Category: Business & Tech

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.

We watch the (women) influencers watching the (heavily female) influencing industry, but the men aren’t entirely in the dark.

“Not only was the whine agitating—EHHNNNNNNNN—but its constant drone was like a cruel mnemonic for everything that bothered him.”

Influencers who break type, like Mina Gerges or Jakiya Brown, have more than just an image. They have a story — and a plan.

Boeing’s failings with the 737 MAX reveal a dangerous deviation from its engineering-first culture that used to put the safety of the flying public before profit.

When you read “influencer,” do you think “white woman”? That’s not a surprise: the stereotypes originally established offline are reaffirmed on social media by the same systems.

Michael Gillespie has automated a way to decrypt ransomeware, and he gives his code away for free just to help people in need.

In Iceland, overtourism has transformed the island in a few short years — and locals and visitors alike try to grapple with the change.

It was Russia, in the cybertubes, using stolen passwords, a secret backdoor, and layers upon layers of false flag cloak work meant to stump security analysts.

To this day, only Elizabeth Pierce knows why she defrauded partners and investors by forging contract signatures.

Rapidly modernizing has caused the McDonald’s company some growing pains, but embracing Big Tech might just save them from their old analog self.

In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

Searching for justice in the newly legal weed economy

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.

The next space race is on.

Digital labor is valuable even when we do it for free. Should we get paid?

American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.

Robocalls are a scourge, and it’s only a matter of time before the technology learns to spoof your mother’s voice.