The story of how a Microsoft employee working on the Word team invented autocorrect.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
One Question for Microsoft's Next CEO
OM: The challenge for Microsoft comes down to: you’ve got developers, you’ve got cloud, you’ve got the legacy, the enterprise relationships, those things you got right. You’ve got old legacy products which people like to use however there is a little bit of challenge when it comes to the new world. Look at the world […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Autocorrect Doesn’t Correct Obscene Words
Gideon Lewis-Kraus talked to autocorrect inventor Dean Hachamovitch for Wired, and learned why some swear words don’t get autocorrected: On idiom, some of its calls seemed fairly clear-cut: gorilla warfare became guerrilla warfare, for example, even though a wildlife biologist might find that an inconvenient assumption. But some of the calls were quite tricky, and […]
Posted inNonfiction
Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima
Through her work on clone-thriller Orphan Black, science consultant Cosima Herter has helped open our eyes to the possibilities and perils of synthetic biology and the pursuit of genetic perfection.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing Meredith Broussard | The Atlantic | July 21, 2014 | 12 minutes (3,091 words) […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Chat Wars
Sabotage, bureaucracy, and emoticons: Inside the late ’90s chat wars between Microsoft and AOL, from the perspective of a former Microsoft programmer: The messenger war was a rush. Coming in each morning to see whether the client still worked with AOL was thrilling. I’d look through reams of protocol messages to figure out what had […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima
Through her work on clone-thriller Orphan Black, science consultant Cosima Herter has helped open our eyes to the possibilities and perils of synthetic biology and the pursuit of genetic perfection.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
How science fiction writers inform the way we think about the real world: Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist at the Seattle-based tech company LaserMotive, who has done important practical and theoretical work on lasers, space elevators and light-sail propulsion, cheerfully acknowledges the effect science fiction has had on his life and career. “I went into astrophysics […]
Posted inReading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Photo: Richard Barnes *** Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. *** 1. No Exit: ‘Your Feeling of Autonomy Is a Fantasy’ Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Wired | April 23, 2014 | 42 minutes […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Remembering The Man Who Brought Helvetica To The Masses
This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss: In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His […]
