For several decades, starting in the early 1970s, I traveled regularly from London, where I lived as a resident alien, to Boston, where I grew up, and each time it was like a tumble through the Looking Glass. Boston was so mild, so confident, still the joyous and even innocent city of my youth. The noteworthy Boston tragedies, vividly recalled by my father—the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (21 killed), the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inferno of 1942 (492 killed)—were over, and such infernalities seemed unrepeatable.

Arriving in Boston was like landing upon the bosom of serenity from the derangement of a war zone. Britain at that time was in the grip of a bombing campaign by well-funded and feuding nationalists in Ulster, who were driven by spite, folklorism, and religious bigotry and were tribalistic in their antique grudges, absurd in their speechifying.

London was weary and anxious, and by the mid-1970s there had been a number of bomb outrages: the Old Bailey bomb of 1973 (1 death, 200 injured, shattered buildings), the Guildford bombing of 1974 (5 killed, 65 wounded), the pub bombings in Birmingham (21 killed, 182 injured), the Regent’s Park nail bomb of 1982 (the deaths of 7 musicians playing selections from Oliver! and many injuries), the Chelsea Barracks cluster bomb on the same day (11 deaths, many dismemberments, seven dead horses), the bombing at Harrods department store at Christmas 1983 (six people killed); and 5 people dead and many injured in an attempt on Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984.

Imagine jet-setting around the world like a VIP, with guaranteed access to premier nightclubs and exclusive cultural events, deals at five-star hotels and luxury spas, and a group of well-traveled, glamorous people eager to befriend you at the farthest corners of the earth.

That’s the premise of ASmallWorld (ASW), an invitation-only social network that relaunched Monday as a subscription-based travel and lifestyle club. Long known as a Facebook for the rich and famous, ASW is slashing its membership size from 850,000 to 250,000 and operating on an annual member fee of €80, or $105, instead of relying on advertising.

All members will have access to deals and discounts from hundreds of global travel, lifestyle, and fashion partners including Cathay Pacific Airlines, Mandarin Oriental Hotels, David Barton Gym, Uber car service, and Derek Lam.

In an effort to identify and locate the most pivotal of American history’s overlooked moments, Andrew Carroll has traveled to all 50 states, amassed two dozen file cabinets of research, and even attracted the suspicions of the FBI.

The result is Here Is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History, a 457-page book documenting his four-year journey to bring attention to uncelebrated stories “that reverberate nationally” and the sites where they occurred.

In 2009 the Washington, D.C.–based author set out to track down these little-known landmarks. For months at a time, he crisscrossed the country in an erratic route he likens to a Jackson Pollock painting. Among his many trips, he has traveled to Hawaii’s farthest inhabited island, owned by a family of Scottish ranchers, where the Japanese landed during World War II; he has located the Rigby, Idaho, farm where a young Philo Farnsworth first found inspiration that led to the invention of the electric television; and he paid tribute to the North Carolina highway where legendary African-American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson died in a car crash.

Geologists are not generally all that excitable. After all, developments in their field generally take place over millions of years. But when scientists began scouring the Atlantic off southeast Brazil in 2011, they suspected that they were on to something—
and something very big, at that.

Two years—and half a dozen deep-sea expeditions later—the geological world is abuzz. Brazilian marine geologists are poring over the rubble dredged up from the undersea excavations in the so-called Rio Grande Elevation, and the research done by a Japanese exploration vessel, which deployed a mini, three-man submarine to comb the same waters before sailing on to Rio.

So what did the rubble reveal?

YOU’VE HEARD of his black cod with miso that’ll make your eyes roll back into your head. Now Nobu Matsuhisa—the culinary legend who brought Japanese-Peruvian fusion to a well-heeled crowd with 25 restaurants around the world—is entering the hotelier game. Las Vegas’s newest destination, the Nobu Hotel, is nestled inside Caesars Palace just steps away from a sleek, inviting new Nobu restaurant.

A chef’s hotel? It’s not as odd as it sounds. Like everything else found in Sin City, this is 100 percent natural.

Longtime Nobu restaurant partners Robert De Niro and film producer Meir Teper teamed up with the chef to develop Nobu Hotel in what was previously Caesars Palace’s Centurion tower. The hotel’s soft launch was in February, but its lavish Vegas-style grand opening party was thrown at the end of April. The entrance is so discreet, set a few steps below Nobu Way, that people not aware of its existence (and this included many guests staying in regular ol’ Caesars when I visited in early April) would be surprised to discover Japanese minimalism inside opulent ancient Roman environs.

Years after Boeing committed to using lithium-ion batteries in its 787 Dreamliner, other airplane makers developing advanced new jets have rejected the technology as too risky. As Boeing executives found themselves on the defensive this week at a National Transportation Board inquiry into their choice of batteries, it has become clear that other planemakers are not surprised that the lithium-ion batteries had problems serious enough to cause the grounding of the entire 787 fleet for more than three months.

A whole batch of new airplanes that will be flying soon have rejected lithium-ion batteries in favor of the older and well proven nickel-cadmium technology. These include the 787’s direct competitor, the Airbus A350, which will be making its first flight this summer. (Airbus initially chose lithium-ion batteries but dropped them when Boeing’s problems became clear.) Two other new passenger jets, the 110-130 seat Bombardier C-series, made in Canada, and the 90-seat Japanese Mitsubishi Regional Jet, have also gone with the older, safer option.

 “We looked at the technology and decided that lithium-ion batteries were not ready, not stable enough, to be used on our airplane,” Bombardier spokesman Marc Duchesne told The Daily Beast. Mitsubishi president Teruaki Kawai told The New York Times that he regarded lithium-ion batteries as “Too dangerous. The technology isn’t mature enough for a plane like ours.”