James' World 2

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Explore A quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, in the borderless realm of the midwater, two blue-green orbs illuminate the inky black. They glow for a few seconds, then disappear.

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This giant squid has the world’s biggest light-producing organs. But why?

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From start to finish, the biggest art heist in modern history lasted just 81 minutes. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered two unsuspecting night security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement.

“Gentlemen, this is a robbery,” the criminals announced.

The pair proceeded to remove 13 treasured artworks on display in the lavishly decorated gallery, smashing the protective glass of two Rembrandt paintings and cutting the canvases from their gilded frames. Just over an hour later, the thieves made off with a staggering collection of art that’s valued today at $500 million.

Despite a flurry of press attention—and the $10 million reward offered by the museum for the items’ safe return—the stolen works have never been recovered. In 2021, Netflix docuseries “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist” took a deep dive into the thorny mysteries surrounding the crime. As Adrian Horton reports for the Guardian, the four-part show built on the reporting of the Boston Globe and WBUR, as well as the FBI’s ongoing investigation.

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Netflix documentary “This Is a Robbery” delves into the mystery of a 1990 art heist. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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The numbers are stunning.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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It was happy hour at the whitewashed hotel on the remote volcanic island of Salina, perched in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a short hydrofoil ride from northern Sicily. Around the pool, honeymooning couples, including my husband and me, drank tamarind margaritas and watched the sunset against Salina’s sister island Stromboli, which puffed out plumes of volcanic smoke into the encroaching dusk.

It was as romantic as I hoped it would be when booking the trip a year earlier – with one unanticipated and starkly unromantic caveat. A woman on one of the sun loungers had Zoomed into her New York work meeting, running through a pitch deck and talking loudly about ROI.

People run away to remote islands on vacation to pretend for a moment that the real world – the world of corporate culture and incessant demands on your time and energy – doesn’t exist. But with that one Zoom call, the mirage was dispelled. All of the disbelief we had collectively suspended came crashing down as we were sucked, unwillingly, into someone else’s remote working experience.

As good, reliable Wi-Fi becomes available in increasingly far-flung locations, there are few places it’s truly impossible to work from. I’m not immune to the lure of this lifestyle myself. I’m definitely guilty of camping at tables with plug sockets in coffee shops around Europe. But I came away from my honeymoon experience asking the question: Just because you can work from anywhere these days, does that mean you should?

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Robert Rodriguez/CNET

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With more than 9 billion gigabytes of information traveling the internet every day, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to compress data into smaller packages. Cutting-edge techniques focus on lossy approaches, which achieve compression by intentionally “losing” information from a transmission. Google, for instance, recently unveiled a lossy strategy where the sending computer drops details from an image and the receiving computer uses artificial intelligence to guess the missing parts. Even Netflix uses a lossy approach, downgrading video quality whenever the company detects that a user is watching on a low-resolution device.

Very little research, by contrast, is currently being pursued on lossless strategies, where transmissions are made smaller, but no substance is sacrificed. The reason? Lossless approaches are already remarkably efficient. They power everything from the PNG image standard to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip. And it’s all because of a graduate student who was simply looking for a way out of a tough final exam.

Seventy years ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Robert Fano offered the students in his information theory class a choice: Take a traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. Fano may or may not have informed his students that he was an author of that existing algorithm, or that he’d been hunting for an improvement for years. What we do know is that Fano offered his students the following challenge.

Consider a message made up of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A straightforward way to encode such a message would be to assign each character a unique binary number. For instance, a computer might represent the letter A as 01000001 and an exclamation point as 00100001. This results in codes that are easy to parse — every eight digits, or bits, correspond to one unique character — but horribly inefficient, because the same number of binary digits is used for both common and uncommon entries. A better approach would be something like Morse code, where the frequent letter E is represented by just a single dot, whereas the less common Q requires the longer and more laborious dash-dash-dot-dash.

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Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

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Peter Kramer, a reporter at the USA Today Network, joined Gannett colleagues on Renaissance Plaza in White Plains, N.Y., to voice grievances on Monday. Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

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