Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me dinner first”…

It’s dangerous for leaders to outlive their countries. Whether they move on or become obsessed with returning to power, they cannot escape their role as symbols of a vanished world—a condition fraught with both nostalgia and danger. Nobody knows that burden like Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader…

News / Graphic Design Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler: Anatomy of an AI System An infographic showing the social and environmental impact of owning an AI voice assistant device has won The Design Museums’s Beazley Design of the Year 2019 prize. Pentagram’s Sascha Lobe, British product designer Hans…

Anti-government protests continued in Baghdad on Saturday.Photograph: Khalid Al-Mousily/Reuters Iraq’s parliament will today begin the process of electing a new leader after the prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, resigned last week . His successor will have to cope with the severe unrest that is…

Al Pacino in The Irishman . Photo: Netflix A version of this review originally ran during the New York Film Festival earlier this year. It has since been updated. Martin Scorsese ranges toward extremes, which is why he’ll be a manic showboater in one movie and practice scrupulous self-abnegation in…

Ringer illustration Deep into Raging Bull , Martin Scorsese’s mesmerizingly brutal 1980 biopic of troubled boxer Jake LaMotta, we find our hero, played by one Robert De Niro, at a professional high (he just pounded the shit out of Laurent Dauthuille) but also at one of his myriad personal lows (he…

Martin Scorsese’s new behemoth of a film, The Irishman , is based on I Heard You Paint Houses , a book by Charles Brandt that was published in 2004. I Heard You Paint Houses tells the remembered life story of Frank Sheeran, a mob enforcer, union leader, and longtime friend of Jimmy Hoffa. Built from…

BALDWIN, Fla. — When Sean Lynch ran for mayor, he never anticipated that the job would involve hiring a butcher and tracking the sale of collard greens. But in 2018, two years into his first term, the only grocery store in town shut down. People in Baldwin, Fla., a rural outpost in northeast…

I Invented the World Wide Web. Here’s How We Can Fix It. I wanted the web to serve humanity. It’s not too late to live up to that promise. Sir Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Foundation. Credit... Wren McDonald My parents were mathematicians. My mother helped code one of the first…

Noah here. A few years ago I had an idea for a fun quasi-art project that combined machine learning (ML) and language (keeping things vague in case I decide to make it happen). I pitched a very large publication on using their archives as the corpus—the material you use to train the AI with—and they…

Credit... Jeenah Moon for The New York Times The company planted the seeds of a public health crisis by marketing to a generation with low smoking rates, and it ignored evidence that teenagers were using its products. Credit... Jeenah Moon for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — In the face of…

Hi, Welcome to Big, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here . First, housekeeping. I’m launching a new section of Big called “From the Mailbag,” which are emails from readers. The reason is that I got a bunch of interesting emails from ex-Boeing…

By the Book Credit... Jillian Tamaki Nov. 21, 2019 “He was an old dog,” says the Emmy-winning actor, writer and producer (whose new book is “Fleabag: The Scriptures”), “but I love how visceral his writing is.” What books are on your nightstand? George Saunders’s “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and…

Earlier this year, one woman stumbled into a side hustle that’s resulted in hundreds of free Amazon products, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Bryan Anselm for BuzzFeed News Jessica receiving Amazon packages on Saturday, November 9, 2019. Jessica — not her real name — has spent well over $15,000…

O ne of Tesla’s core accomplishments has been to change the public’s idea of what — and who — electric cars are for. From the showy, uncompromising, original Roadster to the sleek, luxe Model S, to the almost-mainstream Model 3, the company’s most successful models have dramatically expanded its…

Thomas White/Reuters What Happens to Ambulance Calls When Uber Enters a City Sarah Holder December 21, 2017 In cities where the popular ride-sharing app is used, ambulance usage went down by 7 percent, according to a new study. In cities where ride-sharing apps proliferate, patients are potentially…

Seven thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars. I hid it in a white Piggly Wiggly bag in the back of the dishwasher. Every single time I returned to that tiny apartment, I opened up that Navajo-white Kenmore dishwasher and made sure it was there. It was not a gift. It was not a reward. It wasn’t…

On a recent afternoon in the Arabian Desert, with the temperature hovering around 40C, the cast and crew of Street Dancer 3D are trying very hard to pretend they’re in London. Starring two of Bollywood’s biggest young stars, Varun Dhawan and Shraddha Kapoor , the movie tells the story of rival dance…

“Sunshine is the gift of the gods,” Masayoshi Son cheerily told a crowd of investors on the morning of October 3, 2018. He was in greater Noida, India, giving a speech about solar power. The day was hot, in the mid-90s, and for Son, CEO of the Japanese telecom conglomerate SoftBank, particularly…

Advertisement Pocket Worthy · Stories to fuel your mind. The Best Employees Are Not the Agreeable Ones, According to Adam Grant Grant said he separates workers along two axes: givers and takers, and agreeable and disagreeable. Not you guys, either. Photo from HBO . Cheerful and helpful workers are…

At least five trademark applications are pending for the retort, according to a database for the federal patent office, including one by Fox Media, which hopes to use it for a possible television series. OK Boomer merchandise has proliferated. Credit... Shannon O'Conner/Bonfire First came the “OK…

When you go from the first napkin sketch straight into production. "They said if we converted the CAD file from IGES to DXF we were going to lose some data. I told them we didn't mind." "Someone borrowed my French curves and never gave them back. I can't draw freehand, so all I had to design this…

See the article in its original context from July 11, 1999, Section 6, Page 28 Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. I should be riding on the float in the hit parade/instead of sitting on the curb behind the…

Your Money Adviser The cards, to be issued by some banks, will let customers use their chosen names. The goal is to avoid potential bias. Credit... Till Lauer For transgender and nonbinary people, paying with a plastic card bearing a name that conflicts with their appearance can be stressful. The…

Photo by loli Clement via Unsplash . You already know how much better you feel after a good night’s sleep, but sleeping well helps your brain in less apparent ways than just not being groggy the next day. In fact, getting seven to nine hours of sleep each night can help secure your cognitive…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration Todd Haynes has never made a movie that he hasn’t wanted to. That apparently includes Dark Waters , a fact-based thriller about a lawyer who organizes a class-action lawsuit against the deep-pocketed DuPont chemical company. In interviews , Haynes has talked about…

It’s been a weird 10 years for video games. Still a relatively young industry, gaming has mutated massively over the course of the last decade, from the rise of the utterly massive mobile market, to the dawn of serious big-money eSports competition, to the now automatically assumed online nature of…

See? Biscuits are supposed to be tall. Photo by Brent Hofacker / Shutterstock . For 25 years in Georgia, I watched my mom make the same batch of six light, fluffy biscuits for breakfast almost every Sunday. Then I moved to New York, never to see a light, fluffy biscuit again. I arrived in the city…

“It’s chaos,” said one of the children’s librarians. Credit... Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times It has been heralded as an architectural triumph: A new $41.5 million public library in Long Island City that ascends over multiple landings and terraces, providing stunning Manhattan views to patrons as…

“We got together early on,” Al Pacino said, gesturing at Robert De Niro. “And we shared something, which was a big thing at the time.” The two men were sitting in a hotel suite in New York, trying to sum up 50 years of friendship and the weird, singular bond that comes from being two of the most…

Photo by Larry French/Getty Images . Steve Brown was working his shift at Olsson’s Bookstore in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1985 when he heard his name come over the store intercom. There was a call waiting for him. When Brown picked up the telephone, he heard a voice ask , “Steve Brown? This…

On a sultry summer night in July 2018, the MV Manukai was arriving at the port of Shanghai, near the mouth of the Huangpu River. This busy tributary of the Yangtze winds through the city and includes the Bund, a historic waterfront area and tourist hot spot. Shanghai would be the American container…

You have 3 free articles left this month. You have 3 free articles left. Subscribe to the LRB with our special Christmas offer and get unlimited access to our complete archive Subscribe to the LRB with our special Christmas offer and get unlimited access to our complete archive Subscribe Now Already…

Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop , a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing. The company’s fleet of seven vehicles—a mix of…

This article is an excerpt from Jesper Juul’s book Handmade Pixels , available now from MIT Press. Is independent game development new? Wasn’t there a home computer game revolution in the early 1980s, in which developers would create wildly original games and distribute them on floppy disks (Apple…

CBS/Ringer illustration Despite its moniker as “reality” television, Survivor is rarely a reflection of reality. The long-running series is popcorn entertainment: A handful of contestants, most of them young and attractive, compete in challenges and navigate a social game on a tropical island. It’s…

Would 19 Hours and 16 Minutes in the Air Make Me Crazy? Qantas plans to offer the longest commercial flight ever, nonstop from New York to Sydney. Sarah Lyall took the test flight, with kangaroo-themed pajamas and, perhaps, too much medication. Prof. Marie Carroll from the University of Sydney’s…

Moviegoers love to root for Matt Damon. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox/Warner Bros./DreamWorks For someone who has lived his entire life in the public eye — he was playing the bad guy in School Ties while he was still at Harvard — Damon, unlike his famous buddy Ben Affleck, has done an excellent job…

Inside the weird, wild, low-wage world of Mechanical Turk. After turking for eight hours, the author had earned $7.83. Dave Sanders for The New York Times The computer showed a photo of what looked like a school board meeting. My job was to rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 for 23 different qualities:…

Japan is known for its video arcades, from the tiniest little collections of claw games in basements to entire high-rise buildings packed with floor after floor of video amusements. On Sunday, November 17, perhaps the most elaborately themed arcade in the country, Anata no Warehouse in Kawasaki,…