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As the Australians Announce Their (Possible) MH 370 Finding
Main point: sympathies for the tremendous strain on the families involved -- Chinese, Malaysian, and others from around the world. Secondary point: as I write it's not clear whether the Australian...
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What Was Your First Tweet?
The world's first tweet was short and perfunctory and notable both for its lack of punctuation and its lack of capitalization. It was sent by Jack Dorsey, nearly eight years ago today: just setting up...
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Man vs. Machine: A March Madness Journal
This is a record of encounters with the humans who play college basketball. For most, they've been reduced to numbers, percentages: bracketed. Around here, I want to decompress them, let them be young...
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How to Fund Your Band's Tour On Spotify (Without Really Trying)
Meet Vulfpeck. They’re a funk band. They’re based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And they just released a new album called Sleepify. A representative of the streaming music Spotify has already weighed in on...
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It's Futile to Fight the Tide: AP Will Now Accept 'Over' as a Synonym to...
Here it is, the tweet that ended decades of global grammatical stability and secure stylistic norms: AP Style tip: New to the Stylebook: over, as well as more than, is acceptable to indicate greater...
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Why You Still Have to Fill Out All Those Paper Forms at a Doctor's Office ...
David Blumenthal MDIn the new issue of the magazine (subscribe!) I have an interview with Dr. David Blumenthal. He is now head of the Commonwealth Fund, but during the first few years of the Obama...
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Before There Was the Like Button, There Was ... the 'Radiovota'
The Like button is older than you think. Well, sort of. Back in the 1930s, Dr. Nevil Monroe Hopkins, a research engineer at NYU, had an idea: He wanted to allow consumers of the mass medium of the...
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The San Francisco of Tomorrow
1. The San Francisco of tomorrow: it's gonna get tall and dense in SoMa. "The Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) engaged steelblue to create a suite of marketing assets that tell the story of the...
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Why It's Time for the Journal of Porn Studies
The first issue of Porn Studies, an academic journal exploring "pornography, and sexual representations more generally," has debuted. The mere fact of its existence, which became public in mid-2013,...
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When Tweets Are Tracking Devices
It should be so simple. If you're on Twitter, and you don't want people to know where you're tweeting from, don't click the "share your location" button. Put another way: If you don't want your tweets...
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On the Ramifications of High-Tech, Big-Data Medical Care
As mentioned this morning, in our new issue I have an interview with Dr. David Blumenthal about the paradox of modernization in the American health care system. We all know that everything about...
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When a Man Is Tired of Wingsuit Videos, He Is Tired of Life ...
... as Samuel Johnson might have sayeth, if he had gotten a look at these things. We've previously explored the wonders of wingsuit-flying in China and assorted sites in Europe (plus underwater). Now I...
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The Use and Misuse of Information Technology in Health Care: Several Doctors...
Our new issue has an interview with Dr. David Blumenthal about why it has taken the medical system so long to adopt electronic record-keeping, and what it will mean when the switch occurs. (Blumenthal...
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This Is What a Facial-Detection Algorithm Looks Like in 3D
Once the heady stuff of films like Minority Report, facial recognition algorithms are now a part of so many technologies that it’s hard to keep track of them. iPhones, iPhoto, and Facebook all try to...
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Poetry After Robots
1. The human response to robopoetry. "Learning to detect the difference between these two mingled kinds of poetry could be the legacy of early robopoetics and games like Bot or Not. In the words of Bot...
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After the Latest MH370 Report, How to Think About Speculation
Once again I am spending most of today in transit, and the doors of a (commercial) flight are about to close. So this is a placeholder note about today's announcement from the Malaysian prime minister...
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The Curiosity Gap Is Closing, Says Upworthy
The question I've always had about Upworthy—the fastest-growing media startup in memory—is whether it had figured out how to exploit a single behavioral tic or created a system for finding and using...
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Don’t Listen to Google and Facebook: The Public-Private Surveillance...
If you’ve been reading the news recently, you might think that corporate America is doing its best to thwart NSA surveillance. Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from...
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William of Occam, Thomas Bayes, and the Fate of MH370
Three perspectives worth mentioning this morning. 1) Mysterious disappearances were once the norm. A reader who runs a tech firm writes: It's interesting to remember that this sort of mysterious...
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When Did Group Pictures Become 'Selfies'?
It has been four short months since Oxford Dictionaries editors declared "selfie" their word of the year for 2013, but already the word’s meaning is shifting. A selfie, it seems, is no longer just "a...
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