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The Existential Crisis of Public Life Online
This isn’t a story about Gamergate. For maybe a month now, that pseudo-scandal has been unavoidable in certain thoroughfares of the Internet. Claiming to fight for “ethics in gaming journalism,” its...
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Redesigning the Social Network
Even before he founded the social-media network Ello and championed the pleasures of ad-free browsing, Paul Budnitz was an entrepreneur with a flair for the visual. With Kidrobot, the anti-cute...
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Think Twice About 'Sexy Leia,' and Other Halloween Tips From the TSA
The filmmaker Sean Malone, when traveling through LAX recently, had a belt buckle confiscated by the Transportation Security Administration. The buckle was silver and shaped like the ray gun used by...
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Crowdsourcing Health Inspections With Yelp
"A cockroach ... was enjoying a stroll on my plate while I was eating. The server saw the cockroach crawling on our table and he didn't even pretend to look embarrassed. (Forget an apology!) He grabbed...
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How Sick Chickens and Rice Led Scientists to Vitamin B1
The discovery of vitamin B1 began with a search for microbes. In the late 1800s, microbes were the hot new idea in medical science: Louis Pasteur had recently linked disease to germs, and doctors were...
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The Ubiquity of Cyber-Espionage
Don’t worry about dorm-room hackers, crime rings, or the mafia, said two cyber-security experts Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum. Worry about the government. Or, rather, the governments, plural....
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How to Talk Without Connecting
On a Saturday night about a month ago, I was sitting on my friend's couch, drinking red wine, and looking at my phone. I imagine this scenario is a familiar one to many of you. After we finished...
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Here Come the Swarming Drones
Since the dawn of entomology (more or less), scientists have been pondering the question posed so eloquently in "High Hopes," a song Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote for the 1959 movie A Hole in...
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When Ouija Boards Were Sexy
Ouija boards, as their old-time-y design suggests, first became popular in the United States in the late 1800s. The nation was still recovering, economically and psychologically, from the Civil War,...
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The History of Digital Imaging Began With a Baby Picture
The first digital picture on a computer was, of course, a picture of a baby. In 1957, Russell Kirsch was working at the National Bureau of Standards, which had something amazing—the first computer that...
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Why It's Bad to Be a Robot on the Phone
“The script for interacting with a human receptionist is cordial whereas the script for interacting with an information kiosk is utilitarian.”In a move that seems straight out of The Office (or Office...
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It's Always 9:41 on the iPhone 6
The image above, currently running on Apple's U.S. website, depicts the iPhone 6 in its now-familiar grande and venti sizes. It is, you may notice, similar to other images of the phone that have run in...
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The Wind Farm of the Future Might Be Underwater
Off the coast of Scotland, in the choppy sound between Caithness and the Orkney Islands, you can find some of the fastest-flowing marine waters in the world. The tides of the Pentland Firth can churn...
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The Most Popular Passages in Books, According to Kindle Data
Whether in a crowded library or a dark bedroom, few experiences feel as personal as reading a book. Books are about eye and page, about one human brain in conversation with another. Yet the business of...
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'Bluespace': The Unintended Creative Effect of Tumblr's Wider Posts
Something looks different on Tumblr. The blogging platform and social media network rolled out a new design Thursday for its dashboard—the home page where users create posts, track engagement, and...
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Videochatting With Communists
In 1983 President Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but by the end of his first term, he was wondering if ordinary Russians and Americans couldn’t resolve our nations’s difference by...
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The Plane Crash That Gave Americans GPS
On the first day of September in 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a plane. Its military officers thought it was a spy plane, they said later. But it was not: It was a passenger jet, Korean Air Lines...
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The First Bra Was Made of Handkerchiefs
The bra was not invented on November 3, 1914. Women have been binding and otherwise supporting their breasts for, literally, ages; the first bras may well date back to ancient Greece, where women would...
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Taylor Swift Reminds Everyone How Broken Online Music Is Right Now
Spotify users who want to listen to old Taylor Swift albums might now be seeing red. Or, rather, not seeing Red at all. On Monday, Taylor Swift removed her entire back catalog from the streaming...
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What Happens to a Pill After You Pop It?
In early October, MIT announced that its researchers, along with those at Massachusetts General Hospital, had created a new type of drug delivery system. This "novel drug capsule" does not sound like...
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