Bianca Bosker

Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.

Do you think a giant asteroid caused the earth’s most recent mass extinction? Princeton paleontologist Gerta Keller has a competing theory, and her decades of research have earned her so much ire in the scientific community that she keeps a list of insults others have thrown at her.

Is Josh Tetrick’s vegan-mayo company just another over-promising, under-delivering startup?

Japan’s high-end fruit market elevates produce to works of art.

While Silicon Valley works hard to keep us addicted to our devices through neurological manipulation, one young ex-Google employee is working to get designers to create more socially responsible software.

How Nash Grier became the most popular kid in the world, one six second video at a time.

How Apple’s voice-recognition software got its start—and how it lost some of its power along the way:

“This Siri — the Siri of the past — offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.

“Siri’s backers know Apple’s version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. ‘The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,’ says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. ‘So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.'”