Category: Business & Tech

North Korea hacked him. Things got personal.

Five longreads on artificial intelligence and a future filled with machine-written prose.

“There’s another population of people who came and never left: those freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes.”

“’I think if the town survives, the newspaper will survive. I think we’re so intertwined. It’s not going to be one without the other. Our fates are going to be the same.'”

Can we survive the social web?

“The day I turned 18, the Astro Lounge called and asked me to come strip for them. I have no idea how they knew I’d turned 18.”

Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, the town crier of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our top story picks in business writing this year.

“It’s a feeling instead of living as a guinea pig for an opaque set of private interests, and a feeling that I can’t trust an industry that would ever put unsecure devices inside patients in the first place.”

“They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge.”

A professor embarks on a six-month binge of celebrity-led online courses.

“A friend who teaches at another university tells me that a new Yiddish word has been invented: oysgezoomt, ‘over-exposed to Zoom,’ as in ‘Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!’ (‘I’m so done with Zoom!’)”

Sometimes it’s not who you work with, but who you work for.

“Once the love-language of a brand to its audience, the place of a modern mascot has never been less sure-footed.”

“If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know too. That can be dangerous.”

“That’s when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.”

All the good habits and self-optimization in the world don’t give you real control over your body. Back away from the bread starter.

“As the pathological process advanced, it was carving a different person out of Lee’s raw substance.”

For wealthy Americans, a dystopian future includes underground golfing in South Dakota.

Dialogue, Twitter-style: you get called out on social media. People pile on to you. Other people pile on to the pile-oners. Soon everyone’s anxious or angry or both, no one’s really talking (or listening), and a few tech CEOs are buying new houses in Jackson Hole.

“Weiss…a subtle, under-the-radar bureaucrat who fought his country’s adversaries with red tape and a headful of contrarian ideas. I understood him as a man whose entire life was secrets. “

Can Fitbit data help to convict the alleged perpetrator of a brutal murder?

Rita Strand, age 58, posed as a health inspector and got unrestricted access to South Dakota prison.

When an interior-design startup collapses, no filter can hide the ugly truth.

Without it, you’d have to actually, y’know, be productive.

The “United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets.”

“…these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload.”

China’s largest e-commerce company is not only changing the way people in China shop, but how they think about commerce and each other in a Communist country.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Irving Nachumsohn invented the crock pot so that his family didn’t have to use the stove to prepare dinner on hot summer evenings. You’re welcome.