“The aftermath of a self-driving tragedy.”
Technology
Posted inEditor's Pick
Aristocrat Inc.
“How a small computer chip company, owned by the author’s mother, became the target of a sprawling pan-Asian crime ring that operated throughout Silicon Valley.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Billionaires Like Elon Musk Want to Save Civilization By Having Tons of Genetically Superior Kids.
“Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.'”
Posted inFeature
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Promise and Peril of Space Tourism
“A space tourism industry is being built on the proposition of personal and existential transformation. But at what cost?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
This Is Life in the Metaverse
“Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters of the immersive, three-dimensional internet that Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death Cheaters
“The members of Longevity House are united by two things: a willingness to hand over $100,000 and a burning desire to live forever. Inside the weird world of cryotherapy, biocharging and fecal transplants.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Twisted Life of Clippy
In the 1990s, Microsoft created a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office that users found annoying — so it was swiftly retired. For Seattle Met, Benjamin Cassidy recounts the history of an unloved and doomed office assistant that has lived on in pop and nerd culture. These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Care Tactics
In an ableist world, health care systems and tech innovators are more invested in high-tech solutions and shiny objects that don’t consider disabled folks’ actual needs during the design process. Many in the disability and caregiving communities rely on their own creative hacks instead, leaning on a culture of collaboration and shared knowledge to make […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Great Fiction of AI
Can artificial intelligence write novels? Josh Dzieza looks at how independent authors have begun to experiment with AI writing programs like Sudowrite and Jasper to write their stories faster. The piece explores questions around ethics and authorship, and its design is A+. It requires a strange degree of sympathy with the machine, thinking about the […]