After the deluge comes the deluge. First Hurricane Irma raked Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in early September, and then two weeks later Hurricane Maria did the same, leaving 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico without clean water, […]
If you had to take a guess, how many studios would you say are desperate to greenlight a superhero film by a black director? One? Just a few? All of the majors? I cynically volleyed that question to coworkers in […]
Some 130 million years ago, two extremely dense balls of matter collided into each other. These two neutron stars, the city-sized cores of deceased giant stars, spiraled inward and merged to become a giant fireball. In the collision, they generated […]
This weekend, in case you don't know and haven't looked at a calendar in a few days, is Memorial Day weekend, aka the Official Start of Summer. That means it's time for barbecues, sports, road trips, and reading. Yes, reading. […]
Earlier this year, Collin Smith came into possession of an "intelligent" first aid kit. When he did, the first thing he did was try to outsmart it. The kit in question was the Comprehensive Rescue System, a sturdy, gray, 17-pound […]
In the second season of Handmaid’s Tale, everything is different. It has to be. For one, the first season's plot burned through almost all of its source material, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel of the same name. For another, the […]
Editor's note: This is part of our series HardWIRED: Welcome to the Robotic Future, in which we explore the fascinating machines transforming society. A central tension in robotics is that while humanity created the robot in its image—the classic humanoid […]
It’s been a seven-day seesaw that has seen Fox News host Tucker Carlson complain of bullying, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin indicted in a college bribery scandal, North Korea threaten to suspend talks with the US, climate change officially […]
In an ordinary hospital room in Los Angeles, a young woman named Lauren Dickerson waits for her chance to make history. She’s 25 years old, a teacher’s assistant in a middle school, with warm eyes and computer cables emerging like […]
Most Saturdays, my husband Seth and I spend approximately the whole day with our phones aimed at our son, taking pictures of him from slightly different angles. There’s a diptych of him dancing in the bagel shop. There’s one of […]