to develop probability theory, how one of the first wearable computers was designed to covertly predict the fall of a roulette ball, and how poker-playing bots are advancing more quickly than we think.

Early on a humid Tuesday morning in May, Robert Xiao, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student, stares intently at his MacBook, his eyes darting among his Windows, OS X, and Linux setups, indie K-pop blaring from his headphones. He hasn't slept in 22 hours.

As I stood on a Brooklyn street corner late at night with one hand gripping a wad of cash in my jacket and the other clutching the smartphone in my pocket, an old memory hit me. The place looked exactly like a street corner where I bought weed once (or maybe twice) in high school.

In the fall of 2007, a new social network named Friendfeed launched in semi-private beta. Founded by four ex-Google employees-Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh-it had a simple mission: " to glue together the web ," as Buchheit put it.

"Tor is essential," Shari Steele says over the phone. "Tor is so critically important. We can't afford to not have Tor." That's the kind of thing someone might say when all hell is about to break loose, but Steele sounds downright ecstatic.

The shiny new pair of Bose headphones you bought online just arrived in the mail. You break the seal of a huge corrugated cardboard box and tear through multiple layers of packaging. You immediately feel a pang of guilt. Could your Amazon addiction be bad for the environment? You can rest easy.

The rainforests are the world's lungs. They provide the oxygen we breathe, suck up carbon from the atmosphere, and host an incredible amount of biodiversity. Yet over the past half-century, they've been destroyed at a rapid clip. And it's only getting worse.

When a friend begged Andy Danna for some heroin for a sick acquaintance several years ago, he agreed to hook her up. Two years later, when, Danna says, he was clean and on a good path, cops kicked in the door and arrested him "cuz of a rat that sold coke and got busted.

In 2014, security guru Bruce Schneier said, " Surveillance is the business model of the Internet . We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing." The abstract and novel nature of these services tends to obscure our true relationship to companies like Facebook or Google.