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Show Those Pearly Whites
June 30, 2015
Officially, things have rebounded since Wall Street collapsed and the world’s wealthiest and most rugged individualists turned to Washington for a bailout. Corporate America is now raking in more money than ever before, and unemployment rates continue to fall, inching back ...

Not the People’s Uber
June 24, 2015
“The idea of a discount luxury is an oxymoron,” Sarah Maslin Nir said recently on the Longform podcast. “And it’s an oxymoron for a reason: because somebody’s bearing the cost of that discount.”  In this case, Maslin Nir was referring to ...

Bloomberg’s Baby Davos
June 22, 2015
 In January 2012, when he was still mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg announced that he would spend the year mastering the lucrative but laborious work of computer programming, and that his tutor would be an internet startup called Codecademy. Later, he invested in that ...

Made to Measure
June 17, 2015
In the latest season of Orange Is the New Black, an eligibility test sends the inmates of Litchfield Penitentiary into a multiple-choice frenzy. High-scorers will supposedly land better paying jobs—no one knows what kind, although the $1-per-hour wage is incentive enough—but ...

Watching the Watchers
June 10, 2015
The imposing edifice of the security state is propped up by many tools. Mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk, and endless war (those old standbys) get help from Stingray devices, license plate scanners, surveillance blimps, and a thousand different ways to data-mine. Should we pin ...

The Internet Doesn’t Exist
June 03, 2015
The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a dark side, Nikki Finke was barred from the Internet, the Supreme Court made the ...

For the Love of Bug Bounty
May 27, 2015
Chris Roberts, suddenly the nation’s most notorious computer security researcher, has had an exciting couple of months, ping-ponging between industry martyr and villain. In April, FBI agents yanked him off a Boeing 737 as soon as it landed in Syracuse; apparently they ...

America: Dangerous Curve Ahead
May 18, 2015
At some point in the early 1980s, a large yellow placard began turning up in the back window of cars proclaiming “Baby on Board.” At first it seemed a joke, an inadvertent high-sign that the driver was someone who took this parenthood thing a little too seriously. Even as ...

Facebook’s Web of Tiers
May 06, 2015
The oligarchs are here to help. That’s the message that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg relayed in an excruciatingly awkward video released on Monday. The video—a tense apologia featuring many “should”s and “must”s from Zuckerberg and more than one suggestion of a sweat ...

Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life
April 22, 2015
Sometimes, the darkest timeline comes quicker than you expect. Last year, Jathan Sadowski noted that insurance companies were fawning over the Internet of Things—smartphones, fitness monitors, wearable computers, and anything else with a sensor and WiFi—with an eye to ...

Why Is Twitter Aiding Turkish Censorship?
April 08, 2015
Corporations, like nation states, act out of self-interest. So it pays to be suspicious when a company claims to be on the side of social progress. Markets, with their inherent sociopathy, just don’t value things like justice and equity (well, not that kind of ...

Taking a Cat Photo Approach to History
March 27, 2015
In the midst of chaos and tragedy of the 2014 Ferguson riots, a white cop embraced a black youth. It was a moment of harmony within a storm of racial conflict. It was a beautiful photograph. No wonder we made it the defining image of the riots by sharing it 400,000 times on ...