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How Secret Societies Stay Hidden On the Internet
It all started with a Facebook message from a dead guy. His name was Ernest Howard Crosby and his profile picture showed an old-time portrait of a man in a dapper vest sporting a bushy Civil War beard....
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California High-Speed Rail—Some Views from the Valley
For those joining us late: California's controversial High-Speed Rail project is worth paying attention to, no matter where you live. While everyone moans about America's decaying infrastructure, this...
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The Cats of the World, Mapped
There are a lot of cats in the world, and there are a lot of cats on the Internet. These two facts—one a longstanding reality, the other a longstanding cliche—often collide with each other in...
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In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was 'Too Fast for the Truth'
Perusing The New York Times archives a few days ago, I stumbled upon a delightful news nugget from 1858 about the "benefits and evils" of the transatlantic telegraph—delightful, because it reads like...
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This Is Awkward, but I Know How Much Your House Cost
This is sort of awkward to bring up, but... I know how much you paid for your house. I also know how many bedrooms your house has, how many bathrooms, how many levels, how many square feet. I know the...
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How Fonts Reveal the Many New Users of the Internet
If you mostly read English or other Romance or Germanic languages, you’ve been spoiled for choice with digital fonts. The Latin alphabet has long been the subject of intense typographical exploration,...
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Could Silicon Valley Become the Next Camden?
When I moved to Camden, New Jersey, I expected to find a city struggling with poverty, unemployment, and crime. I didn’t expect to find a post-industrial landscape littered with technological relics...
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Kapitalism, With Kim Kardashian
What is it like to be Kim Kardashian? What is it like to live her life, and know her mind, and walk a mile in her rhinestone-studded stilettos? You probably have not asked such questions, partly...
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Is Silicon Valley the New Wall Street?
A few years ago, key leaders in the technology industry, led by Apple's Steve Jobs, colluded to hold down their employees' wages. They agreed not to recruit from each other, and this spring they...
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The USPS's Hail-Mary Idea: Embrace 3-D Printing
Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it would begin to sell and ship out customizable, 3-D-printed products—some of which are in truth just slightly customizable, and most of which are fairly...
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When Is a Piano Not a Piano?
When the piano was invented some 300 years ago, it was a technological marvel. The harpsichord could produce sound plucked at a single volume level, but the piano allowed for the kind of nuance you...
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I Drank a Cup of Hot Coffee That Was Overnighted Across the Country
Last week, Thermos overnighted me a cup of hot coffee from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., to see if it could. It was a bald-faced PR stunt. It succeeded in both senses: The coffee was still hot by...
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What Is Pinterest? A Database of Intentions
In 2012, Pinterest broke out to become a wildly popular site and app for collecting media across the Internet. People pin photos into collections called boards, which serve as big catalogs of objects....
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A Tool That Answers 'What's That Typeface?'
The Internet is, from its very core to its most distant peripheries, a vast universe of text. I was reminded of this fact just this morning as I read the transcript of a conversation between my editor...
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How the Remote Control Rewired the Home
Eugene Polley, the inventor of the first wireless television remote control, once said that “the flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next...
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The Future of Iced Coffee
I have seen the future of iced coffee. There I was, wandering the grocery-store aisles—when suddenly, next to the kombucha, opposite the rotisserie chickens, I spotted something I never thought I’d...
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The Quarantine Next Door
On a flat green peninsula beneath a towering range of sea cliffs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a hidden community of people who are isolated many times over. The first layer of their...
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The Rise of the Micro-Holiday
Nancy Hoffman, of Peaks Island, Maine, has amassed a collection of 1,200 umbrella covers. Not umbrellas, to be clear, but umbrella covers: the fabric tubes that encase brand-new umbrellas, the ones...
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The Courts Speak Up for California High-Speed Rail—and So Do Some Readers
As a reminder, this is #7 in a series on the most ambitious and consequential infrastructure project now under consideration in our infrastructure-degraded land. It is the plan for a north-south...
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The Reluctantly Quantified Parent
When I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I did after stocking up on vitamins was cut back on things that made me nervous. I'm not the most tranquil creature, and it felt like a concrete...
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