Escape From The Matrix
The fear of missing out, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. FoMO haunts our social networks and our real lives alike. But there is a way to break free.
Unfold: The App That Lets You Create Beautiful Stories
Unfold is an app and toolkit for storytellers. It’s used by celebs, influencers and other Instagram power users. Create beautiful and engaging stories from minimal and elegant templates. The app is available for iOS and Android.
Under The Weather
As psychiatrists and philosophers begin to define a pervasive mental health crisis triggered by climate change, they ask who is really sick: the individual or society?
The Case For Making Low-Tech ‘Dumb’ Cities Instead Of ‘Smart’ Ones
There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?
What Happened To American Childhood?
The percentage of 12-to-17-year-olds who had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year shot up from 8 percent to 13 percent. Among girls, the rate was even higher; in 2017, one in five reported experiencing major depression. Here’s what we can do about it.
How The Dumb Design Of A WWII Plane Led To The Macintosh
For all the triumph of America’s new planes and tanks during World War II, a silent reaper stalked the battlefield: accidental deaths and mysterious crashes that no amount of training ever seemed to fix. At first, pilots took the blame for crashes. The true cause, however, lay with the design. That lesson led us into our user-friendly age—but there’s peril to come.
How Lego Became The Apple Of Toys
In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. An exclusive look inside the company’s top-secret Future Lab.
What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town
Miners now pouring into Eastern Washington are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.
How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Architecture
Artificial Intelligence remains a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, with the potential to enhance the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of cities, or destroy the potential for humans to work, interact, and live a private life.
How To Fight Lies, Tricks And Chaos Online
It took me years to really understand where all the information I saw online was coming from. So this isn’t just a guide to spotting when something is fake. It’s a system for slowing down and thinking about information — whether that information is true, false, or something in between.
How A TV Sitcom Triggered The Downfall Of Western Civilization
‘Friends’ signals a harsh embrace of anti-intellectualism in America, where a gifted and intelligent man is persecuted by his idiot compatriots. And even if you see it from my point of view, it doesn’t matter. The constant barrage of laughter from the live studio audience will remind us that our own reactions are unnecessary, redundant.
The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich To Excel In Elite Jobs
Sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman have uncovered a striking, consistent pattern in data about England’s workforce: Not only are people born into working-class families far less likely than those born wealthy to get an elite job—but they also, on average, earn 16 percent less in the same fields of work.
The New Generation Of Self-Created Utopias
The United States has been a laboratory for experiments in alternative living since its founding. As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.
Honeybee Venom Could Hold Secret To Treating Aggressive Breast Cancer
A young Australian scientist’s groundbreaking research has found honeybees could hold the secret to treating one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer.
Dr Ciara Duffy, 25, found venom from the honeybee could kill cancer cells in just 60 minutes.
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign To Reelect The President
After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.
GauGAN: Changing Sketches Into Photorealistic Masterpieces In Seconds
A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Dubbed GauGAN, the tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images.
I Was a Proud Non-Breeder. Then I Changed My Mind.
When I hear younger women confidently describe how they’ll feel when they’re older, sometimes I feel a pinch of such condescension myself. Not because I think they’ll all necessarily want kids, or that they should have them, but because one tricky thing about your 20s is the need to make decisions for a future self whose desires are unknowable.
Inside China’s Massive Surveillance Operation
Xinjiang, northwest China, is in a state of surveillance lockdown. Every message, word and movement is monitored for its extremist potential. A million Uyghur muslims are being held in concentration camps.
Why We Need To Stop Striving For Work-Life Balance
When you separate work and life, it’s a little bit harder to make that connection. But when you think of work as part of a full life and a holistic experience, it becomes easier to see that success in one aspect often supports another.
Don’t Let Your Obsession With Productivity Kill Your Creativity
Our current work world is obsessed with productivity. We read about other leaders’ productivity hacks, trying to model how to get into hustle mode. But our relentless quest to be productive is undermining one of the most important abilities in today’s workplace: creativity.
Parents Shouldn’t Spy On Their Kids
With tracking technologies such as mSpy, Teen Safe, Family Tracker, and others, parents can monitor calls, texts, chats, and social media posts. Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development.