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A Surprising Benefit of the Common Core: Really Cool Video Games
When I was in seventh grade—a year during which I considered it a fashion statement to wear cargo shorts with a Legend of Zelda t-shirt—my school tried to implement a statewide education initiative....
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The First 'Picturephone' for Video Chatting Was a Colossal Failure
Bell Labs was right about so many aspects of video chatting. They were right that it would a little bit awkward. That it'd provide "an enhanced feeling of proximity and intimacy." That people would use...
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In Online Dating, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfortable-data-behind-online-dating/
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D'Oh, Canada! Apple's Latest Map Mixes Up Toronto and Ottawa
Americans probably have a lot to apologize to Canadians for, but one of them is this: Most of us have very little idea about Canada's most basic geography. Ottawa? Vancouver? Ontario? Those places, for...
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A Brief History of Shrinking Wallpaper
When you unlock your phone you’re immediately met with an image. It’s one you chose, one that says something about you or reminds you of something you like—a wallpaper. Mine is a fox, jumping into some...
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Cement Makes the Modern World Possible
Concrete is one of those technologies that was used for centuries—in this case, by the Romans—and then had to be invented again centuries later. But once we rediscovered it, we were hooked. The only...
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Everything: You're Doing It Wrong
Are you having a good day? Are you feeling rested, and happy, and ready to conquer the week ahead with your signature mixture of aggression and aplomb? Are you on top of your game, and thus on top of...
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Before Computers, People Programmed Looms
Before IBM, before punch-card computers, before Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, one of the very first machines that could run something like what we now call a "program" was used to make fabric....
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Future Ennui
It’s been seven years since the first launch of the iPhone. Before that, smartphones were a curiosity, mostly an affectation of would-be executives—Blackberry and Treo and so forth. Not even a decade...
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Do People Remember News Better If They Read It in Print?
Consider two different morning routines. In the first, you’re already washed and dressed as you sit down to your morning newspaper. While sipping coffee at the breakfast bar, you leisurely peruse the...
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The 100% Renewable-Powered City: Too Good to be True?
Yesterday I mentioned the latest accomplishment of Burlington, Vermont. Previously the site of such implausible-sounding but actually true achievements as "an airport that is pleasant" and "a newspaper...
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Making Babies Outside of the Womb Has Never Been So Easy
A little more than forty years ago, one of the first attempts at in-vitro fertilization ended when the chairman of the OB-GYN department at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian hospital took the test tube...
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The Internet Is Losing Interest in Computers
You may know Google Trends. It takes all the searches that all the humans (and other users of Google) make, pulls them apart, and deduces what topics people are searching for. It's perhaps the closest...
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When the Government Wanted a Database of Everyone's IQ
In November of 1967, The Atlantic's cover featured an evil Uncle Sam generating data readouts in a dark control room. The journalist behind the cover story, Arthur Miller, noted at the time that...
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The One-Paragraph iPhone 6 Review
Late Tuesday night, the first reviews of Apple’s new smartphones were published. Though the reviews come from a wide swath of writers—everyone from the Gray Lady to an elite Apple blogger to Stephen...
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After Uber, San Francisco Has Seen a 65-Percent Decline in Cab Use
Yesterday afternoon, the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency gave a presentation to the organization's board of directors. It was titled "Taxis and Accessible Services...
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That 'Free U2 Album With Purchase of Cassette Player' Ad? It's Bogus
Behind the web’s seething stream of new things, there’s an enormous archive. It's the old and the (often) interesting—the pre-digital newspapers, magazines, catalogs, photographs, prints,...
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Single-Stream Recycling Is Easier for Consumers, But Is it Better?
Single-stream recycling seems so simple. There is a bin. You put everything that's not trash—whether it's paper, plastic or metal—into that bin. The city comes and takes that bin away. Easy. The first...
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TMZ's Famous Ray Rice Video Was Edited—Was It Ethical to Publish It?
The famous video of Ray Rice striking his girlfriend is edited. This isn’t a secret. TMZ put it in their original story: “This video is a cleaned up version of the raw surveillance elevator video—the...
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Meet Martha, the Very Last Passenger Pigeon
When you walk into the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the first thing you see is an elephant. The Fénykövi Elephant—yes, it has a name—is the centerpiece of the museum's rotunda, a...
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