“Denver-based startup Boom already has orders for its commercial supersonic planes. But is supersonic travel really the future, or best left to nostalgia?”
Peter Rubin
Posted inEditor's Pick
Your Favorite Scary Movie: The Oral History of ‘Scream’
“Twenty-five years ago, Wes Craven’s bloody, witty meta-horror film hit theaters and reinvigorated multiple genres. Here’s how the iconic movie was made.”
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The Great Offline
“The problem is, of course, that the boundary between the offline and the online is incredibly hard to situate. It shifts as technologies change and become absorbed — to differing degrees, at differing paces — into the collective cultural perception of what counts as real as opposed to virtual. (Does watching cable TV count as […]
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The American Addiction to Speeding
“The nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will, and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets. Enforcement is both inadequate and punitive. The cost is enormous. And the lack of political […]
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Afrodisiac: A Textual Meditation on Greg Tate
“The only time I ever loaned Greg Tate a book was when I ran into him on Astor Place. I’d just come from the barbershop, where I finished reading Phillip K. Dick’s brilliant Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. ‘I haven’t read that one,’ Tate said. ‘Can I borrow it?’ Without hesitation I handed him […]
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How the Taxi Workers Won
“Then, in 2011, Uber arrived in New York. Lyft followed in 2014. Tens of thousands of additional cars flooded the streets, and yellow cab ridership fell by half. In late 2014, the medallion bubble burst. By 2018, medallions were selling for as little as $160,000. Seeing an opportunity to make a profit, Marblegate Asset Management, […]
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Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write?
“These days, we don’t just write, revise, and lay out our work in one program; if so inclined, we can go all the way from gathering research to monitoring reception without leaving our browsers. Some thrive on the streaming of a previously sequential process; for others, it’s like being forced to write with an Instant […]
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Say It Loud
“My two-steps-from-sexagenarian ass is old enough to know all the avant funk-jazz sources of [Kamasi] Washington and company’s aesthetic (Horace Tapscott, Sanders, Tyner, The Crusaders, Stanley Cowell, Strata East, Black Jazz) so The Epic couldn’t reach my ears as a spiritual, political and musical revelation. But it has been fascinating nonetheless to witness young friends […]
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Passion Plan
“Despite any collateral damage, Nintendo and their peers will keep squeezing maximum profit from the biggest, most proselytized audiences they can assemble for however long they can. In practice, this is what ‘convergence culture’ looks like. Playing games that cite other games that can be frictionlessly purchased on devices you can take everywhere, and then […]
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The Therapists Using AI to Make Therapy Better
“Ultimately, the approach may reveal exactly how psychotherapy works in the first place, something that clinicians and researchers are still largely in the dark about. A new understanding of therapy’s active ingredients could open the door to personalized mental-health care, allowing doctors to tailor psychiatric treatments to particular clients much as they do when prescribing […]