In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life’s work. I thought Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, with hundreds of employees. It would IPO, and I would work on it until I died. Something like…

I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected. Getty Images “I tried to register for the 2016 election, but it was beyond the deadline by the time I tried to do it,” a man named Tim, age 27,…

Illustration by Dougal MacPherson In late 2016, Gartner predicted that 30 percent of web browsing sessions would be done without a screen by 2020. Earlier the same year, Comscore had predicted that half of all searches would be voice searches by 2020. Though there’s recent evidence to suggest that…

With the rise of microservices and distributed cloud architectures, the web has grown increasingly complex. We all depend on these systems more than ever, yet failures have become much harder to predict. These failures cause costly outages for companies. The outages hurt customers trying to shop,…

Featured Stories The past, present, and future of non-fiction storytelling Josh S. Rose Feb 28, 2018 · 13 min read Photograph by Amit Madheshiya, from the project The Cinema Travellers. N on-fiction storytelling is one of the most exciting and boundary-pushing genres of modern entertainment. And…

A year ago, I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked for me. I was there to support them. The topic of design responsibility came up, possibly brought up by one of my designers; I honestly don’t remember the…

Today Guy Callendar is a historical footnote, but tomorrow he will have a chapter of his own. Born in 1898, Callendar was the son of Britain’s leading steam engineer, a successful academic and inventor who raised his children in a 22-room mansion. A greenhouse on the grounds was converted into a…

Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, Leonard Higgins, Michael Foster and Ken Ward near Seattle in January. Credit Katy Grannan for The New York Times Feature How a group of five activists called the Valve Turners decided to fight global warming by doing whatever it takes. Emily Johnston, Annette…

Sarah Cartier, the valiant captain of one of the most emblematic refuges on the Alps, unveils life in her little corner of paradise 2,481m above sea level. Being the start and end point of all great alpine adventures, the refuges are one of the strongest emblems of mountain culture. A warm and…

While I am (rightfully) teased about how often I discuss Aggregation Theory , there is a method to my madness, particularly over the last year: more and more attention is being paid to the power wielded by Aggregators like Google and Facebook, but to my mind the language is all wrong. I discussed…

What does it take to push a farmer to this point? The point where, fed up of thousands of disrespectful photographers, wannabe “influencers” and narcissistic tourists, they feel the only way to get them to stop damaging their business and property, is to damage those people’s photographs? I guess…

Refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border in 2016. ‘In the 21st century rising resource consumption has matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth.’Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images F or most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony…

The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on Mars. Unless we…

Overreliance on artificial intelligence may put us in intellectual debt. Illustration by Jon Han Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of…

Your project is called the Glia Project. Does the name mean anything? No. It just sounded medical and we all liked it. One of the engineers was like, “Glia… I like Glia.” Okay, great. We didn’t really care about a name, but we needed one to apply for a medical license and The High-Quality, Low-Cost…

A woman rides her bike to the farmers’ market to buy locally grown fresh fruit and vegetables. After carefully selecting some apples, oranges, avocados, potatoes and kale, all grown on small farms without the use of synthetic pesticides, she places them in her homemade cloth produce bags. Before she…

Hello, how is it going? I’m Vince Kadlubek, CEO of Meow Wolf, a creative production company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I thought a lot about what the name of the talk was going to be, or what is the thesis of my talk? And it jumped around to a lot of different things. I think really where it landed…

Credit: Mayur Kakade Getty Images “More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops…

Ranjan here, and today I'm talking Taboola and Outbrain. Most of my work in media has been on subscriptions and branded content, so I've never played in the depths of ad-tech darkness. But, I spent seven years trading currency derivatives and am well versed in the art of arbitrage. This is what…

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow , Noble Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly…

June 25, 2019 - Tristan Harris @ The Senate Commerce Committee. How technology companies use algorithms and machine learning to influence the public. Insight into companies, such as Google, Youtube, and Facebook.

Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers , turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 2600km²…

Jim Balsillie, retired co-CEO of Research In Motion and chair of the Centre for International Governance Innovation , testified today at the hearings of the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy being held in Ottawa. Politicians from Canada and 10 other countries have…

In today's business world, it's almost universally assumed that you can boost corporate productivity by encouraging and expecting your salaried employees to work as many hours as possible per day. Research says otherwise. Long work hours create stress, and stressed employees get sick more often,…

Itamar Gilad Feb 1, 2018 Over the years I created my fair share of product strategies, roadmaps and project gantts. I don’t do them anymore. I found a better alternative which I’ll explain below. First, here’s what I used to do: This form of planning is a ton of work — just getting all stakeholders…

Forest clearance in Indonesia. Scientists have warned of the impact of deforestation on animals.Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Greenpeace Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced…

How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world. APRIL 30, 2019 Big Picture Does what I eat have an effect on climate change? Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all…

Credit: Robert Drózd, Wikimedia Commons In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were…

Illustration by Nate Kitch I t felt as disorienting as forgetting my pin number. I stared at the caterpillar, unable to attach a name to it. I don’t think my mental powers are fading: I still possess an eerie capacity to recall facts and figures and memorise long screeds of text. This is a specific…

Getty Images / Mark Wilson / Staff The world’s richest man has given up on Earth. Developed economies are scrambling to cut emissions, and globally governments are being urged to declare a climate emergency, but Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, seems to have thrown in the towel…

It’s hard to pin down a starting point for art made under the Anthropocene — our current geological age, in which human activity has exerted a dominant influence on the climate. The novels of Charles Dickens are nothing if not a story of man struggling against his own ingenuity; the horror in Heart…

In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans…