Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook
In a journal with unlined 8-by-10 paper, Zuckerberg sketched his mission and product design and explored how a tiny company might become a vital utility for the world. In detail, he described features called Open Registration and Feed, two products that would supercharge his company.
Inside The Dark, Lucrative World Of Debt Collection
A dizzying array of variables affects a portfolio of debt’s true potential — the age of the debt, how many agencies have tried to collect on it, the size of the balances, the type of credit card, where the debtors live and the current economic climate.
The Economist With A Radical Plan To Solve Wealth Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s 753-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker “Capital and Ideology”, may prove still more influential.
Real Estate For The Apocalypse: My Journey Into A Survival Bunker
Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it.
Instagram, My Daughter, And Me
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
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.
Ladies In Waiting
In the most memorable scene of the 2002 film Secretary, nothing happens. For over ten minutes, a period that represents entire days in the movie’s internal timeline, protagonist Lee remains faithfully immobile, wetting herself in the process. Waiting, which renders everything provisional, which suspends progress or conclusion of any kind, is worse than clarity.
The Secret History Of Page Six
For more than four decades, Page Six has ruled the world of gossip about the famous and powerful. In an era when celebrities control the narrative and “power” is a dirty word, can it survive?
What Does Uber Love More: Restaurants or Investors?
Eateries are getting squeezed by delivery apps. Restaurants can enjoy a 69% profit margin onsite, versus just 38% from deliveries. Uber could give up profit to keep them happy, but that’s not what IPO investors want to hear.
The Long-Forgotten Vigilante Murders Of The San Luis Valley
For more than a century, historians, writers, and artists were guilty of creating a mythologized version of the American West. How history forgot Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers—and the complicated story behind their murderous rampage.
The ‘Internet of Things’ Is Sending Us Back To The Middle Ages
One key reason we don’t control our devices is that the companies that make them seem to think – and definitely act like – they still own them, even after we’ve bought them. The companies say they still own the software, and because they own it, they can control it.
Behind The Scenes Of A Radical New Cancer Cure
CAR-T involves removing a patient’s own blood, filtering for immune cells called T-cells, and genetically engineering those cells to recognize and attack cancer. CAR-T made history in 2017 as the first FDA-approved gene therapy to treat any disease. The trials that led to approval showed response rates of 80 percent and above in aggressive leukemias and lymphomas that had resisted chemotherapy.
The Invisible City: How A Homeless Man Built A Life Underground
After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath Hampstead Heath, a vast open space that sits as a sort of green beehive haircut on top of metropolitan central London. His life would get even more precarious.
The Complicated, Problematic Influence Of TripAdvisor Restaurant Reviews
The travel site is beloved and trusted by tourists — a fact some New York restaurants are exploiting however they can. While locals are more likely to turn to user-generated review sites like Foursquare, Yelp, or Google Maps to navigate the city’s shifting restaurant landscape, TripAdvisor holds considerable clout with international travelers.
Killer, Kleptocrat, Genius, Spy: The Many Myths Of Vladimir Putin
Putin’s recent ubiquity has brought great prominence to the practice of Putinology. This enterprise – the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information – has existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.
Kudos, Leaderboards, QOMs: How Fitness App Strava Became A Religion
Strava is a fitness and sports tracking platform that launched in 2009 and bills itself the “number one app for runners and cyclists”. The app offers community, training data and motivation to millions of athletes. Even runners who dislike tech can’t bear to be without it.
How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class
Some major textbooks feature illustrations of Texas Instruments–series calculators alongside the text, so students can use their Texas Instruments calculator with the lesson plan, emphasizing how deeply interwoven Texas Instruments remains with the educational hegemony.
Big Tech Takes Aim At The Low-Profit Retail-Banking Industry
After years of timidity Big Tech, with its billions of users and gigantic war chest, at last appears serious about crashing the fintech party. Amazon and Apple introduced a credit card. Facebook announced a new payments system and Google said it would start offering current (checking) accounts in America.
Hard Truths: Will Museums’ Digital Plans Make Curators Obsolete?
As art institutions continue to raise ticket prices and roll out blockbusters, we may come to see shows that will be curated entirely by optimized algorithms. What happens when a museum becomes curator-less? Will this be the end of art history as we’ve known it, or the dawn of a techno renaissance?
Why We Fell For Clean Eating
The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it.
The Story Of A Baltimore Panhandler Murdering A Woman Made National News. The Truth Didn’t
Jacquelyn Smith was murdered, and not by the man on which her husband cannily tried to pin the crime—a homeless and powerless man. Baltimore’s most powerful institutions put a bizarre story to use for their purposes, shedding light on who counts in the city, and why.