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The Eternal Return of BuzzFeed
Before Nyan Cat, before “Imma let you finish,” even before rickrolling, there was a small startup in New York dedicated to finding pre-viral content online. The first employees of BuzzFeed wrote about...
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Human After All: Ex Machina's Novel Take on Artificial Intelligence
Last month at South by Southwest, while swiping through the dating app Tinder, some festival attendees came across an attractive 25-year-old brunette named Ava. Ava used correct punctuation and...
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A Transcontinental Culture War Could Cost Google Billions
If you're like most people, when you Google something, you don't really think too much about how the top results got there, as long as you get what you're looking for. The tech giant's competitors...
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Europeans Use Google Way, Way More Than Americans Do
It sure seems like Europe isn’t fond of Google. On Tuesday, the European Union’s antitrust commissioner formally charged the company with monopolistic behavior, alleging that it gives Google products a...
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Inside the Podcast Brain: Why Do Audio Stories Captivate?
In my all-time favorite episode of Radiolab, “Finding Emilie,” a young art student named Emilie Gossiaux gets into a terrible accident while riding her bike and, rendered blind and deaf, is unable to...
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Google's Other Big Research Project: Curbing Its Own Prejudice
Self-driving cars, balloons that beam Internet service to previously unconnected citizens below, immortality—these are the farsighted, high-risk pursuits that Google calls its "moonshots." But another...
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How NPR Tote Bags Became a Thing
Tote bags are so synonymous with public broadcasting in the United States that they're as much a physical manifestation of NPR as a radio. The humble tote bag is, and has been for much of the network's...
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Should Netflix Be Accessible to the Deaf?
When President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act 25 years ago this July, his hope was that the law would ensure that people with disabilities were given “independence, freedom...
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A New Satellite for One of the Great U.S. Space Programs
One of the U.S. government’s most useful science programs is also one of its least known. The Landsat program doesn’t produce images like the ones of astronauts playing golf on the moon nor geologists...
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Mapping Genomes to Understand Contaminated Foods
Last week, two companies issued national recalls of their products due to listeria contamination. For Sabra Dipping Company, which is recalling 30,000 cases of hummus, no illnesses or deaths have been...
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Britt McHenry and the Upsides of a Surveillance Society
“I’m in the news, sweetheart.” So began the tirade—if a steely, sneering string of vitriol can fairly be called a "tirade"—delivered to an anonymous recipient, a worker at a towing garage, by the ESPN...
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Who Will Track the Internet Trackers?
It's a given that when you visit a website, that site is gathering information about you. Big Data knows you, and it knows you well. If you don't want to be tracked, you might as well log off. Or you...
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Makerspaces Are Remaking Local Economies
Two and a half years ago, James Fallows wrote an article about the changing state of American manufacturing. He argued that developments such as 3D-printing are enabling start-up companies to...
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When Cops Check Facebook
In 2012, Brooklyn police officer Michael Rodrigues arrested a burglary gang, the Brower Boys, by adding gang members as friends on Facebook. The day of the arrest was like gathering the lowest-hanging...
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Do Killer Robots Violate Human Rights?
As bizarre as it sounds, the United Nations just held an arms-control conference to figure out if killer robots might violate the laws of war. Ten years ago, very few experts were worried about...
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The Dilemmas of Maker Culture
What are some of the fast-changing elements of the "maker movement" currently reshaping part of the American economy? In an item here a few days ago, I went through some of major developments in recent...
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Google Joins the Search For the Loch Ness Monster
The tale of the Loch Ness monster has always been, in a funny way, a story about technology. More specifically, it is a story about how machines can bump up against the edge of a mystery, and provoke a...
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The Importance of the Paper Clip
In late 2009, the London-based blogger James Ward and the artist Ed Ross began a movement to celebrate "stationery"—the term for office supplies, basically, in the U.K.—that they called the Stationery...
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Canada Loves the Poop Emoji
The French love the heart emoji. Canadians prefer pizza—and the pile of poo. And Americans? The land that gave the world the iPhone, the Declaration of Independence, and the Kinsey Report prefers emoji...
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Can Starbucks Salvage the American Dream?
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/390978/starbucks-university/
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