Move Over, Pebble: MetaWatch’s New ‘Strata’ Aims To Make A Splash On…

Sure, the Pebble has nabbed its share of headlines and accolades lately, but that doesn’t mean it’s got the nascent smart watch market all sewed up. Case in point: veteran MetaWatch recently pulled…

Getting started with Readability for Android

Congratulations! Your Readability account has been created. You’re moments away from saving anything you find on the web to your Android device for reading on your terms -anytime, anywhere.…

The Monster of Florence

My wife and I had always dreamed of living in Italy. Six years ago we finally made the move with our two young children. We rented a fourteenth-century farmhouse surrounded by olive groves and…

Suddenly That Summer

FREE FOR ALL The Charlatans perform in Golden Gate Park. In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing…

Posted June 12, 2012 Today’s a big day. We’re thrilled to announce two things we’ve been working on for quite some time - Library and Send to Readmill. Both features make getting…

The Perfection of the Paper Clip

Guess What's Cooking in the Garage

The next big breakthrough in synthetic biology just might come from an amateur scientist By Jack Hitt Posted 05.31.2012 at 10:02 am Guess What's Cooking Ray Lego What follows is a modified excerpt…

“Hello, I Am Sabu ... ”

On the day that he joined forces with the hacker collective Anonymous, Hector Xavier Monsegur walked his two little girls half a dozen blocks to their elementary school. “My girls,” he…

10 Timeframes

I recently gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, a full-day event held on Saturday, May 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction…

Empire of Ice

TooDogs is on the run. “Catch me later,” he’ll say each time I approach, and then he disappears for a day. There are not a lot of places to hide. This is a six-acre island, 250…

Can Music Save Your Life?

Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and…

Getting started with Readability for iPhone

Congratulations! Your Readability account has been created. You’re moments away from saving anything you find on the web to your iPhone for reading on your terms—anytime, anywhere.…

On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

Sitting along Yankee Stadium’s third base line during New York University’s rainy graduation two years ago, Max Salzberg couldn’t focus. The phone in his pocket wouldn’t…

Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and…

Cover photo for a 1964 brochure for the PDS 1020 Digital Computer. Madison Avenue's strategy for popularizing computers shifted from the 1950s through the 1980s. At first pitches focused on…

Some Came Running

It's difficult to really formulate, in one's memory, just how that quality we now know as "buzz" was generated in the days before this mess we're all in now, but my recollection is that Alien DID…

How Tech Is Turning Us All Into Neurotics

Three months of browsing stats, one deceptively tidy graph Nassim Taleb, the economist who predicted the last major financial collapse, posted a striking excerpt from his new book on Facebook. See if…

E3 Day Zero: When Game Violence Becomes Vile

By Nathan Grayson on June 5th, 2012 at 5:00 pm. One of the most striking scenes of yesterday’s E3 press conference gauntlet didn’t take place on a stage or a screen. It wasn’t…

If You've Ever Sold a Used iPod, You May Have Violated Copyright Law

The Supreme Court will decide whether secondhand items copyrighted abroad can be legally sold within the United States. ReutersThe Supreme Court will soon hear a case that will affect whether you can…

Commencement Address to Atlanta's John Marshall Law School

I was asked to post the text to the Commencement Address I gave at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School on May, 19. With some hesitation (as tongue-in-cheek gets lost in writing), and with one…

Playboy goes west | Prospect Magazine

Is the Midwest’s only great magazine heading into the sunset? Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Key Club in 1960 surrounded by bunnies. His magazine has been described as both misogynist and feminist…

What's wrong with science journalism in the U.K.?

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. For a few hours last week, I'd planned to write a column about the "five-second rule." Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in England h

Newton, Reconsidered

In the grand scheme of things, 1992 is such recent history that it barely qualifies as history. When it comes to portable gadgets, however, it’s an era that we 21st-century humans…

In the Ruins of a Blue and White Empire

Published in the June/July 2012 issue He's wearing his running uniform, we can reveal that much about the runner.Shorts, tank top. A pair of Asics track spikes.We can tell you that just before he…

I Sing the Body Electric

June 2012 At this year’s Coachella music festival, slain rapper Tupac Shakur was resurrected for a performance with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Projected as a two-dimensional image, abs still…