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Earth in 10,000 Years
A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in...
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How Telephone Etiquette Has Changed
When the telephone was new, it was a sensation. And not an altogether positive one. Sure, it was a machine that enabled a person to speak—as if by magic—to another person in another place in real time....
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When Robots Hallucinate
When a collection of artificial brains at Google began generating psychedelic images from otherwise ordinary photos, engineers compared what they saw to dreamscapes. They named their image-generation...
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The Revision of Steve Jobs
An iPhone is a machine much like any other: motherboard, modem, microphone, microchip, battery, wires of gold and silver and copper twisting and snaking, the whole assembly arranged under a piece of...
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The Lessons America Never Learned From Hurricane Katrina
As the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached, I did not plan to write about it. Yes, I thought about doing something. Three years before the disaster, I had worked on a Times-Picayune series...
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Can Mommy Bloggers Still Make a Living?
The success story of Dooce.com was once blogger lore, told and re-told in playgroups and Meetups—anywhere hyper-verbal people with Wordpress accounts gathered. “It happened for that Dooce lady,” they...
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Is That a Colony of Conjoined Twins or a Single Sea Creature?
The creature is Nanomia bijuga. It’s a translucent, gelatinous blob with no brain and very simple muscles. And yet, it is clearly an excellent swimmer. In the GIF, above, a scientist injects...
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Things I Do Not Hate
Google has a new logo and The New Yorker thinks I hate it. “Why you hate Google’s new logo,” the headline explains. But I don’t hate it. (I’m not sure whether I like it yet, but that isn’t the same...
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When Discrimination Is Baked Into Algorithms
A recent ProPublica analysis of The Princeton Review’s prices for online SAT tutoring shows that customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents are often charged more. When presented with...
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The Meanest Email You Ever Wrote, Searchable on the Internet
Most of us get to be thoroughly relieved that our emails weren't in the Ashley Madison database. But don’t get too comfortable. Whatever secrets you have, even the ones you don’t think of as secret,...
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How People Explained Technology, 2003 Edition
It’s weirdly easier to remember long-abandoned technological habits—like recording a television show to VHS, or that thing where you untangle a landline to let the handset dangle from its cord and...
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Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth
In a recent New Yorker article, the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein collected testimony from several people who saw, firsthand, the flash from the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb, at...
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The International Fight Over Marcel Duchamp's Chess Set
In 2014, Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera, both 3D fabrication artists in the United States, gave the world something they considered a gift and homage: a re-creation of Marcel Duchamp’s personal...
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When the Lights Go Out
Throughout history, inexplicable natural phenomena have tended to instill an understandable fear in people. Accounts of the solar storm of August and September 1859 stand out for their tendency toward...
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The Cultural Origins of the Apple Spectacle
Apple’s annual fall events have become the stuff of legend in tech circles. The company has a tradition of making big product announcements—new iPhones and processors, the Apple Watch—and has attracted...
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Apple's Cash Reserves Would Fill 93 Olympic Swimming Pools
Since it debuted eight years ago, what kind of wealth has been created by the iPhone? There are lots of ways to measure this, obviously. The device has refashioned an entire industry and region, and...
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How Data-Wranglers Are Building the Great Library of Genetic Variation
Let’s say you have a patient with a severe inherited muscle disorder, the kind that Daniel MacArthur from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT specializes in. They’re probably a child, with...
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Why Europe’s Trains Are So Much Better Than America's
Riding the high-speed train between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany’s two largest cities, is a radically different experience from riding its American counterpart, Amtrak’s Acela, which connects major East...
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What Is a Phone in 2015?
Apple is doubling down on its trend toward bigger iPhone screens, and bigger screens in general for that matter. Along with a huge new iPad Pro, Apple on Wednesday announced that its upgraded iPhone 6...
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Tim Cook Sounds Really Thirsty Talking About the Apple Watch
No one outside Apple knows how many Apple Watches the company has sold since the product was released this past April, but in recent months there have been several signs that sales have been...
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