Goodbye Big Five Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened. Week 4: Microsoft When I initially planned to block all the tech giants from my life , I hadn’t…

Goodbye Big Five Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened. Week 3: Google Long ago, Google made the mistake of adopting the motto, “Don’t be evil,” in a…

“Green Book” is the worst best picture Oscar winner since “Crash,” and I don’t make the comparison lightly. Like that 2005 movie, Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and…

The co-working giant’s real product isn’t office space — it’s a new kind of “corporate culture.“ The Rise of the WeWorking Class America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable The New Labor Movement Fighting for Domestic Workers’ Rights Why Aren’t Women Advancing More in Corporate…

Two apartments at 385 Greenwich Street in TriBeCa, Manhattan, were illegally offered through Airbnb, city officials said. According to a lawsuit, they were part of an enterprise that made more than $20 million in revenue. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Multiple misleading identities, more…

Giving jobless people in Finland a basic income for two years did not lead them to find work, researchers said. From January 2017 until December 2018, 2,000 unemployed Finns got a monthly flat payment of €560 (£490; $685). The aim was to see if a guaranteed safety net would help people find jobs,…

Uber and Airbnb were part of an early generation of tech start-ups that quickly reached $1 billion in value. The up-and-coming generation is looking very different. SAN FRANCISCO — Technology start-ups worth $1 billion, once as rare as unicorns, are now plentiful enough and old enough that there's a…

Goodbye Big Five Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened. Week 6: Blocking them all A couple of months ago, I set out to answer the question of whether…

Waymo’s Early Rider program is a distraction Enlarge / Sergey Brin wears Google Glass in 2012. KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/GettyImages Google made a similar mistake earlier this decade with Google Glass. Instead of releasing an actual commercial product, Google released the Explorers Edition, charging…

A young Kenny and Eve Shopsin. Photo: Courtesy Shopsin Family Kenny Shopsin was the king of the New York diner, as skilled at manning a short-order station as he was at doling out acerbic aphorisms. Shopsin passed away last year , 36 years after he and his late wife opened Shopsin’s , the temple to…

Predicting the results of the Oscars is like predicting the shades of a sunset. Sometimes you recline beneath a majestic rose-mauve skyline. Sometimes you toil under a gray mass of clouded doom. It’s always different, but the unpredictability never changes. The Oscars operate similarly, because…

The rapper G-Eazy at Barclays Center in Brooklyn last month. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times Last month, the white rapper G-Eazy — a handsome ectomorph sporting a motorcycle jacket and 1950s-slick hair — headlined a show at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, part of a weekslong tour. Over…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration He was so young, so raw, so angry, so hungry, so irresistibly crass. But at first, almost everyone managed to resist Marshall Mathers. “You bitches get a hysterectomy disrespectin’ me,” boasted the Detroit rapper known semi-professionally as Eminem on his very…

You know you want to push it. (Credit: luckyraccoon/Shutterstock) All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons – on coffee makers, TV remote controls and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why , looking into where…

None of us has enough money. On Two Cents we often focus on maximizing your money: Leveling up investments or employing new savings hacks. But what do you do when just need to make more ? Lifehacker talked with five people, including a familiar face (hi, Kristin!), to get a sense of how people…

In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company's offices in Europe. Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user's data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the…

A couple weeks ago I interviewed the chef-owners of Joe Beef, David McMillan and Fred Morin, at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn about their new book: Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse . Midway through the Q&A, the two chefs—who are legendary, along with their iconic Montreal restaurant, for…

Now, thanks to a new behind-the-scenes video, we can take a look inside the machine, where SNL cue card supervisor Wally Feresten leads an eight-person team that writes out 1,000 cue cards a week–by hand. The story of why offers a few unexpected lessons in legibility and type design. The short…

For years, awards-show enthusiasts have come up with elaborate systems for predicting and logging the entertainment world’s winners, losers, and tragic snubs. As hype over who wins has grown, so has a fascination with show business’s overachievers. Only a talented few have reached the apex of this…

Testing out solutions is a core part of the design process, and on the web, that often happens in the form of A/B testing: Designers show one group of users design A, another group of users design B, and measure which gets closer to a desired outcome. And it’s not just layouts that get A/B…

The Mueller Report Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect. A concise report will probably act as a “road map” to investigation for the Democratic House — and to further criminal investigation by other prosecutors. Mr. Katyal was an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama. A report from…

Winning the lottery. Having a long-lost relative put you in their will. Selling your TV show. For our Money issue, we interviewed 15 people—and asked writer Ijeoma Oluo to contribute an essay —on the subject of windfalls. How they got their money, and what they did with it, was both as intensely…

Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase’s popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack. Recommended for You Machine…

Illustration: Getty Imagine: you’re in a crowded mid-size venue, 300 strangers surrounding you. Just an hour ago, this space was vacant; now you’re practically cuddling with some drunk dudes you’re praying won’t spill beer on your shirt. They don’t smell great. It’s Friday night and you’ve headed…

Getty Images O n January 29, parliament rejected the Cooper Amendment – which would have staved off a no-deal Brexit. Less than 24 hours later, in a room overlooking Shoreditch, a huddle of London technology workers are planning their next move to stop Britain leaving the European Union. There are…

Uber has become a subsidized alternative to the public-transportation systems that it claims to support. Photograph by Dave Sanders / NYT / Redux Last September, Uber rolled out a rebranding campaign. A new television commercial showed car doors being flung open and the young and the old crowding…

Colin Kaepernick attending the 2018 U.S. Elsa/Getty Images On Friday, the NFL and representatives for Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid announced that they had settled a grievance suit with the two players over alleged collusion to keep them out of the league because of their protests during the…

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on his way to a cabinet meeting last year with his senior advisor, Gerald Butts, who resigned on Monday. Credit Justin Tang/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press OTTAWA — The top political adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada resigned on…

Bursts of high intensity interval training (Hiit) may be more effective for weight loss than longer less intense workouts, a study suggests. The research, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine , analysed results from 36 earlier studies. Although all the participants lost weight, those…

“ I want to debunk the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking and persuade you that originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize.” — Adam Grant, Originals Hi readers. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Steph. I’m an indie maker. I also lead a remote team of a couple dozen as…

Mohammed Khalifa, a 35-year-old Canadian citizen who was born in Saudi Arabia and is of Ethiopian descent, says he is the narrator of multiple English-language Islamic State videos. Credit Ivor Prickett for The New York Times HASAKA, Syria — More than four years ago, the Federal Bureau of…

Photograph: Getty Images/Flashpop W hat brings you joy? It is a question that is hard to avoid these days, as joy seems to be the new buzzword. It is on the cover of two new books, The Joy of No (#Jono) by Debbie Chapman, published at the end of last year, and The Joy of Missing Out , by the…

Illustration by Sean Lewis “M y name is John!” shouted John Allen Chau from his ­kayak in November 2018 as he ­paddled toward strangers on the beach of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. “I love you and Jesus loves you!” In response, the people on the remote Indian island strung arrows in…

Vice President Mike Pence and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Munich on Saturday. She pushed back against his call for European allies to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. Credit Matthias Schrader/Associated Press MUNICH — European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words…

Price is the most delicate element of the marketing mix, and much thought goes into setting prices to nudge us towards spending more. There’s one particularly cunning type of pricing strategy that marketers use to get you to switch your choice from one option to a more expensive or profitable one.…

To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco . Crystal meth . Pollution . Cars before seat belts . Chemicals before Superfund sites . But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to…

Wisconsin’s justification for the $125 million widening of rural Highway 38 was never very clear. Fortunately, the state has dropped the project. Photo: America 2050 “It is difficult to find any merit in the project at all.” That’s what the Wisconsin Public Interest Group said about the proposed…

Construction of the Muscat Avenue Viaduct seen west of State Route 99, just east of Cedar Avenue on July 13, 2017, in Fresno, California. California High-Speed Rail Authority via Getty Images Congressional progressives’ push for a Green New Deal briefly put the question of a national high-speed…

The "distracted boyfriend" meme gets reversed. Antonio Guillem / Shutterstock Andrew Gotzis, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple, whom we’ll call Jane and John, for several years. They have sex about three times a week, which might…

Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, writes that “the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself.” (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) Greg Miller is national security correspondent for The Washington Post, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of “ The…