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Why Tech Still Hasn't Solved Education's Problems
Remember MOOCs? Two years ago, massive open online courses seemed to be everywhere. The wave of Internet-enabled disruption that had swept through the post office and the book store had now arrived at...
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In the Brain, Memories Are Inextricably Tied to Place
It’s no coincidence that, when recalling a tragedy, we ask where someone was: “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?” Psychologists hypothesize that we lock in that memory by linking it to a...
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The Case for a Foursquare That Helps You Avoid Your Ex
She was everywhere I went. I saw her at bars and coffeeshops. I saw her walking down the street, waiting at traffic lights, smiling at me in the familiar way she had for months. I saw her on the El,...
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If a Self-Driving Car Gets in an Accident, Who—or What—Is Liable?
On first contact with the idea that robots should be extended legal personhood, it sounds crazy. Robots aren't people! And that is true. But the concept of legal personhood is less about what is or...
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South Korea's First and Only Astronaut Just Quit Her Job
It was something of a lark all along. South Korea started its space program in 2006 with a national search for qualified astronaut candidates. The country doesn’t have the technological infrastructure...
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The Email Fave Button Could Actually Happen
In the dark days of 2011, it was a common refrain: Why isn’t there an Instagram for video? Now we have Vine, and all is right in the world. But there’s another feature, actually, that’s somehow...
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The Internet's Original Sin
Ron Carlson’s short story “What We Wanted To Do” takes the form of an apology from a villager who failed to protect his comrades from marauding Visigoths. It begins: What we wanted to do was spill...
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The First Pop-Up Ad
Ethan Zuckerman is sorry. Zuckerman, who leads the Center for Civic Media at MIT, says he didn't realize what he was bringing into the world when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad more than 20...
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Forcing America's Weaponized Police to Wear Cameras
Police officers armed like stormtroopers rained tear gas on Ferguson, Missouri, fired rubber bullets into crowds, and arrested journalists charging their cell phones in a McDonald's last night. As my...
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Daimler Employees Can Set Emails to Auto-Delete During Vacation
Even the most disciplined relaxers can find themselves just, you know, every now and then, taking a peek at their work email when they're away on vacation. Yes, their out-of-office reminders are set....
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Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
All these people are trying to kill email. "E-mail is dead, or at least that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on," wrote Businessweek tech reporter Ashlee Vance. There's the co-founder of Asana, the...
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The Many Ways Twitter Is Bad at Responding to Abuse
Hundreds of tributes have already been written since the world learned of Robin Williams’ death by suicide on August 11. The loss of his genius and warmth was clearly a terrible blow to his fans,...
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How Uber Helps Women Break Into the Taxi Industry
How many times have you climbed into a taxicab to find a female driver at the wheel? Until recently, I'd virtually never had this happen. After scores of cab rides in New York City, Southern...
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Wait, Is That a Human on the Moon?
In this age of big surveillance and miniature satellites, there is an idea that—once we are able to track everything around us—the magic and mystery of the universe will be replaced with data,...
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Why Did the Ice Bucket Challenge Go Big? Boston
Where did the ice bucket challenge came from? Since the beginning of June, the viral fundraising game has spread across social timelines and late-night talk shows. According to Facebook, more than 15...
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How Much Racial Profiling Happens in Ferguson?
In 2013, the Ferguson Police Department made 5,384 stops and 611 searches. 86 percent of the stops and 92 percent of the searches were of black people. Only 67 percent of the town's population is...
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Twitter Starts to Change the Central Logic of Its Service
When will Twitter no longer be Twitter? This week, the company tested a change to its core product that could alter the service in a small but important way. According to Mashable, Twitter is altering...
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Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected by Scientists
In a retired shore station for transpacific communications cables on the western coast of Vancouver Island sits a military computer in a padlocked cage. It's the sort of cage you might otherwise use to...
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What an Introvert Sounds Like
Do our Facebook posts reflect our true personalities? Incrementally, probably not. But in aggregate, the things we say on social media paint a fairly accurate portrait of our inner selves. A team of...
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118 Years Ago, The New York Times Crowdsourced a New Motto
Though it may seem like a product of the Internet, crowdsourcing has been around for ages. Take, for example, an experiment run by The New York Times in 1896, when the newspaper decided it was time to...
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