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Unmanned
For as long as humans have been gathering in groups to kill each other, other humans have watched, whether from the front line or the sidelines, and made art about it. The impulse is a natural one—to...
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'Mayday! Emergency Landing. We're on Fire.'
Two weeks ago today, on the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, workaday life in downtown Washington came to a momentary halt during a dramatic flyover by World War II-era aircraft right along the National...
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The Underwater Internet
In 1962, during a period of technological and political transition in the undersea cable industry, the Keawaula cable station was built on Oahu’s west shore for the landing of the Commonwealth Pacific...
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The Tiny House Powered Only by Wind and Sun
In theory, I support the tiny-house lifestyle. I would enjoy the opportunity to live on a lonesome plain somewhere, with only the stars and many insects for company. I’m sure I could find a way to...
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A Brief History of the Wristwatch
On July 9, 1916, The New York Times puzzled over a fashion trend: Europeans were starting to wear bracelets with clocks on them. Time had migrated to the human wrist, and the development required some...
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Inbox Zero vs. Inbox 5,000: A Unified Theory
For some, it’s a spider. For others, it’s an unexpected run-in with an ex. But for me, discomfort is a dot with a number in it: 1,328 unread-message notifications? I just can’t fathom how anyone lives...
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When the Best Page on a Campaign Website Is the One That's Not There
The only unimpeachably good things to emerge from the 2016 presidential election so far have been the 404 pages of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I’ll back that up, but some context first: When a...
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Unbreakable: A Robot That Can't Be Stopped
It almost looks like a wounded animal. There’s that little hop in its gait, the way it looks tentative as it springs forward from its haunches, the not-exactly-straight trajectory of its path. Except...
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The Dragon Autopsy
Try to imagine how hard it would be to skin a Komodo dragon. It is harder than that. The problem is that the giant lizard’s hide is not just tough and leathery, but also reinforced. Many of the scales...
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Immortal But Damned to Hell on Earth
Imagine a supercomputer so advanced that it could hold the contents of a human brain. Google engineer Ray Kurzweil famously believes that this will be possible by 2045. Organized technologists are...
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What the Early Days of the Cable Industry Reveal About Silicon Valley
In the second season of the HBO comedy Silicon Valley (minor spoiler alert), a tech company debuts its highly anticipated data compression algorithm by livestreaming a pivotal mixed martial arts match...
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What Would It Take to Double a Cell Phone’s Battery Life?
How is it possible that mobile phones can do so much—summon cars, order groceries, make video-calls, count footsteps—and yet still drain power so quickly? For devices that are so mind-bogglingly smart,...
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The Best Soundtrack for Productivity
Now that more employers are transitioning to open-plan offices, workers increasingly get to enjoy all clacking of keyboards and yakking of their colleagues—sorry, “spontaneous collaborative input.” In...
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The Myth of a Borderless Internet
Almost a decade ago now, McDonald’s made a seemingly innocuous decision. On the side of Happy Meals distributed in Morocco in 2008, it put a small map of the region. The map showed a border between the...
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Chinese Hackers Snare Data From Millions of Federal Workers
It has not been a good year for federal government data security. In October alone, Russian government hackers breached unclassified computer networks in the White House. They also penetrated the State...
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Should Journalists Know How Many People Read Their Stories?
Soon, reporters at two of the country’s leading newspapers will have access to the most basic type of digital analytics: They will be able to see web-traffic data for their own stories. That is, they...
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Who's Afraid of the Metric System?
When former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee formally jumped into the presidential race on Wednesday, he made a splash. There are good reasons to take Chafee’s bid seriously, but his...
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Why Did China Hack Federal Employees' Data?
One of things that makes hacking so unsettling is the asymmetry of the situation: Unlike with a physical theft, the victims sometimes don’t know they’re victims for a long time, and once they find out,...
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The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
When her husband lost his job in 2010, Kristy Milland realized how important the Internet had become to her family's survival. For several years, the 30-something Canadian high-school graduate had a...
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When Google Self-Driving Cars Are in Accidents, Humans Are to Blame
In August 2011, on one of the main roads that runs through Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, a Prius—one of the cars in Google’s fleet of autonomous vehicles—caused a fender-bender....
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