Checks and Balance Our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on American democracy Ukraine at war All of our coverage of the war in one place The Intelligence Our daily podcast. Today: America’s murder ra

While the US government narrowly avoided a shutdown over continued funding of Planned Parenthood last week, a group of activists coalesced online when Seattle-based writer Lindy West posted the follow

WNYC to Open New Podcast Division WNYC, the public radio powerhouse in New York, is about to grow even bigger through a new division that will develop programs for the expanding podcast market. The di

Published in Liner Notes · 3 min read · Oct 8, 2015 -- On October 1, 2015 something amazing happened. It’s been a few days since the event and I frankly can’t remember much of the details of the Notif

HOW they cheered, the Home Counties arts students and sociology lecturers, as Jeremy Corbyn rattled through the old left’s greatest hits. Ban the bomb, bash the banks, yah boo to the Tories…one more t

Notifications as the app itself I gave a fast quick talk (ten minutes to write, ten minutes to give) at InboxAwesome yesterday in DUMBO. The conference was all about different ways we are designing and looking at our inboxes. A lot of the conversation took to how our inboxes and message queues…

Ever since the release of iOS 9, I’ve been experimenting with a new kind of homescreen. Call it the unscreen . Not where the action is. Advertisement The idea is that Apple’s operating system for iPho

Last week, I wrote a post about notifications – how they’ve evolved, why they matter, and where we’ll be able to handle more. (We also talked about notifications at length in the most recent episode o

When Ken Dornstein learned that Pan Am Flight 103 had exploded, he did not realize that his older brother, David, was on the plane. It was December 22, 1988, and Ken, a sophomore at Brown University,

But then Digg's fortunes turned south. The recession, management problems, and a botched software upgrade all contributed to Digg's downfall. By 2012, things had gotten so bad that the digg.com domain

As software eats the world and takes control over the jobs and services we care about, it also generates an awful lot of notifications: 3 new emails. 4 new interactions on Twitter. 30 minutes until yo

DIGG PICKS | SPONSORED This $40 Kit Will Teach You To Pick Locks Digg Picks 3 months ago You can get started a lot easier when you have a clear visual of what's going inside of this clear lock. · 'WHA

In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site , host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale human avatar with frosted fuchsia tips

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As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared mor

Simon Khalaf, SVP, Product & Engineering, Publisher Products On the 3rd of September, 2015, Benedict Evans , a veteran mobile industry analyst turned venture capitalist, tweeted a chart showing how traditional TV is losing its share of screen to smartphones and tablets. While Mr. Evans’ chart was…

In nature, the relationship between predators and their prey seems like it should be simple: The more prey that’s available to be eaten, the more predators there should be to eat them. If a prey popul

The 2011 Christmas issue of the New Statesman was guest edited by Richard Dawkins. This is his interview with Christopher Hitchens from that issue. It was to be Hitchens’ final interview; he died as i

DONALD TRUMP is not going to be America’s next president. The vagaries of the electoral college notwithstanding, the next occupant of the Oval Office will be someone who wins a lion’s share of the 130

“THIS country is a hellhole. We are going down fast,” says Donald Trump. “We can’t do anything right. We’re a laughing-stock all over the world. The American dream is dead.” It is a dismal prospect, b

Breaking news! The stock market is crashing! Everybody panic! Unicorns are going to die!!! Ok, so maybe we’re overreacting a little. But today (Monday, August 24) saw a nice little 4% ‘correction’ in

Plumbing Trump’s psyche is as productive as asking American Pharoah why he runs. The point is what happens when he does. Illustration by Christoph Niemann On July 23rd, Donald Trump’s red-white-and-na

A dubious first.

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I…

The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the System Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com “We’re going to push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” David Addington, t

Hillary Clinton likes to point out that she is not the first senior national security official to conduct official business on a home computer system. She’s right about that, but the precedent should

If you’re looking for today’s version of the “Wild West,” just look skyward. Consumer drones are flooding the U.S. market in a big way, and more people are flying drones than ever before. Unfortunately, airplane and helicopter pilots are seeing that trend in the worst place possible: just outside…

HBO This story is part of a group of stories called Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Tech stocks have been taking a beating lately, and venture capital investor Bill Gurley of Benchmark thinks it’s a sign. If the valuations of public tech companies are…

There are three fundamental structures that govern the nature of all economic activity: customers, producers and the way, the mediating infrastructure, in which value is exchanged between them. The wa

1. There are these cars around London that seem a bit like Zipcar - the car sharing service - but you can leave them anywhere. Or at least, in most parking bays. So they kind of float around. The app

The discussion around companies like Uber and Airbnb is too narrow. The issue isn’t just employment, but a huge economic shift led by software and connectedness. Published in From the WTF? Economy to

For at least some players in the media industry, this looks like a cross between a Class 5 hurricane and a neutron bomb headed straight for their balance sheets. It’s not enough that they are struggli

T he Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence. I say this as someone who led the party for 13 years and has been a member for more than 40.

He terrified opponents as a stellar prosecutor. Now he’s a supreme court judge and revered historian – the establishment personified. So why is Jonathan Sumption not a household name?

The recent polling surge by Donald Trump has launched a thousand stories about Trump’s “ unprecedented campaign .” But it’s nothing all that unusual: Similar surges occurred for almost every Republica

The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes what we need to design and build. The end of apps as we know them