You might think twice about boarding a bus named "If Tomorrow Never Comes," with the phrase spray-painted in green above the windshield. I don't, not when the alternative is loitering along the smog-shrouded shoulder of Commonwealth Avenue—the 18-lane highway looping through Metro Manila colloquially known as the "Avenue of Death." And not when the ride in question is actually a jeepney, the garishly decorated offspring of U.S. Army jeeps abandoned in the Philippines following World War II. You might call it a death trap, but for millions of Filipinos it's just part of the daily commute. ... Jeepneys have neither emissions standards nor seatbelts nor retirement ages—the eldest have been running since the 1970s. They are the most dangerous and decrepit two percent of traffic, and they generate 80 percent of vehicular pollution. ... Nearly half of the capital's residents take one of its 45,000 jeepneys to work each day, more than double the number riding the city's buses and trains. Yet it's virtually impossible to cross the megacity riding just one; a typical commute involves some combination of the three. ... But today, Metro Manila has a booming economy and a surging population—the supercity has added 6 million residents since 2000, for a total of more than 24 million. At the same time, middle-class Filipinos are fleeing jeepneys for a quiet, air-conditioned drive in their own vehicles. Cars presently account for less than a third of all passengers on Manila's roads, but comprise nearly three-quarters of traffic. New car sales have nearly doubled in just the last three years. ... Jeepneys traditionally operate on a franchise system, with owners applying to the DOTC for the right to run on a particular route. The problem, she explains, is that the government never bothered to create a coherent network—it just handed out franchises to anyone who asked.

Uganda, in East Africa, is home to 37 million people and one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s perhaps best known for the dictator Idi Amin, who came to power in 1971 and murdered 300,000 of his countrymen during an eight-year reign. Although the country borders tumultuous South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda today is an island of relative political stability. The economy hums. Shopping malls bloom around the capital. Its people, to generalize, are deeply religious, family-oriented, and averse to profanity. Winston Churchill dubbed Uganda the Pearl of Africa in part for its friendly people. ... It’s also one of the leading providers of mercenaries—or “private military contractors,” as the security industry prefers to call them. They are at once everywhere and nowhere. On TV, a company called Middle East Consultants runs advertisements looking for able-bodied young men to send to Dubai. Talk to taxi drivers as you bump along dirt roads in the capital, Kampala, and each has a friend or cousin or neighbor who raves about the fortune he’s made guarding some embassy or joining the war in Iraq. But official numbers and interviews with the kind of multinational companies that go to countries such as Uganda to find soldiers are hard to come by. ... A decade ago, after con men began running employment frauds on mercenary hopefuls, the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development created the External Employment Unit, an agency meant to track men leaving to serve abroad. ... Mercenary remittances surpassed coffee exports in 2009, according to the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development. Interpol’s Kampala bureau conducts roughly 1,000 background checks on Ugandans heading abroad for security jobs every month

By some estimates, the market for VR will be worth $150 billion within four years. A decade from now, who knows? It’s impossible to say because no one’s clear on what the platform is best suited to do. But the race is on to figure it out. Never mind that some of the largest players have tried to put things on your face before: 3-D spectacles, Google Glass, and previous incarnations of VR headsets. Those were inferior technologies, they say. This time is different. Try it for yourself and you’ll understand that those technologies died so this one could live. ... Despite feverish press coverage of VR, two-thirds of the U.S. population remains unaware of the technology, according to a survey by research firm Horizon Media. That suggests a definition is in order. There are a few flavors of the technology: virtual reality, augmented reality, and a combination known as mixed reality. They all use a special headset to alter human perception and, in effect, take you somewhere or enable you to see something that would otherwise be invisible. We’re lumping all the technologies under the term VR in this article, both for simplicity’s sake and because all the permutations share the same roots. ... In 1943, IBM’s Thomas Watson predicted “a world market for maybe five computers”—most likely because he was thinking about computers in terms of what they were (the size of a room) rather than what they would become (the size of a fingernail).

Yannis Pitsiladis, scientist and provocateur, had come here for the same reason that pilgrims wheezing with bronchitis and emphysema have headed to this low-altitude divide between Israel and Jordan. He had come for the oxygen. ... A quarter-mile below sea level at the Dead Sea, where the barometric pressure is high, there is about 5 percent more oxygen to breathe. The naturally enriched air had been shown to increase exercise capacity in those with chronic lung disease. Would it do the same, Pitsiladis wondered, for the world’s fastest distance runners? ... He wanted to redefine the limits of human endurance by training a man to run a marathon in less than two hours without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. ... The Sub2 Project, as it is called, is an attempt at the extraordinary — to reduce by nearly three minutes the world record of 2 hours 2 minutes 57 seconds, set at the 2014 Berlin Marathon by Dennis Kimetto of Kenya. ... Some consider the goal impossible. Many are suspicious because of widespread doping in track and field, and almost no one considers the feat achievable anytime soon. ... To run under two hours without the use of banned drugs would be to set a record that would stand with the four-minute mile as an ultimate test of human stamina. ... A 1:59:59 marathon would require a searing pace of 4 minutes 34 seconds per mile, seven seconds faster than the pace of the current world record. It would require 85 to 90 percent of a runner’s maximum aerobic capacity — twice the capacity of an average man — and a sustained heart rate of about 160 to 170 beats per minute.