I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the internet will look like in the future. Right now, it’s dominated by social media in one form or another, with large, megacorp silos acting as our primary sources of information and discourse. This is a shift from the “DIY” homegrown state of the early…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration In 2015, Alice and Angelo Clary took their daughter Azriel to an R. Kelly concert in Orlando, to celebrate Angelo’s birthday. Azriel was 17, with, her mother says, a bubbly personality and dreams of being a famous singer; during the show, Kelly, who has long…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration “It belongs in a museum.” That’s the rallying cry of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a movie that is about, among other things, the importance of preserving holy objects so that future generations can marvel at their grandeur. Netflix isn’t a museum, and,…

On Practical Machinst, there's a fascinating thread about the manufacturer's lockdown on a high-priced, high-end Mori Seiki NV5000 A/40 CNC mill. The person who started the thread owns the machine outright, but has discovered that if he moves it at all, a GPS and gyro sensor package in the machine…

The Shift Face ID, introduced in the iPhone X in 2017, is one of the few advances that can’t be added to an iPhone that’s several years old. When Apple lost more than $75 billion in market value this past week after a surprise announcement that it is expecting lower iPhone sales than originally…

Dick Cheney in March, 1989, after being nominated as President George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. Photograph from Bettmann / Getty Adam McKay, the director of “Vice,” has an exuberant and fantastic filmmaking style that inoculates him against the kind of indignant fact-checking to which…

Brian “RiceGum” Le talking about the Mystery Brand controversy. RiceGum/YouTube Mystery Brand, the controversial loot box-style website promoted by YouTube creators like Jake Paul and Brian “RiceGum” Le, has confirmed it doesn’t own some of the prizes offered to users, and collects others through a…

Not since Dilbert has truth been spoken to power in soulless work settings. But the cartoon character’s successor may be David Graeber. In 2013 he achieved viral fame with cubicle zombies everywhere after he published a short essay on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to…

On November 20, 1969, a 25-year-old drummer from Chattanooga, Tennessee named Clyde Stubblefield was seated behind the drum kit at the King Records studio in the Evanston section of Cincinnati, in the midst of a scorching hot jam. His boss and mentor, James Brown, the Godfather of Soul himself, was…

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible,…

A group of bankers, brokers, and journalists was huddled outside a dingy warehouse along the Nieuwe Maas River in Rotterdam on a gray morning last January. All around was the industrial sprawl of Europe’s largest port, a landscape of cranes and colorful shipping containers stacked up like Lego…

You can call it a human touch or you can call it confusing — either way, Google Maps has started using businesses as reference points for directions. Drivers using the app have started noticing that instead of being given a street name to turn onto or a direction to head in, they're being instructed…

Brendan McDermid / Reuters I t’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by…

The Swedes take a individualized approach to candy selection: “It all depends on how we feel, our mood, the weather. You could say that each person’s candy bag reflects the state of mind of that person.” Photograph by Matt Monath At New York’s newest Swedish candy store, Bon Bon, on the Lower East…

A decade ago, within the special features for “Inland Empire,” David Lynch at the then-newly launched iPhone: “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone,” he said. “Get real.” Ten years later, the simmering tensions between filmmakers of a certain age and the…

Having already reached number four in our Top 100 list earlier this year, we're delighted to name Subset Games' Into The Breach our Ultimate Game of the Year for 2018, joining past winners like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Dishonored 2, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, and Alien: Isolation. Check…

Every year, Jennifer Jenkins and Jamie Boyle from the Duke Center for the Public Domain compile a "Public Domain Day" list ( previously ) that highlights the works that are not entering the public domain in America, thanks to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which hit the pause…

Edan and Homeboy Sandman’s dazzlingly sunlit collaborative album Humble Pi arrives somewhat incongruously, as daylight savings descends on the East Coast and icy winds whip through the streets of East New York. There’s even an early blizzard on the day that we speak, which only adds to the sense…

I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the…

He Jiankui attends the International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong. Reuters Updated on December 4 at 10:55 a.m. ET. Before last week, few people had heard the name He Jiankui. But on November 25, the young Chinese researcher became the center of a global firestorm…

If you are contemplating a new year's health kick, you could be forgiven for feeling a little overwhelmed. Do yoga, run, lift weights, cut the carbs, or the fat (depending on the particular diet that's in vogue), ditch the booze, reduce your stress. It is easy to feel like your life needs to be…

Julia Baritz is having quite a week. The Austin-based developer is the founder and lead architect of Pillowfort.io, a community-oriented social media platform that’s quietly amassed around 20,000 users in its first two and a half years. But since Monday, Baritz has been inundated with more than…

Bryan Boyer Dec 22 Walking around Brasília some years ago I had the distinct feeling that I was doing it “wrong” because, of course, I was. The center of Brasilía is organized along the Exio Monumental, featuring an array of government and other important buildings that form a long spine. This is a…

It’s no secret that companies like Facebook and Google scoop up personal information to serve users ads. But if anything became clear this year, it’s that consumers have a lot more to learn about what happens to their data online—how it’s gathered, who gets to look at it, and what it’s worth.…

Illustration by Dom McKenzie. I n the 158th year of the American civil war , also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise…

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. ‘What mischief could be coming in this dawning era of astonishingly realistic ‘deep fakes’?’Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP D o the notes taken by the interpreters at the recent Helsinki summit include the words “Snowden” and “swap”? We could ask the Russians…

Trump responds to a question from the media prior to boarding Marine One, November 9, 2018. By SHAWN THEW/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock. As Donald Trump’s West Wing careens through one of the most turbulent weeks of his presidency, White House officials are struggling to understand the source of the fury…

An open pit mine in Burdwan, West Bengal, India. Coal is the single largest source of electricity worldwide. Credit Rebecca Conway for The New York Times Leer en español Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. HANOI, Vietnam — Coal, the fuel that…

Pete Paphides Dec 29, 2018 I like specialist and second-hand record shops, but these weren’t the sorts of shops I went to as a kid. I spent vast amounts of my time rifling through record browsers in Debenhams, Boots and WHSmiths, and going to high-street shops that sold a broad selection of records…

In the bright-eyed naiveté of my first few weeks as Facebook’s first leader of the ads targeting effort, I’d eagerly confront each new conspiracy theory. “Is Facebook scanning my photos and using that for ad targeting?” was one from a Los Angeles Times reporter. “My cousin uploaded a photo of her…

William Van Hecke/Corbis via Getty Images Three years ago, on the way to my apartment in Brooklyn to cook dinner for myself and a friend, we stopped into a grocery store that offered build-your-own six-packs of beer. The store had dozens of options of craft beers and ciders in weird flavors, from…

The analytical scientist and the reality star are almost epically mismatched. Illustration by Chloe Cushman This past July, on the final day of the NATO summit in Brussels, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, proposed a closed-door emergency meeting. The emergency was Donald Trump. Minutes…

Lawrence McNamee, a dairy farmer outside Letterkenny, near the border with Northern Ireland. The return of a hard border “would be devastating,” he says. Credit Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times Britain’s exit from the European Union threatens to disrupt trade and potentially…

“So we kind of said this is a one time thing. We’re all coming together to work on this one project.” That sentiment is very much the spirit of Minit itself. The adventure game where you’re stuck in a loop and each life lasts sixty seconds is all about doing as much as you can in the time given to…

Time for G.O.P. to Threaten to Fire Trump Republican leaders need to mount an intervention. Opinion Columnist Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Up to now I have not favored removing President Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came…

A week after my dad died, I got God of War . In the disbelief phase that had followed the late-night, crying call from my mother, who had delivered the unexpected news, I’d looked forward to getting the game and mindlessly mashing buttons, submerging myself in the screen as I had a few years ago…

Back in early 2017, Netflix approached “ Black Mirror ” creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones with an unusual idea. The streaming service had been experimenting with interactive kids content , giving young viewers the ability to choose their own path through a story with a series…

Time for G.O.P. to Threaten to Fire Trump Republican leaders need to mount an intervention. Opinion Columnist Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Up to now I have not favored removing President Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came…

Burnett, like Trump, feels like an outsider, an associate says: “In the reality-TV business, you’re never part of the true Hollywood.” Illustration by Christian Northeast. Photographs: (Trump) M. Von Holden / FilmMagic / Getty; (Burnett) JC Olivera / Getty “Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish…