Renowned tech guru and futurist Kevin Kelly built his career on a knack for knowing what’s next. A hippie and college dropout, he found his way into magazines in the 1980s as editor of the beloved cou
Not because there aren’t people who actually enjoy working in an open office, there are. Quite a few, actually. But they’re in the distinct minority. The vast majority of people either dislike the open office or downright hate it. So how is that going to work, exactly? By force, of course! Open…
Hillary Clinton supporters react to early poll results on election night at the Javits Center in New York on Nov. 8, 2016. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images Because countries are not people, it’s tricky to translate whatever “loving one’s country” means—it’s quite abstract—into the language of…
Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, sees the success of the Model 3 as a crucial step. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times Scrambling to turn out its first mass-market electric car, the automaker set up multiple assembly lines and is changing production processes on the fly. Elon Musk,…
We’re About to Find Out How Bad It Will Get Without Justice Kennedy Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on Wednesday after 30 years on the Supreme Court. Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press For more than a dozen years,…
It started with a paper by John Carlisle in 2017. [1] He analysed baseline data for participants in over 5,000 randomised trials, looking for differences in trial arms that would be improbable if people had been allocated to them randomly. One of the trials he marked as unlikely to be genuinely…
I have always been fascinated by QVC and Home Shopping Network (HSN), and how effective they are in moving product and reshaping inventory. It is no surprise that those two are central to one of my favorite movies, Joy, which is about self-made entrepreneur Joy Mangano . In recent times, when…
Indie pop-rock band ConBoy perform at the WMN/N/SND concert series at WMA Spaces in New York City on May 11, 2018. The series is organized by IMG Agency & Records in partnership with Airbnb. Lindsay Jords Many people think of Airbnb as the poster child for disruption: leveraging the sharing economy…
You can call it a “ policy ” ( Jeff Sessions ) or you can call it a not-policy ( Kirstjen Nielsen ) or you can call it a “law” ( Sarah Huckabee Sanders ). You can say that yes it’s a policy but nobody likes it ( Kellyanne Conway ) or you can say it’s a “zero-tolerance” enforcement of a Democratic…
N ew York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the…
On the last Sunday afternoon in March, Mike Hughes, a sixty-two-year-old limousine driver from Apple Valley, California, successfully launched himself above the Mojave Desert in a homemade steam-powered rocket. He’d been trying for years, in one way or another. In 2002, Hughes set a Guinness World…
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you
Leer en español Adrienne Bresnahan/Getty Images Feedback, as they say, is a gift. Research bears this out, suggesting that it’s a key driver of performance and leadership effectiveness . Negative feed
Cover art for The Wizard Sniffer . Courtesy Buster Hudson Buster Hudson discovered interactive fiction by chance. While exploring the vast world of online game sites, he happened upon a game called Co
The famous proponent of New Atheism is on a crusade against tribalism but seems oblivious to his own version of it. Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the “New Atheists” ( by
Horse racing is something like a religion in Hong Kong, whose citizens bet more than anyone else on Earth. Their cathedral is Happy Valley Racecourse, whose grassy oval track and floodlit stands are r
Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the contemporary internet for a project called “ The Internet Apologizes .” We’re now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview. This interview…
The message of many things in America is “Like this or die.” — George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context , 1980 The Seeing Robot The camera is a small, white, curvilinear monolith on a pedestal. Inside its smooth casing are a microphone, a speaker, and an eye-like lens. After I set it up on…
A new study on surveillance finds that Republicans tend to feel pleased about tracking, both online and in real life, while Democrats often feel bad about it. A survey from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania asked participants about different hypothetical…
People generally believe hitching takes no particular know-how, but it takes a tremendous amount of skill to travel quickly, safely and in the right direction like Juan Villarino. Doba with his kayak
The Media Equation Evan Williams, standing, has turned from Twitter, which he helped start, to Medium, a platform for longer thoughts. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Evan Williams is at it again. Mr. Williams is sitting in an office here a mile up the road from Twitter, where…
I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances dail
For more than 30 years, MIT has been recruiting people with crazy ideas to work in their Media Lab, where life-changing inventions are created. 60 Minutes got a peek at what they're working on now 201
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I wan
It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world. In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per…
This can be cured. Photographer: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images Photographer: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images The recent Bitcoin bubble wasn’t the first, and it might not be the last. Once in
A new power point. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Not long ago I attended an informal session in San Francisco on, basically, how to make the world
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Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What…
There’s a joke in the creative industry that “everyone is a designer”, making light of how infuriating it is to have someone (without a visual background) tell a designer how things should look.
It’s a huge and common problem, caused by a “client is always right” attitude — something we’ve all…
How to write a book: Even if you don’t know what to write about March 07 2018 – 05:13pm I never thought I’d write one book, let alone two . I’m not one of those authors who spent his entire childhood
The intuitively expressive artist continues to create emotion-forward music. The intuitively expressive artist continues to create emotion-forward music. Photography: Clement Pascal Styling: Marcus Allen Text: Max Bell This article appears in the pages of VMAN39, available on newsstands now. Order…
Two weeks ago, Facebook learned that The New York Times , Guardian , and Observer were working on blockbuster stories based on interviews with a man named Christopher Wylie. The core of the tale was familiar but the details were new, and now the scandal was attached to a charismatic face with a top…
Robbinsville, NJ When Dave Alperson got his first job at an Amazon warehouse in 1997, as a temporary hourly employee, it involved walking around the warehouse with a list of where to find products—mostly books—that customers had ordered. Twenty years later, as a regional director of operations for…
"Discarded Treasures" John Frederick Peto / Getty Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book it
In 2013, Jason Kottke wrote a prediction for Nieman Lab’s year-end roundup: “ The blog is dead, long live the blog. ” Kottke was then (and still is) owner of one of the longest continuously running bl
Leer en español You know that thing where someone is walking toward you, and you move one way but so do they, then you move the other way but so do they, and you repeat this dance until, inevitably, o
One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a…
Silicon Valley visionary John Perry Barlow died last night at the age of 70. When he was 30, the EFF founder (and sometime Grateful Dead lyricist) drew up a list of what he called Principles of Adult Behavior. They are: 1. Be patient. No matter what. 2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, never…
I’ve benefited enormously from big tech. Prophet, the consulting firm I cofounded in 1992, helped companies navigate a new landscape being reshaped by Google. Red Envelope, the upscale e-commerce company I cofounded in 1997, never would have made it out of the crib if Amazon hadn’t ignited the…
All across the world, small projects demonstrating driverless buses and shuttles are cropping up: Las Vegas , Minnesota , Austin , Bavaria , Henan Province in China , Victoria in Australia . City governments are studying their implementation, too, from Toronto to Orlando to Ohio . And last week, the…