Hey, I made you a tool to put words between buns.
It occurred to me one summer day: It’s really nice when word are typeset between buns. I remarked upon this fact on social media: The specimens in that tweet were hand-crafted, of course. It’s easy enough to do in software like Adobe Illustrator, but time consuming too. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why so few sets of words find… read more
Google and Facebook are easy scapegoats, but companies have been collecting, selling, and reusing your personal data for decades, and now that the public has finally noticed, it’s too late. The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost.
A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another Target, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage. A home baker wishes aloud for a KitchenAid… read more
Shared, electric motor scooters are racing to catch up with Bird, Lime, and other kick-scooter brands, as tech companies attempt to reinvent urban mobility. But can these vehicles ever find a place in America?
When King Carlos III commissioned the Puerta de Alcalá in the 1770s, the city of Madrid was already almost a thousand years old. The gate, designed in the neoclassical style popular during that era, predates more well-known triumphal arches in Europe, like the Arc de Triomphe and the Brandenburg Gate. At the time, the gate connected to the city’s medieval… read more
A flowing, connected interior—once a fringe experiment of American architectural modernism—has become ubiquitous, and beloved. But it promises a liberation from housework that remains a fantasy.
For some American families, one kitchen is apparently not enough. What is wrong with having just one kitchen? Well, people cook in kitchens, and when they cook in kitchens, they make messes, and then, to make matters worse, if their kitchen is in full view from the rest of the house—as many today are—their mess is out in the open… read more
But it was just a resolution to “disapprove”—a far cry from stopping the repeal.
In a shocking reversal, the Senate voted 52–47 to disapprove of the rollback of network neutrality—the policy that treats broadband and wireless data as common carriers. That protection required internet service providers to treat all internet traffic the same, rather than blocking, throttling, or otherwise interfering with access to particular services. All 49 Democratic senators were joined, somewhat unexpectedly, by… read more
A 50-year-old philosophical thought experiment has been central to the debate about autonomous vehicles. It’s time to give it up.
You know the drill by now: A runaway trolley is careening down a track. There are five workers ahead, sure to be killed if the trolley reaches them. You can throw a lever to switch the trolley to a neighboring track, but there’s a worker on that one as well who would likewise be doomed. Do you hit the switch… read more
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying.
For a spell during 2010 and 2011, I was a virtual rancher of clickable cattle on Facebook. It feels like a long time ago. Obama was serving his first term as president. Google+ hadn’t arrived, let alone vanished again. Steve Jobs was still alive, as was Kim Jong Il. Facebook’s IPO hadn’t yet taken place, and its service was still… read more
Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.
“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms… read more
A New York Times exposé of a “black market” for online fame diagnoses the symptom of social-media despair, but misses its cause.
In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?”… read more
Snapchat's redesign shows how communication services are becoming indistinguishable.
I am very old. As in, my age begins with a four, a profoundly uncool number for an age to start with. Which is to say, too old to use Snapchat, the image-messaging social-network app. Founded in 2011, it’s most popular among young people, who spurned Facebook and even Instagram for it. Why? For one part, it’s because we olds… read more