(Originally published in Contemporary Keyboard, January 1980. The original pages and a slideshow of great original images follow the text.) The scenario sounds as if it were lifted from The Andromeda Strain : Several Specialists are contacted by the Mission Director. Each is asked to leave home and…

Fredric Fortier wears an Ethereum sweater along with Mathieu Baril wearing a Bitcoin sweater at the San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup Holiday Party at the Runway Incubator in December. Jason Henry for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer…

With sales of Diet Coke in a prolonged rut, Coca-Cola announced last Wednesday that it is tweaking the design of its most famous zero-calorie soft-drink can to be more slender and colorful. It is also launching several new flavors of Diet Coke, including “Feisty Cherry,” “Twisted Mango,” and “Zesty…

Machine learning systems are very capable, but they aren’t exactly smart . They lack common sense. Taking advantage of that fact, researchers have created a wonderful attack on image recognition systems that uses specially printed stickers that are so interesting to the AI that it completely fails…

layer innocent nothing argue pottery winner cotton menu task slim merge maid T he sequence of words is meaningless: a random array strung together by an algorithm let loose in an English dictionary. What makes them valuable is that they’ve been generated exclusively for me, by a software tool called…

O n a soundstage deep in the hills of Los Angeles one morning last August, RuPaul Charles and several drag queens made their way to a set that had been transformed into a simulacrum of the reality-TV show “The Bachelor.” Lacy strands of lights dripped down plastic boxwood hedges, and a row of white…

Ikon Images / Alamy Stock Photo The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with "takes" arguing…

It can feel a little bit like deja vu. Despite a relatively diverse roster of nominees , and a couple of performances which nodded towards the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, one of the major takeaways from the 2018 Grammy Awards was that, ultimately, it let women down. Before the ceremony, potential…

WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.…

As Facebook undergoes a renovation focused on improving its users’ well-being, the company could take inspiration from an app it already owns. By Kevin Roose For the past several years, Facebook has been conducting what amounts to an A/B test on human society…

This post is SFW-ish (somewhat Safe For Work, depending on your workplace) Pierre Corbinais has a long history of making short poignant games about relationships and intimacy. (Before I had played this game, my personal favorite had been Tiny Soccer Manager Stories .) His choice of tool, Adventure…

Early in my career, I worked for Paul Manafort. He was strategic, canny, demanding and, it will surprise no one to learn after his 12-count indictment this week, played by his own rules, in an industry where you usually got away with it. I was young, wanted to do right by the world, and my boss…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration At last year’s CES, I was introduced to Snoo , a bassinet that rocks to lull a crying baby back to sleep. The product was featured in the Baby Tech showroom, a space littered with smart baby monitors and high-tech breast pumps. This year I didn’t see Snoo, but I saw…

Protesters on Sunday in Moscow, where rallies called by the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny were banned. “You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a pre-recorded message. Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters MOSCOW — Protesters across Russia braved icy temperatures on Sunday to demonstrate…

Enlarge / A music streaming site that participated in Coinhive crypto mining maxes out the visitor's CPU. Malwarebytes A researcher has documented almost 2,500 sites that are actively running cryptocurrency mining code in the browsers of unsuspecting visitors, a finding that suggests the unethical…

Enlarge Diego Betto YouTube was recently caught displaying ads that covertly leach off visitors' CPUs and electricity to generate digital currency on behalf of anonymous attackers, it was widely reported. Word of the abusive ads started no later than Tuesday, as people took to social media sites to…

We’ve seen it before: Giant discounts on TVs or games consoles or perhaps the latest iPhone generate a frenzy among shoppers. But in France, it seems, 70 percent off the hazelnut-and-chocolate spread Nutella can also do the trick. When a supermarket chain slashed the price of 33-ounce jars of the…

Properly construed, Spice World is one of the greatest films ever made, narrowly beaten only by Die Hard and Home Alone . There is much that is wonderful about the 1997 classic, and much that is merely good, but all of it is worth noting as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the film. In 1997, the…

Part 1. Gameday: Beer, bros and The Beastie Boys. ROSE: If you have a guiding principle of the WWE and Vince McMahon, it's the live event is where it happens. Give the fan his or her money's worth. When they leave that stadium, leave that arena, you want them to say, "I can't wait to get back. I had…

Columns Do You Think I’m Pretty? Consent as community I don’t say yes. I say oh, yes. I say yes, please. I paper his walls with my yeses. I come to with a boy on top of me. I am drunk, I am taking my shirt off. And I’m asking something over and over again: Do you think I’m pretty? Do you think I’m…

The emailed response from the Guggenheim's chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump's private living quarters. Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was…

Television ratings for the N.F.L. have fallen 17 percent over the past two seasons. The league is embroiled in a continuing crisis over concussions, and youth participation rates are falling. All of this suggests a difficult future for the sport, yet the N.F.L.’s most notorious competitor, Vince…

The XFL is not an American institution. There are not millions of fans eager to see if the Los Angeles Xtreme, the Memphis Maniax, or the Orlando Rage will be playing in the Million Dollar Game this year. They aren’t tuning in to see Jesse Ventura announce the game, or to watch if “He Hate Me” will…

Sex on Campus The Game Is Rigged Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it. Photograph by Andrew Lyman SCAD class of 2016 Last winter, Reina Gattuso was a Harvard senior majoring in literature and gender studies and writing a biweekly column for the college…

James Franco in 2016. Image via Getty. Over the summer—before his Oscar campaign, before the Harvey Weinstein allegations, and before Franco’s Time’s Up pin prompted women to come forward with their stories of Franco’s sexual misconduct—James Franco did a cover story with Out Magazine . The tone…

A visual representation of our national discourse. Baloncici/Getty Images Trash. He’s trash. She’s trash. They’re trash. You’re trash. “Trash”—as well as its sister term “garbage”—has become the word du jour to describe everything from men to Tinder to, perhaps most frequently, Lena Dunham . It’s a…

Sonny Ross Sometimes video game developers make games. And sometimes they don’t. In 2017, Campo Santo, the studio that made Firewatch , announced that it was working on a new game, In the Valley of Gods . And Visceral Games, a studio that had been working on a single-player Star Wars game led by Amy…

A year ago, before the investor lawsuits and the federal investigations, before the mass resignations, and before the connotation of the word “Uber” shifted from “world’s most valuable startup” to “world’s most dysfunctional,” Uber’s executives sat around a hotel conference room table in San…

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms , a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly. Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar…

Let 2018 be the year we demand more than freedom from sexual harassment and abuse. This year, it’s time we demand pleasure. fter giving a talk about pleasure anatomy to a group of Ivy League students, complete with 3-D models of a clitoris, a tall, soft-spoken sophomore student came up to me with…

This week on That Startup Show we are examining the ins-and-outs of body tech. Inventors and entrepreneurs are creating technology that will change our relationship with our own bodies, building brilliant businesses in the process. Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas was arrested in Las Vegas on…

For a fleeting moment Tuesday , President Trump seemed to signal he would do the right thing on immigration. At a 90-minute meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats, much of it televised, he said he’d be willing to “take the heat” for a broad immigration deal of the sort urgently needed…

If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy League university unenrolled and undetected, says Guillaume Dumas, a 28-year-old Canadian, start with big lecture courses. If you must sit in on a smaller seminar class, it’s important to show up consistently starting with the first session, instead of…

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/05/politics/donald-trump-hill-republicans/index.html The other day I asked my audiences on Facebook and Twitter what they think are some of the most under-reported stories about the awful things the Trump administration has been doing. The Russiagate narrative has…

SAN FRANCISCO — Creating a new Bitcoin requires electricity. A lot of it. In the virtual currency world this creation process is called “mining.” There is no physical digging, since Bitcoins are purely digital. But the computer power needed to create each digital token consumes at least as much…

Deconstructeam/Devolver Digital Here is a game about the attractions and the perils of self-improvement. For me, the lesson is germane: Playing The Red String s Club makes me remember that I have a bad temper. I learned my foul temper from my father, who learned it from his father. Those two men had…

Where they're going, they don't need roads. Try to picture a voyeuristic video camera that gleefully records the following: a bear that attempts to outrun a car, a car that runs into an unsuspecting cow, two gentlemen who solicit prostitutes one late evening, two men who get into a fistfight, two…

• Much of the federal government officially shut down early Saturday morning after Senate Democrats, showing remarkable solidarity in the face of a clear political danger, blocked consideration of a stopgap spending measure to keep the government operating. • The Senate adjourned for the night…