A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it. We already had the coup. It happened on…

Illustration by Bill Bragg B ack in 1999, Google hit 1bn searches a year . Wifi began to make an impact about two years later. Thanks to the pioneers of Facebook and Twitter, the age of mass social media dawned between 2004 and 2006 – and non-stop posting, messaging and following was soon enabled by…

P erhaps the hardest thing for people not living in Israel to grasp is that for most Israelis, talk about how to deal with the question of Palestine is just foreground. In the background is a contest over what kind of state Israel must be. It is not just thinking about war, with Iranian proxies,…

An Ordnance Survey worker points his arrow at a revision point, while laughing children look on. All photos: Courtesy Archives+/Timepix On March 11, 1947, readers of the Manchester Evening Chronicle were warned of a strange invasion. “Teams of men have descended on a dozen cities,” the article…

“S adly, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing…

On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell, a leading member of the Conservative Party in the British parliament, made a speech that would imprint itself into British memory—and divide the nation with its racist, incendiary rhetoric. Speaking before a group of conservative activists, Powell said that if…

Reality’s been having a tough time of it lately. From fake news to fake video to the utter charade of our Instagram personas, ‘authenticity’ seems to be over. When everything is an ironic meme, what are the new vectors for talking truth? 1. Media isn’t really real In the last couple of years, fakery…

The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won…

It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes (in glasses) was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot. Photograph from Universal Pictures / Everett Earlier this year, the Criterion Collection, which is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around…

You know the drill by now: A runaway trolley is careening down a track. There are five workers ahead, sure to be killed if the trolley reaches them. You can throw a lever to switch the trolley to a neighboring track, but there’s a worker on that one as well who would likewise be doomed. Do you hit…

Spacecraft Cemetery in Pacific Ocean The phrase Spacecraft Cemetery can refer to an area in the southern Pacific Ocean 3,900 kilometres (2,400 mi) southeast of Wellington, New Zealand, [1] where spacecraft, notably the defunct Mir space station [2] and waste-filled Progress cargo ships [3] are and…

Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare “Y ou can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end,” wrote Tim O’Brien in his novel about Vietnam, The Things They Carried. “Not then, not ever. In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t…

O n 3 August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer. Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out…

What are microbiomes? Both inside and out, our bodies harbour a huge array of micro-organisms. While bacteria are the biggest players, we also host single-celled organisms known as archaea, as well as fungi, viruses and other microbes – including viruses that attack bacteria. Together these are…

The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut Michal Rovner: Night-7 , 2016. Rovner’s work is on view in…

Among the most hilarious words in the English language is “dagnabbit.” It’s full of very funny hard syllables and, for most Americans, it’s most often heard coming out of the cartoon mouth of Yosemite Sam, who has a funny voice and a big hat (big hats are also funny). But the way the word evolved is…

Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to understand the principles that determine how tech affects our lives. Understanding technology today Technology isn’t an industry , it’s a method…

On the days when Bitcoin crashes, a holiday atmosphere takes over in my corners of the internet. People tweet screengrabs of Reddit fights. It’s always good fun to watch strangers grieve as their digital nonsense nickels melt into slag. It’s not that I want Bitcoin holders to suffer, really. As a…

Adapted from “We Are The Very Model Of Modern Humanist Technologists”, a lightning talk given at # foocamp 2017 in San Francisco on Saturday, November 4th, 2017. For context, a lightning talk is normally around five minutes long. Last autumn, I was invited to Foo Camp , an unconference organized by…

From left, Diane Keaton, Woody Allen and Jerry Lacy in “Play It Again, Sam.” Paramount Pictures On the morning of the Oscar nominations, I was chatting with a stranger about movies, as one does. The conversation turned to Woody Allen. “My son has seen all his movies, and he thinks he’s innocent,”…

I n his 2014 book The Establishment , Owen Jones explained how and why Britain’s unequal, class-ridden system would always prevail. It was written at a time when the elite seemed to be thriving, despite having recently helped to trash the global economy. After a few lean years for “ Davos man ”,…

INDY PULSE For decades Laura James felt like a failure. Unable to "navigate the world" as well as those around her, she could not understand why, given her successful career and life, she often struggled. Then last year, aged 45, James was diagnosed with autism . “For 45 years, I had struggled with…

Marina Abramović in New York.Photograph: Lozovsky/BFA/Rex/Shutterstock Marina Abramović is on a Skype call from Madrid, showing off her custom-made red sweater, which says “Love conquers all.” “I’ve been wearing it all the time,” she says in her husky, Serbian accent. “It’s like my pyjamas.” This…

This was the first edition of Transmediale I attended, high hopes and all. However, it feels as if I could copy-paste the reviews I wrote for recent big budget events in Europe and no one would notice. If you were to play events such as the Venice Biennial , Wiener Festwochen , even Art Basel, as…

Why Brexit is the culmination of a British national project which weaponises imperial amnesia and nostalgia. Artwork by Marisa Malik Brexit sold the country a dream; ostensibly a project built on anti-migrant sentiment, it also invoked delusions of grandeur, rooted in reanimating the glorious days…

The Awl was a place where outsiders and the unpracticed could find a sympathetic audience and an opportunity to sound like themselves. Photograph by Alex Welsh Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surelydisappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of onlinefreedom…

My Internet Mea Culpa I’m sorry I was wrong. We all were.* Last night, as I was falling asleep after a lovely Christmas, a thought popped into my head. I was thinking how lovely the holiday had been, and part of that was because I’d not been on the internet most of the day. Furthermore, most people…

What the McRib says about us as a society is worse than any conspiracy theory by Willy Staley One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions,…

“Toni Erdmann” “ T oni Erdman” is one of the most lauded films of 2016. It was won many critics awards and was named best film of the year by multiple international critics associations, including Sight & Sound, which picked a female-directed film for the first time . Pretty impressive for a German…

O n December 16, 2016, Tanya Gersh answered her phone and heard gunshots. Startled, she hung up. Gersh, a real-estate agent who lives in Whitefish, Montana, assumed it was a prank call. But the phone rang again. More gunshots. Again, she hung up. Another call. This time, she heard a man’s voice:…

Listen: Luyendijk chats to Prospect Editor Tom Clark in our monthly podcast, Headspace When I came to live in London with my family in 2011 I did not have to think of a work or residency permit. My children quickly found an excellent state primary school, and after a handful of calls we enjoyed free…

Alex R Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight.Photograph: Allstar/PLAN B ENTERTAINMENT I nsecure, the HBO series currently in its terrific second season (#TeamMolly), has been garnering attention since its pilot for its refreshing look at the lives of a small group of black women in Los Angeles.…

PUBLISHED: 09:00 10 September 2017 | UPDATED: 12:49 11 September 2017 The New European UKIP's notorious EU referendum campaign Breaking Point poster $image.copyright British identity is fragmented like never before, with the rise of pop-up populism dividing people into “them” and “us”. Author PETER…

Nothing sounds more futuristic than artificial intelligence (AI). Our predictions about the future of AI are largely shaped by science fiction. Go to any conference, skim any WIRED article, peruse any gallery of stock images depicting AI*, and you can’t help but imagine AI as a disembodied cyberbabe…

[Image: Sunrise, via PublicDomainPictures.net ]. A short item in The Economist last month suggested that town planners could simply bypass their own aesthetic responses to a landscape and turn instead to an algorithm to design “scenic” locales. Researchers at the Warwick Business School, we read,…

The Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, who covered Donald Trump long before he entered the White House and has received threats because of her reporting. Photograph by Bob Daemmrich / Alamy One of the saving graces of the Trump era is the journalism it hasinspired. Maggie Haberman is a tireless,…

H alf a century ago, in the great hippie year of 1967, an acclaimed young American science fiction writer, Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more…

D uring World War II, a radar operator tracks an airplane over Hamburg, guiding searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in relation to a phosphor dot whose position is updated with each sweep of the antenna. Abruptly, dots that seem to represent airplanes begin to multiply, quickly swamping the display.…

Dear Journalists, I'd like to offer some advice on how to write better and more truthfully when you write articles about artificial intelligence. The reason I'm writing this is that there are a whole lot of very bad articles on AI (news articles and public interest articles) being published in…

We are living in the web’s goldfish bowl.Photograph: Alamy G oogle and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power. We call them platforms…