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The Test We Can—and Should—Run on Facebook
In 1959, the sociologist Edward Shils wrote an influential essay called “Social Inquiry and The Autonomy of the Individual.” He discussed the nature of studying humans with new techniques—which, for...
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How to Run Facebook's Mood Manipulation Experiment on Yourself
When news of Facebook’s attempt to emotionally manipulate its users emerged this weekend, debate quickly focused on the experiment’s ethics. Lauren McCarthy, though, kept thinking about the experiment...
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Tag and Release: Tiny Tech Traces a Rare Bird's Path
I first saw Y0U on the Delaware Bay. That is, Y-zero-U, the alpha-numeric code used to identify a banded shorebird. This particular bird, a member of the rufa subspecies of red knot (Calidris canutus),...
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The Invisible Blue-Jean Particles in the Original Star-Spangled Banner
If you've visited the National Museum of American History in the last century, you may have seen one of its most prized artifacts: The original star-spangled banner—the one that Americans raised at...
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You Can Delete, But You Can't Forget
The morning after I found out that my mother had died, I did something that I still don’t entirely understand: I searched through my Gmail inbox for all of her emails and deleted every one. I erased...
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We're Already Designing Babies
ASPEN, Colo.—A new type of in-vitro fertilization procedure allows doctors to transfer the mitochondrial DNA from one woman into the egg of another, effectively creating a baby with three parents: The...
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The Military Doesn't Want You to Quit Facebook and Twitter
Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an...
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She's Still Dying on Facebook
I’ve been obsessed with Lea’s Facebook profile since January 2006, when she joined, just a month after I created my own account. In high school, we had a consuming friendship—together we did things...
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A Quest for the Secret Origins of Lost Video-Game Levels
If I could have told my fifth-grade self that one day I’d be sitting in lobby of storied video game maker Sega’s central building, waiting to meet with Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka, I think...
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New York City Musical References, Mapped
As the nation's cultural mecca, New York City has been honored by musicians inside and outside the five boroughs. They invoke its streets and namecheck its neighborhoods in song after song. Wikipedia...
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That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In
Twitter, because of its strict character limit, has become a significant testing ground for developers who like making bots that imitate humans. It's easier for their botmakers to get their creations...
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Explore a Shipwreck, in Real Time
The ocean is, along with so much else, a graveyard. Ships both ancient and modern, both famous and well-known only to a select few, have met their ends at the ocean floor. Sometimes, we exhume their...
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What Makes The Wall Street Journal Look Like The Wall Street Journal
On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, The Wall Street Journal was missing what most other papers on the planet considered a critical element: Photography of what had happened the day before. The only...
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NASA's Zombie Spacecraft Learns to Fire Its Engines
The quest to save the ISEE-3—a long-lost NASA probe launched in the disco era and abandoned in the dot-com boom—might just succeed. Late last week, the amateur scientists and engineers working to...
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Buzz Aldrin on the Moon: 'More Desolate Than Any Place on Earth'
Buzz Aldrin, the legendary moon-walking astronaut, spent this afternoon answering the Internet's questions on Reddit. He writes about how he thinks an American Mars landing isn't far off, explains why...
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Even Cleaning a Giant Whale Sculpture Is Epic
On the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History hangs a model of the largest animal on Earth, the blue whale. The model is a replica, one might say, of a female blue whale that was found in...
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The Age of Erasable Books
I accidentally delete things all the time: an email I meant to send, a phrase I wrote but replaced, or a hard drive I thought I was fixing—only to realize I erased my computer’s operating system. Yet,...
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Gambling Online, Gambling in Casinos: What's More Addictive?
The first time I ever stepped foot inside a poker club I could feel my gut tighten as I walked through the door. Just the thought of losing even a small fraction of my meager savings was enough to...
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This Land, JibJab's Seminal Parody Flash Video, Turns 10
Ten years ago today, a small Flash animation firm based in Los Angeles uploaded a video to its website. The three-minute cartoon parodied the year’s presidential election and borrowed the tune of an...
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The Mortality of Paper
This past winter, while my family and I were in the middle of a move from the mountains of North Carolina to the suburbs of Des Moines, we got a call from the insurance agent working for our moving...
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