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One Thing Baby Boomers and Millennials Agree On: Self-Driving Cars
Lexus SUVs equipped with Google self-driving sensors line up in Mountain View, California, in 2015. Elijah Nouvelage / ReutersAttitudes toward new technologies often fall along generational lines. That...
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Making the U.S. Government's Web Design Less Sucky
Larry Downing / ReutersAlmost every American—indeed, almost every Earthling—could tell you that red, white, and blue stand for the United States.But could they tell you the color hexadecimal code for...
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Americans Are More Afraid of Robots Than Death
Yuna Shino / ReutersWhen the personal computer first became ubiquitous in the 1980s, as Adrienne LaFrance wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year, some people found it so terrifying that the term...
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The Way We Read Now
Norman Rockwell illustration for electric light ad, 1920s (Wikimedia)As a business matter, the Atlantic has placed tremendous emphasis through the past two decades on integrating all the different ways...
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55 Internet Things for Back to the Future Day
A small model of a DeLorean DMC-12 at the concept store "Knick-Knack to the Future" in Berlin, Germany Hannibal Hanschke / ReutersLook, I don't want to overstate this or anything. It’s just that I’ve...
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We Hate the Internet, but It Saves Our Skins (cont).
Yesterday I mentioned the astonishing (to me) news that, by cramming a wad of Post-it notes underneath the cover of my ailing Android Nexus 5 phone, I could save myself the significant cost and hassle...
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When Technology Is Too Advanced
A prototype of Google's self-driving vehicle Elijah Nouvelage / ReutersAmericans can’t seem to get enough of the latest gadgets, yet they remain more hesitant about the impact of technology...
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Machines That Can See Depression on a Person's Face
A 3D face scanner designed to register details about individuals at the Siemens Airport Center in Germany, 2007. Michaela Rehle / ReutersIt might not be until something seems off that you realize...
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More on Machines, Reading, Thinking, and Life
Miss Auras, John Lavery (Wikimedia)In some of the installments you’ll find lower down in this thread, I mentioned both the internal and the external unintended-consequences of the shift from paper to...
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Why the Navy Is Turning Back to the Stars
Shahrul Azman / ShutterstockSometimes old-school is best. In today’s U.S. Navy, navigating a warship by the stars instead of GPS is making a comeback.The Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial...
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Raiders of the Lost Web, Cont'd
The earliest version of IndyFan.com via the Wayback MachineAdrienne wrote a great feature last week about the fleeting nature of the Internet:If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of...
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The Ethics of Exercise Pills
LoloStock / ShutterstockIn his 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley described a fictional drug called Soma. In the novel, a soma was something akin to an opiate, which ensured state-mandated...
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After 10 Years, Google Books Is Legal
The New York Public Library was an early partner in the Google Books scanning program. Vincent Desjardins / FlickrOn Friday, a federal circuit court made clear that Google Books is legal. A three-judge...
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One-Star Amazon Reviews Are Worth Fighting for
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Andrew Kelly / ReutersAmazon’s ongoing crackdown of fake reviews on its site is a big deal for a couple of reasons.The tech giant is suing more than 1,100 John Does—online...
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In Defense of Reading, E-Reader Style
Reading Aloud, Julius LeBlanc Stewart (Wikimedia) Two more notes by readers on the how tablets, phones, and computers are changing the process of reading. Novel angle: these readers say the change may...
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The Computer Glitch That's Keeping Poor People From Their Money
Russell Simmons, the owner of RushCard Andrew Kelly / ReutersUpdated on October 20, 2015 at 12:00 p.m.The final few days before a paycheck can be nerve wracking. That’s especially true for poorer...
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The Great Silicon Valley Bubble Machine
Brendan McDermid / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The AtlanticHearing from the leaders of the tech world is always revealing, and very often surprising. In our second annual Silicon Valley Insiders Poll, a...
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Who Owns the Copyright on 1921?
Few people have shaped modern American copyright law more than Judge Pierre Leval.As I’ve traced over in the Technology section, Leval first proposed a new theory of “fair use” law in 1990. (He did it,...
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The Five Blue Marbles
The moon passes between the Earth and the Deep Space Climate Observatory on August 6, 2015. NASA / NOAANearly 20 years ago, an idea came to Vice President Al Gore in a dream. He envisioned a satellite...
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Going Online in the Age of Conspiracy Theories
An aerial photograph of New York City shows lower Manhattan in the summer of 2001. Carol Highsmith / Library of CongressIn the weeks and months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was an...
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