In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost…

Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again." And at the time, there was some skepticism, both due to fair…

Nestled between two hills in Karachi, Pakistan, lies a very different kind of Silicon Valley. Known as Khadda Market, it is one of the many vibrant places that symbolize the city’s charm. From noon to midnight, it is alive with the buzz of crowded restaurants, supplicating panhandlers, weaving…

Our Local Correspondents The Party Is Cancelled Inside a monthly New York City hangout, where fired university professors and controversial TikTokers get together to have discussions they feel they can’t have anywhere else. May 17, 2023 Illustration by Daniel Zender Every month, more than two…

Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes a…

In the early​ 2000s, after Napster had blown up the old model for buying and selling music, an idea took hold. It was repeated often enough that it became a cliché: people could be tempted away from piracy, the argument went, only if it became significantly easier to access music legally than to…