On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done. Miguel Schincariol / AFP / Getty Images Supporters of Brazilian right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro…

PASU, Pakistan —Sajid Alvi is excited. He just got a grant to study in Sweden. “My Ph.D. is about friction in turbo jet engines,” Alvi says. “I will work on developing new aerospace materials—real geeky stuff!” Alvi’s relatives have come to bid him farewell as he prepares to leave his mountain…

Since early 2016, I have traveled to six major cities around the world (Jakarta, Tokyo, Lagos, New York, Sao Paulo and Amsterdam) to investigate how they manage — or mismanage — their waste. There are some remarkable differences. And a question emerges: Is this just garbage, or is it a resource? ¶…

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were…

The circular economy is telling us something about what it means to be productive. The flow of products, components and materials goes from throughput to ‘roundput', and if waste can be minimised and more of the value in the flow captured then it promises better returns. It's like a pipework, in the…

The Estonian government is so eager to take on big problems that many ambitious techies leave the private sector to join it. Illustration by Eiko Ojala Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends…

When Martin Kunze was 13, he was on vacation with his parents in Spain, and at a beach next to the Mediterranean, did what kids sometimes do out of curiosity and boredom while their parents apply sunscreen and read and kibitz about the other tourists: He started digging a hole in the sand. The…

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel room after two days covering The Singularity Summit,…

Introduction In the beginning, there’s the landing page. It’s often a company’s first impression: a digital introduction to an organization, the problem it tackles, and the solutions it offers. The sophistication of landing pages can vary. Some companies use their homepage as a landing page. Others…

Kelly Sikkema In life, we come across all sorts of decision points, particularly if we choose to go into business for ourselves. Should I do ______? What about ______? Is _______ a good idea? What to do in each one of those situations can be exhausting and stressful and costly. If we’re not careful,…

Murphy's Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never…

A peek under the hood Antin Harasymiv Jul 10, 2018 A few years ago I had the privilege of being an engineer on the Google Photos team and part of the initial launch in 2015. A lot of people contributed to the product — designers, product managers, researchers, and countless engineers (across…

Imagine befriending an octopus, swimming alongside the much-feared great white shark, having your face stroked by a rarely seen clawless otter and cradling a wild rock fish in your hands. These fascinating, life changing experiences have been documented by South Africans Craig Foster and Ross…

Sun Benjamin Hardy Dec 4, 2017 Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder. How do you move forward? If you don’t purposefully carve time out every day to progress and improve — without question, your time will get lost in…

This post is a record of some strategies that I use to focus and be mildly productive. It also records a few other features of my lifestyle. Why develop these strategies? On top of delivering in my day job, I have always tried to invest heavily in my human capital, and that takes a degree of focus.…

Nowadays it’s hard to impress or even surprise with an interface animation. It shows interactions between screens, explains how to use the application or simply directs a user’s attention. While exploring the articles about animation, I found out that almost all of them describe only specific use…

As creators, we can spend hours fine-tuning the tiniest details until we deem our end result “perfect.” But is there really such a thing as perfection when it comes to creativity? We asked four photographers to whether they prepare for flawless or aim for surprise. They each shared a single…

The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die. She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time…

It’s the afternoon of day two of An Event Apart in Seattle . The mighty green one, Luke Wroblewski, is here to deliver a talk called Mobile Planet : With 3.5 billion active smartphones on Earth, we’re now faced with the challenges and opportunities of designing planet-scale software. Through a…

We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to…

Even though Apple’s developer conference is still a few weeks away, I think it’s safe to say that the demo of Google Duplex at yesterday’s Google I/O keynote will go down as the most impressive of the tech conference season. If you haven’t seen it, it is a must-watch: Once I picked my jaw up off the…

R ecently, YouTube announced significant changes to their subscription platform, YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red). They are stepping away from subscriptions and will be opening up their premium content for free, with ads, to all YouTube users. USA Today published an article about the change,…

What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it’s bound to be superseded? Illustration by Lennard Kok In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to…

Good morning 99U. I’m really happy to be back. As Will said, my name is Tina Roth Eisenberg, but most people know me as Swiss Miss which is the name of my blog and my Twitter handle. And I really earned that title. I grew up in Switzerland. I want to address the young woman that struck up a…

The anthropologist David Graeber, in a new book, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” Illustration by Martina Paukova Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports:…

I recently installed a Nest thermostat in my house. Nest has been around for a while, but I’ve been hesitant to get one. I won’t go into the details of why we finally pulled the trigger, but it made sense to have more control of our home environment. When the box arrived, I was excited. I felt like…

Illustration by Dougal MacPherson What makes creative successful? Creative work often lives in the land of feeling—we can say we like something, point to how happy the client is, or talk about how delighted users will be, but can’t objectively measure feelings. Measuring the success of creative work…

“ 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 Edit: The response to this article has been amazing. In the first few days, over 50k people have read it. Thank you to…

In the August 5 issue of the New York Times Magazine , reporter Nathaniel Rich spells out, in just shy of 30,000 words, how in the decade spanning 1979 to 1989, we came very close to halting climate change in its tracks, only we didn’t. Rich’s in-depth reporting links together the earliest…

Oh hey there, leader! We’re so happy you popped in to read this guide. (Exit streamers, confetti and balloons from ceiling) Honestly, there’s no better time than now to level up your leadership skills. What with the future of work in full swing, the differentiating factor for all organizations is…

photo by Toa Heftiba Earlier today, I read a thought-provoking tweet from John Maeda : "Salt Fat Acid Heat" as the perfect set of ingredients for a meal makes me wonder what a similar set of essential ingredients might be for digital products. https://t.co/z1w1PUyQsD — John Maeda (@johnmaeda)…

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once asked his Caltech students to calculate the probability that, if he walked outside the classroom, the first car in the parking lot would have a specific license plate, say 6ZNA74. Assuming every number and letter are equally likely and determined independently,…

Zwei Jahre später entdeckte Werner Herzog, dass auch Maschinen wie Tiere aussehen, wenn man die Kamera lange genug draufhält. In "Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen" erzählt er vom fitzcarraldohaften Kampf indigener Einwohner der australischen Wüste gegen eine Bergbaugesellschaft, die mit Sprengungen auf…

(Washington Post Staff Illustration) What does it mean to be alive right now? Right now. Right this second, right this epoch , as mankind alters the Earth beyond recognition. In Arizona, in the summer, the pinyon pines don’t smell like they used to, says Nikki Cooley, and the wind sometimes feels in…