The Hard Side of Selling Soft Treats1:59 When it gets hot in New York, ice cream trucks hit the pavement, often competing fiercely for coveted street corners. Follow Ricardo Cruz, one of Mister Softee’s 350 drivers, on a sunny day in the city.Credit...Michael Nagle for The New York Times Summer in…

Published on Feb 9, 2016 Flynn Principal Engineer at Ambassador Labs Chad Lung recently put together a tutorial about writing a Python microservice using AWS Lambda, reachable via HTTP. It’s well writ

Illustration: Jim Cooke, Photo: Getty Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has generated an unceasing torrent of press attention that some estimate to be worth roughly $2 billion. Yet the

Biz & IT Facebook’s ad platform now guesses at your race based on your behavior The company profiles users so it can sell against your “ethnic affinity.” Annalee Newitz – Mar 18, 2016 5:15 pm | 117 N.W.A. in the late 1980s. Three different versions of the marketing campaign for the band's biopic…

British democracy has survived all sorts of things: the unraveling of the British Empire, independence movements in Ireland and Scotland, Prime Minister’s Questions. But never before has it confronted Boaty McBoatface. The boat, which is really a ship, acquired new significance this week, when a…

Home Blog May 12, 2016 Posted by Slav Petrov, Senior Staff Research Scientist Quick links At Google, we spend a lot of time thinking about how computer systems can read and understand human language in order to process it in intelligent ways. Today, we are excited to share the fruits of our research…

Let’s start with one of the all-time great Museum logos: The Victoria and Albert Museum. Don’t make the same mistake as me and pronounce it ‘vanda’ What are we looking at here? Sure, it’s the name of the museum, but what’s important is that it’s an abbreviation where the two letters get smushed…

Before Evan Spiegel was Evan Spiegel , there were times he wanted to fit in. Like in June 2012, when Spiegel walked across a makeshift stage erected inside Stanford University’s football stadium to co

In the final years of his third life, Dezhung Rinpoche enjoyed short walks around the block near his home in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood. Dressed in the traditional maroon robes of a Tibetan Buddhist lama, he would shuffle along with the help of an attendant and the crutch that had been his…

You can't get there from here (site_id mismatch error). This happens when an external blog (a self-hosted blog using the Stats plugin) is pointed to WordPress.com by DNS. If you are trying to migrate away from WordPress.com, please update your DNS to point the domain to your own server. Otherwise…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com The twenty-first century is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people on the planet live in cities than don’t. Experts…

Photo Crossing a ladder just above the Khumbu Icefall. At the beginning of each season a team places up to 200 ladders along the climbing route enabling the climbers to through the crevasse-riddled section of the route. Credit Photo courtesy Mike Chambers The morning of the avalanche was quiet. It…

One woman’s story of racism, sexism, and discrimination at Squarespace. Amélie Lamont 18 min read· Mar 14, 2016 -- As a young black woman in the tech industry, by virtue of my existence, I am bound to face discrimination. I’ve wanted to share this story for 2 years, but I’ve been scared. I recently…

Google, Facebook and Microsoft among the companies that will back Apple in its iPhone fight with the U.S. government By Deepa Seetharaman and Jack Nicas Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Gov. John Kasich come down firmly on the FBI's side in the Apple encryption debate during…

Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Subscribe to our newsletter [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the…

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when a Philadelphia magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV,…

analyzing the Anchor launch using social data. Gilad Lotan 5 min read· Feb 23, 2016 -- (full disclosure: betaworks pre-seeded Anchor ) Research shows that densely connected groups of users can help propagate information: “viral” information cascades, e-commerce and app downloads can see increasing…

This evening I’m flying towards Barcelona for this year’s MWC, the main annual mobile industry conference. I’ve been going since 2001, on and off, when it was in (cold, rainy) Cannes and a tenth of the size - last year there were 85,000 people. 2001 was a year after the European auctions of 3G…

A truth is dawning on media owners (or in many cases it has dawned, but they don’t like to talk about it). Publishing is over. Obviously this isn’t true in its purest sense; publishing is actually flourishing, just not for publishers. As Facebook last week extended the reach of its instant articles…

Logan Wright 6 min read· Feb 16, 2016 -- Server side swift has been an exciting prospect ever since Apple officially released an open source linux compatible version. My curiosity finally got the better of me and it was time to give it a try. I haven’t had any backend experience aside from a few…

February 16, 2016 A Message to Our Customers The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand. This moment calls for public discussion, and we…

The idea of a “smartphone” that could connect to the Internet and run applications was around long before 2007; Apple, though, was the first to put the entire package together, including the device, user interface, and interaction paradigm, which is why the first iPhone is considered the start date…

by Nicole Boyce I saw the first denim scrunchie before I’d even reached the venue. A woman in front of me was wearing a Sandlot t-shirt with the caption, “You’re killing me, Smalls!” Another woman, wearing a shirt that just said, “The 90s,” posed a friend for the camera. “You’ve got to move the vest…

A Critic at Large Dead Certainty January 17, 2016 A private investigative project, bound by no rules of procedure, is answerable only to ratings and the ethics of its makers.Illustration by Simon Prades Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as…

“How much are we going to make tonight?” Illustration: Clay Rodery This article was featured in Reread: New York Hustlers, a newsletter miniseries that resurfaces classic tales of scammers, grifters, and strivers from the New York archives. To read more stories like this, sign up here. In another…

This story was originally published on December 8, 2015. Shortly thereafter, Craig Wright scrubbed much of his digital presence and disappeared for months—until May 2, 2016, when he publicly announced that he is the creator of Bitcoin. A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and…

Nathan Hubbard 12 min read· Dec 1, 2015 -- Unless you fell into a post-holiday food coma, you know that Adele’s album 25 just sold more copies in its first week than any album, ever. The average human being had been conditioned to believe this was not possible in 2015. Remember that narrative?…

Shrinking Legacy Business Time Inc.'s ( TIME ) print-related goods and services have been on the decline for quite some time. Given that print-related sales showed the three-year average annual declin

DHH 7 min read· Nov 25, 2015 -- I grew up lower-middle class on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Anywhere outside of Scandinavia, the socioeconomic label would probably have been ‘poor’, but Danish safety nets and support systems did their best to suspend the facts and offer better. Press enter or click…

What follows are some passages of text from a piece about technology in the New York Review of Books. Just as the market or the free play of competition provided in theory the optimum long-run solution for virtually every aspect of virtually every social and economic problem, so too does the free…

I don’t know about you, but for me, the raging war between Bernie Bros and the Hillarybots has reached peak absurd. Last week, when I complained on Facebook about anti-Hillary sexism, a pro-Sanders commenter accused me of angling for a job in the Clinton administration. Drats! I exclaimed as I shook…

Press enter or click to view image in full size Not to mention 400 Duane Reades. What happened to the people that were there before? What happens to those neighborhoods now that their communities are gone forever? Press enter or click to view image in full size This isn’t unique to New York or…

The future of media is here — it’s just not evenly distributed Chris Dixon 8 min read· Nov 15, 2015 -- The success or failure of tech and media products depends on complicated interactions between products, economics, technology, and culture. It’s very hard to predict what will work and what won’t.…

The Data & Society Research Institute, with a researcher from NYU, conducted an extensive study of Uber’s labor issues though “sustained monitoring of online driver forums and interviewing Uber drivers.” It’s a surprisingly breezy document, given what it is, and bears out the types of things any…

John Herrman Co-editor, The @Awl The Awl Be less stupid.

Audrey Elaine Elrod was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived…

Apple devices are widely considered extremely secure and hard to hack. But as the internet adage says, everything can be hacked—even the new iPhone. Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million b