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Parents: Reject Technology Shame
David Zalubowski / APTune into the conversation about kids and screen time, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that before the invention of the iPhone, parents spent every waking moment engaging their...
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Will Our Grandchildren Say That We Changed the Earth Too Little?
Marine cloud brightening might be one way to stem the warming of the planet. International Space Station / ReutersOliver Morton has written a great book about geoengineering, and that is no small...
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Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers
Andrew Brookes / CorbisI’m commiserating with a friend who recently left the technology industry to return to entertainment. “I’m not a programmer,” he begins, explaining some of the frustrations of...
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The Rise of the Internet-Addiction Industry
Ina Fassbender / ReutersRecovery starts with detox and support groups. Or with workers in hazmat suits sealing away your electronic devices in containers marked “biohazard.” Or with a trip to a remote...
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Is the New Chinese Airliner a Kind of Flying iPhone?
Illustration from Sina aviation news service of suppliers for China’s new C919 airliner. Earlier this week China’s state commercial-aerospace company, known as COMAC, rolled out the new C919 airliner...
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Making Music With Color
Masterfile / CorbisIn Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first conversation between humans and aliens is a duet of music and visuals. The film’s narrative doesn’t...
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A New Kind of Aurora on Mars
Gargantuan magnetic loops are emitted during solar flare eruptions on the sun. NASA / SDOSolar storms are brutal events on Mars. Without a global magnetic shield for protection, the planet gets...
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Just Add Ethics
One of the topics that comes up in my piece on whyprogrammers shouldn’t be called “engineers” without an explicit commitment to the public interest: the accreditation of engineering degrees.In the...
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Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups
Aleksander Rubtsov / CorbisI work some days from a small office in San Francisco, and every day, I gotta eat. For a stretch of several weeks this year, I obtained my lunch from an iPhone app called...
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Do We Need Uber for Anything Else?
Uber / Fred Prouser / Jessica Rinaldi / 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...
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On the Sociology and Economics of Omnipresent Noise
Two very different accounts of the neighborhood dynamics of modern community living, related to the community campaign being chronicled in this thread.First, from Mike Lofgren, multi-decade veteran of...
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Is the Dreamliner a Kind of Flying iPhone?
The short answer is “No.” But here is why I put the question in that form.Two days ago I showed a simple supply-chain chart for the new Chinese airliner, the C919, that highlighted the extent to which...
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Oops! Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Backfired
ReutersOn April 20, 2010, an explosion tore through Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next three months, the exposed wellhead released some 750 million liters of oil into...
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Did Electricity Cause a Tech Bubble?
A giant incandescent light bulb was part of the Festival of Lights in central Lyon, France, in 2014. Robert Pratta / ReutersSilicon Valley often finds itself faced with a difficult question, one that’s...
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Saying the Right Things, Doing None of Them
The former Reddit CEO, Ellen Pao, sparked a major discussion about sexism in the notoriously clubby tech industry. Robert Galbraith / ReutersIf you’re an executive in Silicon Valley who calls the...
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17 of the Best Internet Reactions to the Original iPhone
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds the then-new iPhone at an Apple store in London in 2007. Alessia Pierdomenico / ReutersHere’s a gem from the not-too-distant Internet past that seems, in retrospect,...
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Why Sci-Fi Has So Many Catholics
Gianni Giansanti / CorbisSpeaking at Loyola University last month, Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., recently named the director of the Vatican Observatory, was enthused. He was lauding the work of...
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How The New York Times Reviewed The Atlantic's Debut
This month The Atlantic turns 158 years old, an occasion that had me revisiting some of my favorite artifacts from the magazine’s past. Digging through the archives of The New York Times yesterday...
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The Unexpected Charm of Facebook's Friendship Anniversaries
Gary Houlder / CorbisThe day I got married, I wore a sweatshirt from the boys’ section of the Gap. My 12-year-old best friend and I had just discovered the joys of the Facebook relationship status....
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Lake Tahoe's Blueness, Quantified
Lake Tahoe Mick Roessler / CorbisLake Tahoe is famous for its blueness, a fact that’s celebrated on slick bumper stickers and in buckets of thick paint.“A noble sheet of blue water,” Mark Twain wrote...
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