The UK’s decision Tuesday to allow Huawei to provide noncritical components of its 5G network marked another critical win for the embattled Chinese telecom. It also raised a critical question about the multi-year, international campaign by the Trump administration and the US government to box Huawei out of western cellular networks: Has Trump lost?The US…
Brunch looked great before your friends whipped out their iPhones, angling for perfect shots of their avocado toast as yours went cold. It’s 2020, and people still photograph their food, though by now such behavior is cringey enough to elicit some eye rolls. Everyone knows it isn’t really about the food.“It’s about them,” says photography…
Monster trucks. You might think, hey, it’s just a truck with giant tires. Oh, but no. These trucks are also incredibly powerful. They can jump and bounce and do wheelies. They can even do flips in the air. First it was a backflip, but at the Monster Jam World Finals XVIII, a truck known as…
Last year was, in pop culture terms, a year of disappointing endings. Both Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Game of Thrones demonstrated just how difficult it is to end a major mass-media storytelling project in a way that’s satisfying. It’s the Lost problem all over again: Narrative answers are never as satisfying as…
You may not think much about encryption day to day, but it’s the reason the FBI can’t easily get at the data on the iPhones that come into its possession; it also means if someone steals your phone, they won’t be able to get anything off it without the PIN code.In terms of individual apps,…
There is a clock being constructed in a mountain in Texas. The clock will tick once a year, marking time over the next 10,000 years. The clock is an art installation. It is intended as a monument to long-term thinking, meant to inspire its visitors to be mindful of their place in the long arc…
This story is part of a series on parenting in the digital age—from surveilling our teens to helping our kids navigate fake news and misinformation.In a lot of comic books, parents are background figures, just out of frame. They don’t have faces or heads; everything they say comes out as a Peanuts-esque “wah wah, wah…
Last summer, a secretive space company took up residence in a massive warehouse in the sun-soaked industrial neighborhood that surrounds Long Beach Airport. Reflections of turboprop panes flit across the building’s mirrored panes. Across the street, a retro McDonnell Douglas sign perches above the aerospace giant’s former factory and just around the corner, Virgin Orbit…
Kentucky Route Zero has won “game of the year” awards multiple times, was dubbed the “best musical of 2014,” and has been called “the most important game of the decade”—and all this before it was finished. Over the past seven years, the three-person indie studio Cardboard Computer has released four episodic “acts” of its critically…
Happy Khao Thai has an address on San Francisco’s Mission Street, but don’t go there looking for a storefront. A sign on the sidewalk reading “Food pick up here” points, improbably, through the maw of a demolished theater, of which all that’s left is the marquee. Behind it, in what would have been the lobby,…
