The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad . This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective…
Behind the misleading claims fueling America's bourbon boom
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. SUBSCRIBE Widow Jane’s flagship 10-year-old straight bourbon is a common sight in hip Brooklyn bars and, according to the company, it can now be found in more than 30…
My 92-Year-Old Father Didn’t Need More Medical Care
Yasser Chalid / Getty My 92-year-old father fell one Saturday night a few months ago. My mother could not pick him up. Her brother was not answering his cellphone, so she called 911. An ambulance crew brought him to the hospital. The emergency-room physician ordered a CT scan. A spot on the scan…
The Trump Presidency Is Over
Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto / Getty Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here . When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would…
Singapore is the model for how to handle the coronavirus
AP Images The key features: quick action, extensive testing, and relentless tracking. Mar 12, 2020 AP Images I began writing this at Raffles Hotel, a gleaming white pinnacle of Singapore’s British colonial past. Immaculately renovated over the past two and a half years, it is truly one of the…
The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course
Hermes Images / AGF / Universal Images Group / Getty The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise. It was good flying weather—temperatures in the mid-40s with a slight breeze out of the southeast—but oddly, no one knew where the 737 jetliner was…
The Big Interception Flaw in the US-UK Cloud Act Agreement
On October 3, 2019, the United States and the United Kingdom entered into a first-of-its-kind executive agreement under the CLOUD Act . The text of the agreement was released on October 7, 2019. For a fine overview of the provisions of the agreement, Jennifer Daskal and Peter Swire posted a summary…
Facebook Restricts Speech by Popular Demand
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty This past week, with some fanfare, Facebook announced its own version of the Supreme Court: a 40-member board that will make final decisions about user posts that Facebook has taken down. The announcement came after extended deliberations that have been described as…
Presentation Tips for Technical Talks
In the past two years I've given and watched several technical talks, and they are not all created equal. Recently I met with Teuta H Hyseni to talk about an upcoming talk she was planning (securing AI and ML, very interesting!), and afterwards I made several notes about general tips for technical…
Sleep Better, Lead Better
Wayne Mills How much sleep do you get each night? Most of us know that eight hours is the recommended amount, but with work, family, and social commitments often consuming more than 16 hours of the day, it can seem impossible to make the math work. Perhaps you feel that you operate just fine on four…
Why Has Language Changed So Much So Fast? ‘Because Internet’
Books of The Times Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times Amazon Apple Books Barnes and Noble Local Booksellers When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” the…
What happens to tech workers when their skills become obsolete?
In 2010, Steve Jobs announced in a blog post that Apple would no longer support Adobe Flash. At the time, Flash was a popular development tool for creating animations, web games, and other internet applications. Shortly after his announcement, the use of Flash would decline steeply—in 2011, 28.5% of…
DMVs Are Selling Your Data to Private Investigators
Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country are taking drivers' personal information and selling it to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit, Motherboard has learned. DMVs sell the data for an array of approved purposes, such as to…
Being Young, Active and Physically Fit May Be Very Good for Your Brain
PHys Ed Physically fit young adults have healthier white matter in their brains and better thinking skills than young people who are out of shape. Credit... Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Physically fit young adults have healthier white matter in their brains and better thinking skills than…
Amid a global shortage of tech talent, what can Singapore and its companies do?
I currently work in Silicon Valley for the Government where one of my roles is to engage, cultivate and recruit technology talent for Singapore. Hardly a day goes by without a Singaporean employer reaching out to me to discuss the tech talent shortage. One gets the sense that the ambition and speed…
The Grid, but why tho?
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Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?
O n the first floor of a nondescript 1,000 sq metre industrial unit in Berlin’s Steglitz district, four workers are cautiously placing pregnant queen ants into test tubes in order to dispatch them across Europe. This is Antstore , the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two…
How Exercise Affects Our Memory
Phys Ed Even a single workout may make our brain’s memory centers, like our muscles, more fit. A man rides a bike along the beach in Santa Monica, California. Credit Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times A single, moderate workout may immediately change how our brains function and how well we…
What other countries can learn from Singapore’s schools
WHEN the island of Singapore became an independent country in 1965, it had few friends and even fewer natural resources. How did it become one of the world’s great trading and financial centres? The strategy, explained Lee Kuan Yew, its first prime minister, was “to develop Singapore’s only…
The cost of internet access is dropping globally but not fast enough in Africa
Official Correction: This story previously noted that the cost of internet access increased in Africa last year based on a report by Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) . However, A4AI has corrected a methodological error in its initial report to show that prices, in fact, dropped in Africa. The…
Asia's Experimental Music Scene Is About to Explode
This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia It's hard not to at least be aware of the local noise scene if you live in Yogyakarta. That's because, most of the time, the scene comes to you, whether you want it or not. Recently, we were on a Jogja city bus when a small crowd got on board with…
Scaling Engineering Teams – Seth Blank – Medium
Seth Blank Dec 19, 2016 I recently gave a talk on “Scaling the Team and Tech” at Blue Run Venture’s CTO Summit. I’m posting it publicly to start a larger conversation. Have you ever watched your best engineer turn into your weakest link? Have you seen key team members get constantly sidetracked by…
The Story of the AC Adapter, Thomas Edison's Revenge on the Power Grid
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium , a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. Power outlets are frustrating , but the devices we use on a daily basis? They don't necessarily make things easier. In fact, the bricks that come with many modern devices, from…
The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed
Alexis Madrigal It all started with an Instagram ad for a coat, the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat to be specific. It looked like a decent camel coat, not fancy but fine. And I’d been looking for one just that color, so when the ad touting the coat popped up and the price was in…
In Conversation: Quincy Jones
Photo: Art Streiber / AUGUST In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered — from afar, anyway — as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. (That’s what earning 28 Grammy awards and co-producing Michael Jackson’s biggest-selling albums will do.) But in person, the…
Why so many Americans think Buddhism is just a philosophy
In East Asia, Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s death and entrance into final enlightenment in February. But at my local Zen temple in North Carolina, the Buddha’s enlightenment is commemorated during the holiday season of December, with a short talk for the children, a candlelight service and a…
Inside SuperNAP 8: Switch's Tier IV Data Fortress
A look at the cooling units outside the SuperNAP 8 data center in Las Vegas. These 1000-ton units can switch between multiple cooling modes, and have on-board flywheels to provide extended runtime in the event of power outages. Click for a larger version of this image. (Photo; Switch) LAS VEGAS -…
LPWAN is booming all over APAC – but where are the use cases?
Image credit: chombosan / Shutterstock.com Low-power WAN (LPWAN) deployments have been popping up swiftly across the Asia-Pacific in recent months, driven by all the buzz over the Internet of Things and the revenue possibilities therein. LPWAN technologies such as Sigfox, LoRa and NB-IoT…
The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations
Passengers line up for a bullet train at a platform in Tokyo Station. Yuya Shino/Reuters Allan Richarz May 22, 2018 The nation’s famed mastery of rail travel has been aided by some subtle behavioral tricks. It is a scene that plays out each weekday morning across Tokyo. Suit-clad office workers,…
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation. Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants,…
Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse
In training sessions on domestic violence and technology, people have started asking about how to handle the use of connected home devices in abuse situations, said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Credit Tony Luong for The New York…
My romance with ADHD meds.
Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ( read Sydney Spiesel in Slate on the risks and benefits), the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and…
What Is Glitter?
Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Credit Chris Maggio for The New York Times A strange journey to the glitter factory. Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Credit Chris Maggio for The New York Times Each December, surrounded by wonderlands…
How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive
Nayu Kim / Flickr Recently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company’s ballpoints into classrooms. As a teacher, I…
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is…
Re-educating Rita
IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online. By the time the course began in October,…
The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer's Grows
The unsettling evidence that Alzheimer’s Disease may be transmissible under limited -- but definitely nonzero -- circumstances keeps growing. Last December I wrote about research that revealed that infectious, lethal proteins called prions have the potential to be transmitted on optical medical…
The kid hackers who starred in a real-life WarGames
A mong the tens of thousands of kids who saw WarGames, when it opened in June 1983, were 17 year old Neal Patrick and 20 year old Timothy Winslow from Milwaukee. Like the classic film’s lead character, played by Matthew Broderick, they were nice middle class kids from the American suburbs who were…
Zwift Is Trying to Take Over the World
Mar 22, 2019 Zwift , having formed an official cycling league, is now trying to get e-racing into the Olympics. The indoor cycling platform wants to legitimize e-sports and grow it into a global phenomenon to compete with real-world bike racing. The move would create a whole new discipline of racing…
The Kigali paradox: How did Rwanda's capital become Africa's cleanest city?
At first glimpse, Rwanda’s capital is a model African city: clean, organised, beautiful. But behind the gleaming facade, not all is well Kigali — Theodosie Uwamohoro was hawking bottles of juice and mineral water at the bus station the day she was killed. It was a Saturday — May 7 2016. When the…