I’d like to drive less, exercise more, commune with nature, and hate myself with a lesser intensity because I am driving less, exercising more, and communing with nature. One way to accomplish all of these goals, I decided earlier this year, was to procure an e-bike. (That’s a bicycle with a motor, if you didn’t know.) I could use it for commuting, for errands, for putting my human body to work, and for reducing my environmental impact.
I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
This is exhausting, but I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed: Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter accepted this offer, presumably because it was the best the social-media company’s directors thought they could do. Then Musk changed his mind and said he was pulling out of the deal, claiming that he couldn’t tell how many Twitter users were fake. And then Twitter sued Musk to force him to go through with the purchase.
A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became so enthralled by an AI chatbot that he may have sacrificed his job to defend it. “I know a person when I talk to it,” he told The Washington Post for a story published last weekend. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.” After discovering that he’d gone public with his claims, Google put Lemoine on administrative leave.
Updated at 6:10 p.m. ET on May 18, 2022“What do you think of this company Netscape?” my parents asked. It was 1995, and they had called me on the landline, which back then just meant the telephone. Netscape was a company that made a graphical web browser—the web browser, really—but gave it away for free. Its income statement showed only modest revenue (and substantial losses). The web was new and exciting but unproven, so I steered my folks away from Netscape’s IPO.
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product.
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product.
You can call Elon Musk a lot of things. Agent of chaos. Savvy investor. Obsessive workaholic. But the tech-industry analyst Benedict Evans has a different suggestion. He calls Musk a “bullshitter who delivers.” I’d go even further: Musk exemplifies a new kind of bullshitter, one we haven’t really seen before.
At high noon on an early-spring day in 2017, six steers doomed to die escaped their slaughterhouse and stormed the streets of my city. The escape became a nuisance, then a scene, then a phenomenon. “Man, it was crazy!” one onlooker told the local alt-weekly. “I mean, it was fucking bulls running through the city of St.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict could trigger a massive cyberwar, New Scientist surmised. An unprecedented cyberwar is likely, Senator Marco Rubio warned. The hacker group Anonymous has allegedly launched a cyberwar against the Russian government.Cyberwar sounds bad—and it is. Broadly, it names the global threat of combat mixed with computer stuff.
Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.
Wordle! It’s a word game people are playing online. Each day, the game offers one new puzzle: Guess a five-letter English word correctly in six or fewer tries. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct, which are wrong, and which are the right letters in the wrong place. It’s fun! But why?Games seem like trifles, and many are, which can make them difficult to take seriously as art or culture.
“Today was great!” my 7-year-old exclaimed recently when I came home from work. By cosmic standards, her day wasn’t that special. She went to the playground, where she finally mastered the monkey bars. She visited the history museum—or at least its gift shop. She got “really big” nachos. She went to the kids’ art studio. Two years ago, visiting a museum and a nacho joint was so common, it wouldn’t even have registered.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic.
In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them. Maybe it’s snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I’m a secret Luddite. Maybe I can’t stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. I don’t know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful.
It feels like every company and organization I’ve ever transacted with sends me email every week. Some every day, even. Some multiple times a day. My mortgage broker emails on my birthday and holidays. So does my dentist. Certain retailers email much more often. The home-furnishings company Room & Board is one of them, hoping I’ll upgrade to a lounge-worthy sectional or entreating me to meet artisanal glassblowers from Minnesota.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The world works in strange ways, and interesting design choices can often be found in the everyday objects we overlook. Here are two to think about just in time for summer.Ketchup bottles.
If you have been fortunate enough to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, you also possess an essential, high-tech tool for proving your immunity to others.Just kidding, it’s a piece of cardstock. On the flimsy rectangle that all Americans get with their shots, doctors and pharmacists record dates of administration, vaccine type, and lot number. Some scrawl the information by hand with a pen; others apply a preprinted sticker.
What the hell is Amazon doing?The company is behaving like a common troll on social media, which is not the usual stance for a giant corporation. As someone who has spent an ungodly amount of time studying brand behavior on the internet, I have a theory—but, first, let me back up.Over the past week, Amazon has mounted an aggressive public-opinion campaign in what appears to be an effort to discredit its warehouse workers in Alabama, who are trying to unionize.
The vaccines are here, and with them, the promise of getting back to some sort of normal. Over the coming months, many Americans will be returning to offices or schools, traveling to see family and friends, eating cheeseburgers inside sports bars. But the vaccines’ arrival has also provided a more immediate relief: giving people something to talk about.After a year of awkward conversation, the United States has entered vaccine exuberance.
Memorial designs by Rael San Fratello, Refik Anadol Studio, and Sekou CookeUnlike a war, a pandemic is invisible and diffuse. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Its death toll is ultimately unknowable. That makes a virus difficult to mark with physical tributes. Few memorials mark the 1918 Spanish flu; one is a modest granite bench built in Vermont two years ago, underwritten by a local restaurant also marking its own centennial.The coronavirus pandemic is not over, either. Not even close.
Approximately infinity years ago, in a 2006 TED talk, the computer scientist Jeff Han demonstrated a new kind of touch-driven display. First he wiggled all 10 fingertips against a big screen attached to a drafting desk, and then the display responded to all of them at once, as if he were scratching the belly of a puppy instead of operating a computer.
Updated at 11:15 p.m. ET on August 6, 2020.What is TikTok though? It’s an app for creating and sharing short videos, but that description undersells its delight: lip-synched anthems that spawn split-screen duet replies; “challenges” that turn boring tasks into virtuosic dances; wry, incisive takedowns of national politics by teens too young to vote; pets, kids, emo kids, emo pets, and comedians.That’s part of what TikTok is, anyway.
Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama were all feeling generous on the evening of July 16, according to their Twitter accounts, which offered to double any payments sent to them in bitcoin. Not really, of course; they’d been hacked. Or, rather, Twitter itself had been hacked, and for apparently stupid reasons: The perpetrators stole and resold Twitter accounts and impersonated high-follower users to try to scam people out of cryptocurrency.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.Lucy Honeychurch grew up at Windy Corner, a comfortable estate in a polite enclave outside London. It was pleasant in the way suburbs always are: The neighbors were friendly, and the environment, free from the noise and grime of the city, was perfect for children.
Updated at 1:14 p.m. ET on June 10, 2020.To commemorate the company’s initial public offering in 2011, LinkedIn gave some of its employees a lucite cube emblazoned with the stock ticker, LNKD, on one side and “Next Play” on the reverse. That phrase encapsulates the business philosophy of Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO at the time.