The Empathy Layer
Koko offers peer-to-peer support to promote emotional well-being. Can the app—which lets strangers and bots become amateur therapists—create a safer internet?
Greed is Groupon: Can Anyone Save the Company from Itself?
Groupon’s quick rise has been overshadowed poor management and shady accounting. Can the company repair its reputation?
“Everyone The Verge spoke with who has worked directly with Mason says he’s not the clown that became his persona in the media. ‘He was an incredibly focused and hard-working guy,’ says Sennett. But in crafting his image as a goofball, Mason painted himself into a corner. ‘I don’t think Eric used Andrew, or that Andrew didn’t go in with his eyes wide open. But yes, the cynical interpretation is that Eric saw how useful Andrew could be, first as the charming, boyish entrepreneur, then as the fall guy for Groupon’s public plunge.'”
Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers
A writer meets with “grinders”—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:
“I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet.”