Society

We have all spent the better part of this year obsessing over the shape and direction of infection curves. If there’s anything we’ve learned from our collective crash-course in epidemiology, it’s that the exercise of forecasting the future is quite hard. The models we’re building aren’t imbued with foresight no matter how complex (or, uh, simple) their underlying dynamics.

The problem is not that we've run out of sand.

This past weekend, along with my friend Naveen and his family, we drove up to the Point Reyes region. We wanted to enjoy the nice fall weather and have lunch at Saltwater in Inverness, one of my fa…

There’s a reason every Big Tech CEO has a well-worn copy of “Snow Crash” in their office.

Defining the Metaverse, and explaining why Microsoft is well-placed for the virtual reality opportunity

The US has plenty of licensed truck drivers, but there's a shortage of well-paying jobs that would entice them to stay in the trucking industry.

Why the future doesn’t need us. Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

“Will this be on the test?” is a question invented by industrialists. It’s the cornerstone of traditional schooling at scale, because it is such an effective way to indoctrinate k…

Startup CEO Claudia Reuter observes that creating purpose and building a true sense of community are both essential to reducing burnout and unlocking stronger employee engagement, but neither can be solved simply in a trendy virtual space.

This spring I started writing about every book in the library. Not a large library, nor a public one. Just a trunk full of 19th-century schoolbooks that my mother found in an old farmhouse in the 1…

A two-day conference examines how booksellers can take the future into their own hands.

The story of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about nerds creating a wildly popular game and then losing control of it. It’s also about how the dictates of the free market inevitably end up stripping even our leisure activities of joy.

Call it corporate redistricting: Companies could move employees to where they could redraw electoral maps—and it’s more likely to benefit Democrats.

Gremlins are the mischievous, fictional creatures that Royal Air Force members jokingly accused of sabotaging aircraft in WWII. (In reality, their aircraft troubles simply stemmed from mechanical failures.) So perhaps it's no surprise that DARPA's Gremlins program, an initiative for mothership airplanes to deploy and retrieve drones in mid-flight, failed

Companies with 10 or more employees in Portugal now face fines if they call, text, zoom, or email their workers after normal office hours, thanks to a new law enacted there. The law was established…

License security is not the same as software security. In fact, sometimes they are at odds with one another.

A concept that took hold in the ’70s has haunted everything from seat belts to masks—and experts won't let it die.

In Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source, Rachel Cunneen and Mathieu O’Niel nicely unpack their case for the headline. In a online polylogue in re…

This is a lightly edited transcript of my keynote over at NANOG 83, so please accept my apologies if some of the wording is not (yet) as clear as it should be! Hello, and welcome to this presentation on who controls the internet, and if they actually should. As you can see, I cover all grounds here. All kinds of flags are in this presentation and all kinds of companies.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one part: If you have had a relatively comfortable job during the pandemic, it might now be time to worry. The more culturally specific your knowledge and skills, however, the more protected you will be. Doing math and writing code are universal skills. But […]

So far this paper is my favorite of the job market papers I have seen this year, and it is by Nikita Melnikov of Princeton.  Please do read each and every sentence of the abstract carefully, as each and every sentence offers interesting and substantive content: How has mobile internet affected political polarization in the […]

Plans for a new 5G spectrum rollout next month were put on hold by AT&T and Verizon due to possible interference with airplanes.

Implementing automated policy checks at multiple places in the pipeline can shift checks left, speed feedback and reduce context switching.

Pondering the way that physical objects, like newspapers and photos, degrade over time, and why digital objects won’t fade in exactly the same way.

At first, we sold our labor. That was 10,000 years of history. You traded sweat for food. Eventually, people figured out that they could build an organization. And an organization made things, whic…

In a new book, a trio of Stanford professors ask tough questions about how and whether big tech is truly "making the world a better place."