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Requiem for a Dream

“This, I suppose, is the actual problem,” Swartz wrote, long before his suicide. “I feel my existence is an imposition on the planet.” Illustration by Michael Gillette.
PUBLISHED: March 11, 2013
LENGTH: 43 minutes (10972 words)

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but…
LENGTH: 9 minutes (2398 words)

The Lost Futures of Chris Marker

Argos Films Chris Marker's La Jetée, 1962 Gracefully off-kilter, stylized as semaphores, the shadow of a man and an outlined woman are positioned at the center of a sea shell spiral. Are they dancing…
PUBLISHED: Aug. 23, 2012
LENGTH: 5 minutes (1498 words)

Achieving and Balancing Consistency in User Interface Design

By Michael Zuschlag Published: July 19, 2010 The Principle of Least Astonishment: When two elements of an interface conflict or are ambiguous, the behavior should be that which will least surprise…
LENGTH: 27 minutes (6856 words)
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Fall of a Genius

Cambridge University has always been hospitable to powerful but eccentric intellects. Again and again, solitary Cambridge thinkers have conceived, and given clear definitions to, the new ideas of…
PUBLISHED: Jan. 19, 1984
LENGTH: 14 minutes (3618 words)
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Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself

Tens of millions of Winamp users are still out there. MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a…
PUBLISHED: June 24, 2012
LENGTH: 6 minutes (1668 words)

HOW TO KILL A RATIONAL PEASANT

AMERICA'S DANGEROUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH COUNTERINSURGENCY At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack…
PUBLISHED: June 16, 2012
LENGTH: 24 minutes (6035 words)

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS

History has proven that tossing out a familiar platform that prints money for your business and starting anew isn't easy: just ask Apple and Microsoft, whose next-generation desktop operating systems…
LENGTH: 31 minutes (7905 words)

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet…
LENGTH: 21 minutes (5345 words)
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