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The Attention Machine
Human attention isn’t stable, ever, and it costs us: lives lost when drivers space out, billions of dollars wasted on inefficient work, and mental disorders that hijack focus. Much of the time, people...
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The Best Technology For Fighting Climate Change? Trees
When people talk about technologies that might offset climate change, they often evoke not-yet-invented marvels, like planes spraying chemicals into the atmosphere or enormous skyscrapers gulping...
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Losing the Internet You Grew Up With
In sixth or seventh grade, my best friend and I were obsessed with a fanfiction called “The Fellowship of the Banana Peel.” It was pretty much what it sounds like—a reimagining of The Lord of the Rings...
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Uncle Sam and the Illusion of Privacy Online
The U.S. government made twice as many requests for Twitter user information in the last half of 2014 compared with the year before, according to a detailed report out from Twitter this week. And...
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Drones Might Not Disrupt Birds After All
A white drone with red stripes ascended from grassy wetlands in southern France. Equipped with a GoPro camera, it climbed 30 meters into the air before buzzing across a green lagoon speckled with pink....
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7 Truly Amazing Reasons to Care About NASA's New Satellite
Space journalists can be prone to hyperbole. We say things are awesome and mind-blowing. We talk about billions and trillions. We rattle on about theories of everything. And this is all fitting. Space...
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Facebook Is Bigger Than the Internet
It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly. Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the Internet. But in focus groups, they would talk...
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Apple Is Basically a Small Country Now
It's good to be Apple. Really good. As of this week, in fact, $700 billion worth of good. Apple's closing price of $122.02 per share on Tuesday made it the first American company ever to cross that...
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Watching the Universe in Real Time
Even though the sky looks about the same every night to those of us here on Earth, cataclysmic things happen in outer space constantly. Like right now and now and also now. And for the first time in...
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The Art of Twitter Art
A typical Twitter feed is a stream of letters and words. There is photo-sharing, and plenty of it, but Twitter isn't meant for album-making (that's a job for Facebook, Flickr, Imgur, etc.); it's meant...
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The Tactical Kilt Dialectic
The scene: a man running through a remote desert landscape. The obstacle: a prickly cactus. His task: to jump over it. So begins a video released by the company 5.11 Tactical, purveyor of rugged...
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A Failed Metaphor for Intelligent Design
The watchmaker analogy seems timeless—antiquated, yet always in fashion. The most famous version comes from the English clergyman William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology. Just as a watch is made up...
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Creative Ideas Happen When You Stop Checking Your Phone
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/385434/creative-ideas-happen-when-you-stop-checking-your-phone/
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The Robot That Knows When to Swipe Right
I have come to think of Tinder as a sort algorithm for the mind. It surfaces individual data entries—which happen to be humans—and asks the user to make a single decision about them:Would you make out...
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Skipping the 13th Floor
In 1988, The New York Times Magazine ran a piece on a man named J. Ira Harris, who, as the story put it, "is simply crazy about the number 13." Here's how "crazy" he is: Harris's license plate and his...
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A Warehouse Fire of Digital Memories
Two weeks ago, a seven-alarm blaze at a storage warehouse smogged up the Brooklyn ether (and confettied parts of the East River) with "decades’ worth of charred medical records, court transcripts,...
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Facebook and the Art of Matchmaking
Last year, Facebook’s data team examined how interactions between friends change as they inch toward dating. “During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase...
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How YouTube Changed Journalism
Ten years ago today, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal, registered a new company devised around a simple idea: that there should be one website where people can...
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FAA Drone Regulations Deal Blow to Amazon
When Jeff Bezos appeared on 60 Minutes on December 1, 2013, the Amazon CEO unleashed a startling new innovation for his company: Before long, Amazon would use unmanned "drone" aircraft to deliver...
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How to Do Everything on YouTube
It doesn't feel like it's been 10 years since YouTube launched. The site, like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, is now so culturally entrenched that recalling the web without it is pretty hard,...
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