I only wanted one thing out of 2018’s iPhone event: a new iPhone SE. In failing to provide it Apple seems to have quietly put the model out to pasture — and for this I curse them eternally. Because it was the best phone the company ever made. If you were one of the many who passed over the SE back…

Katie Martin; Adult Swim If the universe is indeed run—as users of cutting-edge psychedelic drugs will occasionally suggest—by nine-foot-tall interdimensional locusts with lawn-mower voices and glittering, loveless minds, who program our life patterns on cold locust computers and grind their…

This story appears in the August 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. Nearly every night of our lives, we undergo a startling metamorphosis. Our brain profoundly alters its behavior and purpose, dimming our consciousness. For a while, we become almost entirely paralyzed. We can’t even shiver.…

I walked past the stage and sat down at the bar, the neon lights illuminating my pink teddy, shadowed eyes, and crimson lips. I ordered my first drink of the night and took inventory of the club. There were a few listless customers scattered around, hunching over bar stools, and a dancer circling…

Apple recently marked the 10th anniversary of the App Store—its online vehicle for distributing iPhone and iPad applications—with a retrospective on its website , noting that developers have earned more than $100 billion through the store over its life span. Shortly after the App Store opened for…

There are many factors which can be a catalyst for bad software, from the tools being used, to the quality of communication inside your team, to the personal stake developers have in its success, to the testing methodology you use. I propose that there is one problem chief among them, an impetus for…

Chances are that you’ve never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley the company is the stuff of legend. Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board and a bold new product idea: a handheld gadget that they called a “personal communicator.” Plugged into a…

How to create natural gestures and animations on iOS At WWDC 2018, Apple designers presented a talk titled “Designing Fluid Interfaces” , explaining the design reasoning behind the gestural interface of iPhone X. Apple’s WWDC18 presentation “Designing Fluid Interfaces” It’s my favorite WWDC talk…

The finale of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sees the quest for the Holy Grail reach a dramatic conclusion. The film’s villain – the Nazi collaborator and artifact hunter Walter Donovan – knows that drinking from the sacred goblet will bring him eternal life. But from a…

Resources July 12, 2018 July 12, 2018 Mike Picarella wanted to protect a co-worker from humiliating sexual harassment. He didn't expect his own life to be destroyed in the process. By David Dayen ILLUSTRATIONS BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD 1 New Job Jitters On May 5, 2011, Mike Picarella’s first day at…

Credit Eleni Kalorkoti Ms. Brooks is a writer. CHICAGO — I was on my way home from dropping my kids off at preschool when a police officer called to ask if I was aware there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest. “No, no,” I told him. “I didn’t know that.” I needed to call my husband, but my…

Yes I am very late to this. But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple’s redesigned Mac keyboard: How very much it sucks. Truly, madly, deeply. This is the keyboard that Apple “completely redesigned” in 2015, in its quest for size zero…

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle,…

Vacation is exhausting when you go places. It’s often a time of awkward experiences—donning bathing suits, struggling with foreign tongues, trying to have fun where you know no one and none of the customs. That’s anything but relaxing. The only kind of break that doesn’t require a follow-up vacation…

A rooster crows and awakens my family at the farm where we are staying for a long weekend. The air is crisp, and stars twinkle in the sky as the Sun rises over the hill. We walk to the barn, where horses, cows, chickens, pigs, dogs and cats vie for our attention. We wash and replenish water bowls,…

So excited to finally share the fruits of an investigation I've been obsessing over for months. The fruits themselves are..... bittersweet https://t.co/PXZ5Wk7g4J

In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things , the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fire, L’Hotel Louis XIV, which was located on the waterfront in Quebec, advertised private baths.…

Men: read this to understand yourself https://t.co/5DumY0Lqod If you love a man, you may wish to even if you aren't one.

When I moved down to London , on the morning of my 18th birthday, to become a young, idiotic, yet hopefully noble lady rock critic, I had a bin bag full of clothes, a laptop, a dog, and one terrible flaw — other than the tendency for my hair to assume an unflattering triangular shape if not…

You can't tell people anything This is sort of Morningstar’s version of Murphy’s Law. When we were assembling our catalog of the things we had learned over the past decade and a half in this business, we almost didn’t include this one because it seems so banal. But I keep finding that it’s often the…

The early tale of Toys “R” Us brims with ambition, energy, and no small amount of ruthlessness, as creation stories often do. Charles Lazarus had gone from high school straight to the U.S. Army, where he served as a cryptographer during World War II, and as he cast about for a business venture upon…

Ever had a woman remind you to call your mom on her birthday? Ever had a woman remember to send around a card for the boss’s birthday, then proceed to buy the card, pass it around, double check that everyone who wanted to sign it did (so no one would feel left out)? Then you, sir, have been the…

Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story Sometime in late 1971, Peter Nelson, from Hewlett-Packard’s Corporate Relations Department in Palo Alto, enlisted Karen Cambria, from the Automatic Measurement Division (conveniently, in the same building), to pose with their new electronic device, a scientific…

You and Kara are designers of a product at a mid-size company. Kara wants to add an icon to your product. You think the icon is wrong. You’ve added similar icons in the past and they were complete failures with your customer. You feel responsible for preventing Kara from making the same costly…

Small tweaks to incentivize engaging with a book’s content. I’ve been using Kindles on and off ever since they launched. Our relationship has been contentious but I’ve always been seduced or re-seduced by their potential. At their best, they are beautiful devices. At their worst, infuriating. They…

Guys and videogames. There they sit: asses glued to the couch, eyes transfixed, their attention leaving the screen only for as long as it takes to tell you about their latest achievements — how no, you don’t understand, their Madden team traded for Tom Brady and that unlocked a better sniper rifle…

Press Herald via Getty Images For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he…

I don’t remember a version of me that isn’t anxious. There is no point in my memory where I can look back and sense a calm, unburdened mind — certainly I have a thousand happy memories, but all of them come with the understanding that I remained anxious. A mild panic overlaying the recollection of…

Photo-Illustration: Stevie Remsberg/Getty Images Self/Reflection is a week of stories on the Cut about how we feel, versus how we look. Here, a woman in her late 50s tells Alexa Tsoulis-Reay how being beautiful affected her life, and how she feels about her looks today. Around eighth grade people…

Rick and Morty is a cartoon for adults that airs as part of the Cartoon Network’s after-dark Adult Swim lineup. If you have an incredibly high IQ , maybe you’ve watched it. Otherwise, you may have first heard about the series when a tantrum-prone subset of its hardcore fans rioted at McDonald’s…

Hi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at $COMPANY. It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of equally complex humans. Take your…

At some point in your leadership career, you’ll need to care about performance management. My first bit of advice is the hardest: don’t ever let yourself think or say the words “performance management.” This is impossible, but aspirational. I will explain. My hard earned definition of performance…

At Apple, design is the driving force, with manufacturing and engineering fully dialed in to support that vision. In practice, that means that Apple’s designers make choices nobody else would be able to make. The amount of custom CNC milling that goes into Apple’s unibody laptops is incredibly hard…

Yesterday, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page let investors know that he wouldn't be able to attend every single earnings call as he has made a habit of in the past. Some speculated that it's because of an increasingly difficult medical condition that makes it hard for Page to speak. Regardless,…

Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker “News Desk”, has done us all a grand favor by penning a sort of grand unified theory on how the “open beats closed” axiom can be true in the face of Apple’s decade-long success: “ Does a Company Like Apple Need a Genius Like Steve Jobs? ” Wu’s conclusion: yes,…

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Max Planck, German quantum theorist and Nobel Prize winner There are two primary mental shifts that occur in the lives of all highly successful people. Many make the first, but very few make the second. Both of these…

The following was shared as a twitter thread. Here’s the medium version. Screenshot from twitter (by author) 1/ Apple has a software problem. Here’s how it plans to fix it. via @markgurman // Let’s take a step back and talk about the broader context and product development at scale. Lots follows……

Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers. Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons: in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality. And in aggregate, over…

Programming sucks https://t.co/Wz93uGJrht

Never smooth enough--a modern addiction https://t.co/cdCO8rpCcg