When Dwayne Johnson meets you (and I can assure you, he would love to), the first thing he will do is ask you six thousand questions about yourself, and remember the answers forever. If you are a child, good luck getting past Dwayne Johnson without a high five or some simulated roughhousing; if…

Zaeli Kane and Joe Spurr. Credit Holly Andres for The New York Times By W hen Daniel and Elizabeth married in 1993, they found it was easy enough to choose a ring for her, but there were far fewer choices for him. Daniel, then a 27-year-old who worked in information technology, decided to design one…

A modded game controller in Cuba Photos by Brian Crecente/Polygon, collage by Emily Haasch Antonio Pablo Martinez — Tony to his friends, and everyone is his friend — squats in the den of his small home, his knees pointing toward the corners of the room. He stares down at a half-assembled PlayStation…

Just days before President Donald Trump’s arrival in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officials were shouting at their American counterparts in meetings, furious over news that the U.S. commander in chief may have compromised a vital source of information on the Islamic State and possibly Iran,…

President Trump left for the Middle East and Europe today , amid a domestic firestorm that is fanned by concerns over intelligence leaks and hints of obstruction of justice . Leaving home for foreign lands may seem to be just what the president needs, and his advisers can be forgiven for believing…

Every Ozimal digirabbit in the venerable virtual world Second Life will starve to death (well, permanent hibernation) this week because a legal threat has shut down their food-server, and the virtual pets are designed so that they can only eat DRM-locked food , so the official food server's shutdown…

Cuba is like the memory of somewhere you’ve never been. It’s the bilinearity of capitalism and commercialism, rum and coke, offline and on, that takes two opposing ideas and turns them into some different, often wondrous thing. In spending a week wandering the streets of Havana and its suburbs on…

Enlarge BoatingWithTR.com BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons. Pascal…

I f you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Maybe the problem these days is people are just trying too hard. Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain , but rather something you inhabit. When you’re raging…

Elon Musk’s tunnel boring company still isn’t quite as well-articulated as his other three companies, which include the well-established SpaceX and Tesla, as well as the newly minted Neurolink brain interface company. The Boring Company has by far the punniest name, however, and now it also has some…

President Trump had just returned to the White House on Saturday from his final inauguration event, a tranquil interfaith prayer service, when the flashes of anger began to build. Trump turned on the television to see a jarring juxtaposition — massive demonstrations around the globe protesting his…

D espite being the greatest and most influential mind in human history, Isaac Newton, by all accounts, was a bit of a headcase, 1 as well as a total dick. Newton was famously petty and vindictive. He would go through manic episodes where he would work furiously for days at a time without eating or…

According to the charmingly titled Men’s Rights Activist blog Boycott Bitches , “the future is pretty dark for women”. This is because: “Once artificial wombs are invented, real human women will become obsolete.” If that’s true, then real human women had better come up with some contingency plan,…

Dating is the worst, but the best thing about it are the stories—and the best stories are simple. With that in mind, we asked friends and co-workers to sum up the worst dates they've ever been on in six words. Here's one: "Hardcore begged to see my NuvaRing." Like so many bad dates, many more follow…

Above: Square Enix wants to offload its Hitman studio. Image Credit: Square Enix The people who make hit movies or top-40 songs often have a gift for predicting what new types of experiences audiences are looking. Video games face a similar challenge, but game publishers also have to struggle to…

The Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault was built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters.Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food…

On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners. What did Roger Ailes die of, aside from perfect…

On Wednesday, Paul Ryan held a press conference just after the revelation that Donald Trump had pushed James Comey to kill the investigation into Michael Flynn — you know, the guy Trump appointed as national security adviser even though his team knew that Flynn’s highly suspicious foreign ties were…

My friend Nathan and I were walking to a picnic when we passed a woman named Xenia. I stopped to say hello, and she kissed me on the cheek so intimately that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She had asked to hook up before, and as the sun set and Nathan and I packed up our hammocks, I texted her…

WASHINGTON — When House Democratic leaders hastily called a news conference Wednesday to demonstrate their outrage at President Trump’s latest dramatics, they took great pains to show they were not seeking to railroad him out of the White House. “No one ought to, in my view, rush to embrace the most…

After ten years away, the controversial former Prime Minister is back with a plan to save Britain from Brexit. ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLAS ORTEGA; SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH BY LUKE MACGREGOR / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY As Britain enters the jingoistic, ill-tempered final phase of its forty-four-year membership in the…

flickr/ Nannydaddy When we apply matters of morality to matters of taste, the most marginalized people get thrown under the bus. I t’s never been easy talking to my mom about my career in porn, so I’m always on the hunt for ways to help her relate to my ideas about, and experience in, sex work.…

Share A few days before Christmas, I had the most tense journey to an airport of my life. I was in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had been reporting on the end of President Joseph Kabila’s term (he had refused to step down, despite being constitutionally limited…

After an astonishing week of revelations, Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapse. Consider what has happened just in the last 10 days: a string of damaging stories about a president unprecedented since at least the Nixon administration. On May 8, former Acting Attorney…

Hospitals in Britain, several companies in Spain and 11 other countries have confirmed attacks to their systems. Patient information does not appear to have been stolen or compromised, according to the National Health Service of Britain. Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Right Now:…

Careful what you wish for. In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, many are demanding a special prosecutor into the Trump-Russia connection. It’s not appreciated enough that such an appointment could well turn into a shield for wrongdoing. A special prosecutor could wrap the…

The following is an excerpt from The Way to Design , a guide to becoming a designer founder and to building design-centric businesses . It was a dapted and reprinted with the author’s permission. [Cover Image: Foundation Capital] I’ve had my fill of empathy. Or to be more specific, all the talk of…

Uberization, Noun. A process where a high-tech middleman replaces past intermediaries. It was in 2009 that an upstart, a small company called Uber, disrupted the taxi ride business. By leveraging technology to reach a wide swath of consumers and stretching the definition of employees, Uber was able…

Hello. It’s my first day back covering technology for The Atlantic . It also marks roughly 10 years that I’ve been covering science and technology, so I’ve been thinking back to my early days at Wired in the pre-crash days of 2007. The internet was then, as it is now, something we gave a kind of…

WASHINGTON — The bad-news stories slammed into the White House in pitiless succession on Tuesday, leaving President Trump’s battle-scarred West Wing aides staring at their flat screens in glassy-eyed shock. The disclosure that Mr. Trump divulged classified intelligence to Russian officials that had…

Given Donald Trump’s long record of deception, James Comey’s memos are far more likely to bury the President than to exonerate him. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON / REDUX Donald Trump, who may well have attempted to obstruct justice within just a few weeks of taking his oath of office, came to the…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization. More on how Polygon writes opinion pieces. The drive to be on the bleeding edge of technology powers the PC gaming community. We…

President Trump’s opponents have spent his administration’s first months engaged in an unusual but important debate: Is Trump a problem because he is incompetent or because he harbors autocratic designs that threaten American democracy itself? At the end of his first 100 days, the debate was tilting…

By Latonya Pennington In a recent interview , X-Men: Apocalypse actress Olivia Munn caused a stir when she claimed that she did all her own stunts for the upcoming film. This didn’t sit well with the stunt community, since it is their job to physically test a stunt for safety reasons before allowing…

They didn’t meet until they were both in their mid-thirties, when they were introduced to each other by a mutual friend - an executive at Cartoon Network. At that time, both were gearing up to make their latest solo records. El-P, a rapper and producer from Brooklyn who was one-third of the hugely…

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title. Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never…

THE MORNING PLUM: A few Republican senators heroically ventured on to the Sunday shows to profess deep concern about President Trump’s abrupt firing of the man overseeing the investigation into the small matter of whether his campaign colluded with a foreign power to undermine our democracy.…

When people behave as if they have something to hide, it is often because they do. For me, this is a basic law of human behavior. That’s why President Trump’s baffling, outrageous, unfathomable and just plain bizarre behavior last week strengthened my already strong suspicions that there is…