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How a New Librarian of Congress Could Vastly Improve U.S. Copyright
Many things are said about the Librarian of Congress. Some claim that he has not been seen in years, that his encyclopedic intellect is now stored in thousands of Laserdiscs kept in an Amazon-owned...
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What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?
When I recently learned of Amazon's new plan to pay some authors for each page that a Kindle user reads, I remembered an editor who looked at my one of my book proposals and said something along the...
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The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be)
It is not enough for the Internet to succeed. It must succeed inevitably. Or so many of us Internet Triumphalists in the mid-1990s thought. For, if the march of the Internet’s new values were not...
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Yale's Rare-Books Library Is Saving Old Chipotle Cups
Remember those little stories on the side of the Chipotle cups? Do you happen to have one lying in the backseat of your car? You, then, have at least one thing in common with Yale. Yale’s rare-book...
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The Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need
Atlanta turns yellow for two weeks in April. Streets, driveways, terraces, cars—everything cakes with pollen. It’s the trees that cause the worst of it. Pine, oak, sweet gum, sycamore, mulberry,...
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Even Early Focus Groups Hated Clippy
This is part of an occasional series about abandoned Internet icons like Twitter’s Fail Whale and AOL’s Running Man. Clippit, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant, lived like a firework, or perhaps...
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Gmail and the (Shrinking) Luxury of Mistakes
Among the many things that there should probably be a German word for is the feeling that comes when you realize you’ve sent a digital message prematurely. That feeling, whatever it’s...
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That Time the CIA Bugged a Cat to Spy on the Soviets
My favorite story about American spying is one I've never been able to verify with the Central Intelligence Agency, and not for lack of trying. At the height of the Cold War, the story goes, officials...
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The Rise of 'Speed-Listening'
It started, for Ashlee Vance, with an email. The author of a recent (and much-quoted) biography of the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk recently received a note from a reader, the CEO of the San...
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The Pope, Lonely on the Internet
Of all the media’s favorite blood sports, media criticism has to rank near the top. No one can fret about digital technology like the journalists who seem surgically attached to their smartphones. But...
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Beyond Black and White: The Forgotten History of Color in Silent Movies
For many modern audiences, silent films are virtually synonymous with black and white. Yet as far back as 1895, more than 80 percent of them were all or somewhat colored with dyes, stencils, color...
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Humans Might Be the Ultimate A.I. Thought Experiment
Midway through the recent movie Ex Machina, one computer programmer asks another why he invented a machine that can think, talk, and act like a human. “That’s an odd question,” replies the tech...
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How Airbags Are Supposed to Work
The sound of an airbag deploying is loud, like the cracking of a whip. Really, it’s the noise of an explosion. When car sensors detect a crash, a chemical reaction is triggered by the ignition of a...
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Living Test Patterns: The Models Who Calibrated Color TV
In November 1953, The New York Times reported that late-night television audiences across New York had “discovered a new quiz game” on WNBT, the local NBC affiliate. It did not air on a regular basis...
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Were All Those Rainbow Profile Photos Another Facebook Experiment?
Facebook, you may have noticed, turned into a rainbow-drenched spectacle following the Supreme Court’s decision Friday that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right. By overlaying their profile...
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A View From Space So Clear You Can See the Cars Moving
Even from outer space, Fenway Park is immediately recognizable. That “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” as John Updike famously described it in 1960. “Everything is painted green and seems in...
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Move Over, Shakespeare—Science Has Insights Into Love, Too
ASPEN, Colo.—Is science ever the way to a man or woman’s heart? This week, I’m sharing a variety of responses to the question, “What insight or idea has thrilled or excited you?” This installment...
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The Resonant Frequency of Googly Eyes
Sound is one of the great mysteries. It surrounds us all the time, yet it is invisible and has no smell. Except for the most booming of subwoofers, we rarely feel its vibrations on our skin. In fact,...
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The Computers of Our Wildest Dreams
One of the first electronic, programmable computers in the world is remembered today mostly by its nickname: Colossus. The fact that this moniker evokes one of the seven wonders of the ancient world is...
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Supersonic Airplanes and the Age of Irrational Technology
The box sat untouched in his bottom desk drawer. For weeks we discussed opening it, and one January morning he was ready. I set the box on his white bedsheets and removed the stack of passports, which...
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