Tech CEOs are out for themselves, not the public good Silicon Valley has no shortage of big ideas for transportation. In their vision of the future, we’ll hail driverless pods to go short distances — we may even be whisked into a network of underground tunnels that will supposedly get us to our…

A demonstration in favor of more liberal abortion laws, in Dublin in March. Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters Ireland plans to hold a landmark referendum on abortion at the end of May . Voters will be asked to consider a repeal of Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, known as the Eighth Amendment, which…

Stars spun into existence in the deep womb of the sky and burned out again, and planets rose and set, and at the end of the last age of men the great wolf Fenris rose from the deep and swallowed the Earth — and Donald Trump was still on the phone with “Fox & Friends” after calling in with a lot of…

For his latest project, the soundtrack to the breakdancing video game Floor Kids , Montreal turntablist Kid Koala reached back into his earliest musical memories. “I started scratching when I was 12. My friends and I were so into the scene before some of us branched into graffiti and some into…

Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden) plays well with others on “Die Cut,” the DJ’s first album in 12 years. (Joseph Armario) The worlds of hip-hop, dance and funk have changed a lot since the last time Cut Chemist put out a full-length album. Back in 2006, as the DJ (real name: Lucas MacFadden) was…

In 2018 the personal has never been more political. As discussions of gender, race and identity have come to the forefront of society, what’s political and what’s personal is increasingly unclear. You can see it in the growing polarisation between the left and the right, feel it in the conspicuous…

When you treat people the way you’d like to be treated, cool things happen… Most of the so-called marketing “influencers” out there are celebrities. They’ve made it. They’re not in the trenches anymore. They forgot how to “do” marketing; their employees promote their new books for them, build their…

Play Video 13:04 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video ‘F ind Christopher Wylie.” That instruction – 13 months ago – came from the very first ex-Cambridge Analytica employee I met. He was unequivocal. Wylie would have answers to the two…

In 2008, web-comic artist Tim Buckley sat down to write a dramatic four-panel strip for his long-running comic "Ctrl+Alt+Del." What he ended up creating was loss.jpg, the web’s best-known and longest-running meme about a miscarriage. “ I’m not sure what I anticipated, to be honest. I knew it was…

Detail from the cover art for Comic Shop. Image: Swallow Press Comic book shops can be great or awful places, depending on where you go. But they remain a key part of how many people experience the characters and creativity that the comics medium has to offer. A recently released book gives a…

Small tweaks to incentivize engaging with a book’s content. I’ve been using Kindles on and off ever since they launched. Our relationship has been contentious but I’ve always been seduced or re-seduced by their potential. At their best, they are beautiful devices. At their worst, infuriating. They…

Sean Hannity appears at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February 2016.Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP When Sean Hannity was named in court this week as a client of Donald Trump’s embattled legal fixer Michael Cohen, the Fox News host insisted their discussions had been…

The Fortitude Coffee shop in Edinburgh.Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer G o to Shoreditch Grind, near a roundabout in the middle of London’s hipster district. It’s a coffee shop with rough-hewn wooden tables, plentiful sunlight from wide windows, and austere pendant lighting. Then head to…

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world I gor Schwarzmann is the German co-founder of Third Wave, a strategy consultancy based in Berlin that works with small-scale industrial manufacturers. The company’s clients range across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the…

Craft is a word that used to mean something. It meant an activity that involved a skill using your hands. But it has been co-opted by brands and strategists to sell us a story about authenticity, which has diluted its meaning. Now the authenticity bubble is about to burst. It is a bubble that…

It’s time to call misogynist extremism by its name. On Friday night, a young man went on a massacre in Santa Barbara that left six other people dead and seven injured. In the hours before the massacre, the suspect, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger , had uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Retribution”. In…

The BBC made its sprawling trove of sound effects available to the public late last week, and you ought to spend some time going through it. There are over 16,000 tracks included in the searchable archive—everything from immersive field recordings to stock studio audio. If you'd like to relax and…

If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I’ll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally. Update: since this post was published I’ve tested…

College-bound Hailee Sussman* is the model of good fortune: She's the beneficiary of five protective older brothers, a fashionable mom with a lenient lending policy, and her choice between a sleek apartment in the bustling northeast city where she lives and a rambling family home in the adjacent…

Pixel Dust Digital Frank Sinatra. Michael Jackson. Ray Charles. Malcolm X. Elon Musk. Truman Capote. Buzz Aldrin. Prince. Tupac. Even Leni Riefenstahl. Quincy Jones has run with them all. Chris Heath stays up late with the 84-year-old music legend who has a tale to go with every famous name. "I feel…

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Decades ago, the business of launching stuff beyond Earth’s orbit fell solely under the purview of governments. When the stuff being sent wasn’t robotic hardware or scientific instruments, the people who chose what it would be approached the decision-making with a certain amount…

Every year, BarSK in Melbourne holds a special event. It’s a game jam that runs for over half a day, from the morning to just past midnight. And when the clock hits 12.30am, something special happens. Everything that everyone has worked on, images, assets, source code: it all gets deleted, never to…

You may not know me or even my company, LivePerson, but you’ve certainly used my invention. In 1995, I came up with the technology for those chat windows that pop up on websites. Today, more than 18,000 companies around the world, including big-name brands like T-Mobile, American Express, Citibank…

On the surface, Facebook is one of the most successful commercial propositions in the history of business. Its market capitalisation is today over half a trillion dollars. Shares are six times more valuable today than five years ago. Though they trade at a lower price to its forward earnings…

Three days before she died, Michelle McNamara typed some notes in a cryptic to-do list on her laptop. Among the looming tasks: “Find out from Debbi D about flashlight.” “Find out from Ken exactly what he meant about the husband or the guy in the clown suit walking down the street.” The list…

Loading View on Instagram A word on swimsuits. I do not love them. Or, rather, I hope every yearto find one that I love, and pretty much every year I fail. It is as ifall the useful knowledge of the human body and its many variations insize and shape that lingerie designers regularly employ in their…

Air cleaning fabric, sensory technology, plant-based paint, 3D printed concrete housing and evolutionary materials. These are some of the game changing designs to come out of this year’s Milan Design Week. Designers, architects, scientists and tech professionals are pushing the boundaries of what is…

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash A few years ago I took the leap and finally started my freelance business. Like most new freelancers, I thought the whole sales process was going to be easy as I had more than enough experience and had valuable skills that could help any business… So I started off…

Look Catalog Even if you’ve never heard of ‘deep work’ before, you’re immediately familiar with the concept. It’s that place of intense concentration and cognitive focus where real progress is made—on whatever it is that we happen to do , be it writing or thinking or designing or creating. Producing…

I used to want to leave you. I loved you. But I couldn’t stay. I wanted to live in a city, with access to hiking trails, and coffee shops and bookstores that I could walk to. Not our Florida suburb full of palm trees and shopping plazas, a place I had never wanted, but settled in because you were…

1. Media isn’t really real In the last couple of years, fakery seems to have accelerated. The term “fake news” appeared out of next-to-nowhere in November 2016. Source: Google Trends The press has published myths, falsehoods, and exaggerations for about as long as there has been a press, and even…

I spent months on the notorious dating site talking to bachelors about why they’re so obsessed with married women My journey into the underbelly of infidelity starts when a friend of mine — let’s call her “Kelly” — split from her husband. She decided after 20 years of being in “prison” that she…

On a warm Phoenix night five years ago, Aaron Cashatt walked down the red-carpeted hall of the second floor of a Marriott hotel, trying to move casually despite the adrenaline and methamphetamine surging through his bloodstream. Six feet tall with blond, close-cropped hair, he wore a black sports…

J ohn Meehan bragged frequently about his supposed ties to organized crime, and claimed to trace his bloodline to the prolific East Coast hit man who had run Murder Inc. itself. It had the ring of empty boasting from a man who lived by lies. What is believable is that he approved of the mob’s way of…

T he private investigator told Debra Newell how to make herself a difficult target. Change hotels every few nights. Study the crowd before she entered a room. Ditch her stylish clothes for bland ones. Get a wig to cover her conspicuous blond hair. Blend in. She dreaded that she would meet the fate…

T his couple is all wrong, the lawyer thought. There sat the husband, John Meehan, glowering wrathfully as he plotted legal mayhem on his enemies. There sat the wife, Debra Newell, soft-voiced and love-struck and helplessly in his grip. As he gazed across a conference-room table at his newest…

H e had lavished her with compliments, and now he savaged her looks. He had entered the marriage broke, and now he demanded half her wealth. He had been gentleness itself, and now he threatened her with “long-lost relatives” in the mob. “Enough,” Debra Newell texted him. “You are evil.” “Divide up…

A fter church one Sunday, Debra Newell walked into the living room with her husband to find a woman she did not recognize. The stranger sat trance-like before the big window that overlooked Newport Harbor, a thin, weathered woman in her late 30s or early 40s. She had just used the shower; her curly…