Society

This one is far from over, but the window to prepare for future threats is closing fast.

Taking on these duties can have a significant negative impact on employees’ energy levels and job satisfaction.

19th century mapmakers hoped to draw settlers to the region with idealized vistas of emerging Northwest towns.

The cable converter box, a relic of the cable era of the 1970s, was developed in part by one of the first people to install a cable system. Here’s his story.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told CNN that certain workers could escape the "grueling commutes" of the past and gain more control over their days.

What if they opened the office and nobody came?

The United States spends some $850 billion per year on poverty programs, yet the official poverty rate has not fallen much, if at all, over ...

Content moderation is a can of worms. For Internet infrastructure intermediaries, it’s a can of worms that they are particularly poorly positioned to tackle. And yet Internet infrastructure elements are increasingly being called on to...

I can’t find the full article that has researcher Richard Sclove’s 1990s quote,”Every lousy social trend will be exacerbated by this thing, if we’renot careful,” but h…

How do you win an argument? Debate against a strawman. How do you get to the truth? Steelwoman.

It is hard to think of a website so loved by its followers and so scorned by economists as John Williams' ShadowStats , a widely cited sour...

Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.

Plastic is very controversial material but it keeps being produced and used in various forms. Why? dezeen breaks down the different types of plastic and what they’re used for. This refining p…

“The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market, the higher the black market price.” – Kenneth Boulding I had a chance encounter with a crypto bro a few weeks ago. He was pitching his new whiz bang social media app and I just happened to be in the small audience. Well, he wasn’t formally pitching. In the venture capital world, every deal is oversubscribed except for the ones that are undersubscribed, and so he was giving a sneak peek at his next hot startup and pretending like he wasn’t in the market for money – the barrage of name-dropping and buzzwords that followed notwithstanding.

At BFI4 outside Seattle, the retailer uses algorithms and robots to ship more than a million packages a day—vastly changing the jobs of humans in the process.

That’s the best sort of breakthrough idea. An idea that after it is seen, can’t be unseen, an idea that changes what comes next. No need to change the world. A tiny part of the world, e…

The crypto market allows hackers and tax evaders to launder money secretively, outside of the traditional banking system. But forensics investigators are getting savvier at mapping activity on blockchains and figuring out who is behind specific accounts.

Local author Josephine Ensign reveals how the city’s long legacy of poverty is crucial to understanding our current crisis.

The southern border exists in a perpetual quagmire of wishful thinking.

Little known in the U.S., Sinclair democratized computing with his dirt-cheap 1980s PCs. Even his many failures were decades ahead of their time.

An academic conspiracy theory that went mainstream

The word ‘Anthropocene’ has failed us. We’re in a climate crisis, and the myth of human supremacy is killing the planet. Here’s what’s…

Everyone really does hate Ads, Google and Facebook mobile ads aren’t what they used to be. Worse, they are a pain point for user experiences yet drive incredible revenues to a few centralized platforms.

Chapter 9 of Designing Data Intensive Applications: Consistency and Consensus

“One friend had to spit me into a napkin.”

We live in age of “genre-bending” books. Every other novel of the shelf seems to offer up some new combination: coming-of-age zombie novel, Western space opera, postmodern horror, Gothic fantasy. A…