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Drones Are Now Appearing on Afghan Rugs
When it comes to what to depict on rugs, Afghan weavers traditionally turn to what’s most familiar. So in the 1980s, when the Mujahedeen were fighting back the Soviet occupation, some local weavers...
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'The Night I Hit Rock Bottom, My Drone Hit the White House Lawn'
Early in the morning of Monday, January 26, a small, recreational, helicopter-type drone crashed on White House grounds. It was an accident—an employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency...
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This Is Getting Serious: Intellectual Self-Isolation in China
Back in 2008, when I had been in China for a couple of years, I wrote an Atlantic article about the repressive shrewdness of the "Great Firewall," the Chinese government's system for censoring the...
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Televised Football Is Looking More Like a Video Game—In Subtle Ways
It is impossible to consider American football without considering television. It’s not just hammy touchdown celebrations or contractually-obligated media comments. The form of football fits TV. It...
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Andrew Sullivan and the Importance of Self-Criticism
I don't really have much big-picture analysis in the wake of Andrew Sullivan's departure from blogging. My reaction is strictly personal. I've spent the majority of my career as a print journalist. In...
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How Technicolor Changed Storytelling
In the dawn of the age of cinema, adding color to black-and-white films was something like "putting lip rouge on Venus de Milo." That is to say, it had the potential for disastrous, garish results. And...
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What Is Fusion?
Its cable channel has been on the air for over a year. It has netted some of the best-known names in digital journalism. The New York Times has devoted weighty political columns to its lead anchor. But...
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How Languages and Genes Evolve Together
As human populations disperse, the separation leads to changes both in genes and in language. So if we look at human DNA and languages over time, we should find that they differ along similar...
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The Decision That Could Finally Kill the Revenge-Porn Business
Revenge pornography websites are a reminder that preying on the vulnerable has long been big business. And while various laws protect people against scam artists, extortionists, manipulators, and other...
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A Priceless Museum Artifact, But in the Ocean
Feeling grimy and exhausted on a cool evening in late July, I was following Linda Carmeroto across a dock at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. I was eager to get to the car she said was waiting for...
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What Do Emojis Mean?
Late in January, the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old alleged leader of the Silk Road black market website, led to a debate over a piece of eyebrow-raising evidence: a smiley face emoticon...
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The Radical Efficiency of the Pot Vending Machine
There should probably be a law—of marketing, of psychology, of thermodynamics—holding that every commercial product, given a long enough tenure on the planet, will eventually end up being sold in a...
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People of the Internet: 1, Cable Industry: 0
Last spring, when I reported a long story on net neutrality, there seemed to be only one sensible resolution to the American Internet’s crisis. But, source after source told me, the U.S. government...
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Mapping 61 Ancient Tattoos on a 5,300-Year-Old Mummy
Wearing a surgical mask and gown over a thick winter jacket, Marcello Melis stood at a glass operating table in a tiny ice chamber and examination room in Italy’s South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. His...
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What My Hearing Aid Taught Me About the Future of Wearables
I was into wearables before there was Google Glass, Apple Watch, or the Moto 360. I was into them before cheap devices told you how much you had walked, run, slept, or eaten. In fact, I’ve been into...
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A Fire Extinguisher That Walks
Fire extinguishers are ubiquitous now. It's rare to be more than a few feet away from one if you're in a city. Which is remarkable, really, given that we're not all that far removed from a time when...
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The Immediate Future of the Dark Web
The Wednesday conviction of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht on seven felony charges demonstrated at least one thing pretty clearly: U.S. law enforcement can not only find but successfully prosecute...
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Ode to Green Slime
Green slime is that gooey non-Newtonian fluid you may remember from childhood science experiments or Nickelodeon television shows. It’s fluorescent, somehow sticky and springy at the same time, and...
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New York City Subways Are Covered in Microscopic Pizza
The trains that carry millions of people in and around New York City every day are also teeming with thousands of bacteria species—a parade of life forms too small to see, including traces of bubonic...
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Internet-Connected Sheep and the New Roaming Wireless
The Internet of Things is one of those buzzy phrases that has driven technology and business since it was first coined nearly two decades ago. Usually it’s applied to urban areas where the idea is that...
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