Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will promote informed discussion on social media. In the test, pushed to some users on A…
I wish every TV came with a soundbar. Sadly, audio just isn’t a priority for television makers. They keep producing bigger and bigger displays with more vibrant color, filled with more pixels than your eye can see. But by and large, those TV sets sound terrible.For years, Sonos has made it onto our list of…
Regret borne from reflection and anxiety from future projection can be crippling, even when both are necessary or ultimately liberating. These notions are especially true for social upheavals, where engaging the past involves questions more taxing than the ones Marie Kondo gave to us for spring cleaning: Do these relics make us feel good? When…
When Dázon Dixon Diallo began working to prevent the spread of HIV among women in 1985, she first had to convince them that they could get the infection. Even some HIV activists didn’t fully appreciate that women needed to be included in prevention efforts. Diallo founded an Atlanta-based organization called SisterLove to promote reproductive justice…
Pete Curley doesn’t like podcast ads. In fact, that might be an understatement. “I fucking hate ads,” Curley says. “Podcast ads make me want to dive through my plate glass window.”More than a decade ago, Curley cofounded HipChat, a collaborative communication platform that was eventually subsumed by Slack. Now, his love of podcasts and vendetta…
The Nintendo Game Boy lived a long life. From its launch in 1989 until its discontinuation in 2008, the handheld gaming device sold hundreds of millions of units. It went through seven different design iterations, six of which were sold in the United States. And because the system was propped up by Nintendo’s thousands-deep library…
Since the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many researchers out of their labs and field sites and most students from their classrooms and dorms, the process of learning about and doing science has moved almost entirely online. Lab group meetings have migrated to Zoom; office hours to Slack; manuscript writing to Google Docs. But today, all…
To some in the tech industry, facial recognition increasingly looks like toxic technology. To law enforcement, it’s an almost irresistible crime-fighting tool.IBM is the latest company to declare facial recognition too troubling. CEO Arvind Krishna told members of Congress Monday that IBM would no longer offer the technology, citing the potential for racial profiling and…
It’s crunch time in the offices of Naughty Dog, the storied videogame developer in Santa Monica, California. On the morning of February 6, more than 300 artists, designers, and programmers are assembled in a maze of workstations, applying thousands of final micro-touches to a game they have been crafting for nearly six years called The…
Late last month, a mysterious new video app called Zynn began appearing at the top of app store charts, beating out household names like Instagram and YouTube. Zynn is a near identical copy of TikTok, and both apps are the product of Chinese tech giants. The biggest difference is that Zynn, in an effort to…
