A New Kind of Labor Movement in Silicon Valley
Employees at Google and elsewhere are protesting their bosses’ business decisions. Will that evolve into a more sustained labor movement?
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Projects
Metropolis Now
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Jonathan Bachman / Reuters The Hurricane in My Backyard
An environmental philosopher reflects on his experience enduring Hurricane Harvey, and what it teaches cities and their citizens about living with global warming.
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Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / ... Writers Have Always Loved Mobile Devices
Writing boxes, popular from the 17th century, provided the same pleasure as today’s laptops and custom word processors: to make the experience of writing pleasurable, whether any actual writing gets done. An Object Lesson.
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Evgenii Bobrov / Vovan / Shutterstock / Jack ... Teaching Kids to Code During the Summer—for $1,000 a Week
Are private summer camps exacerbating tech's diversity problem?
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Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty What If a Female CEO Acted Like Elon Musk?
The Tesla CEO’s tearful New York Times interview reveals a lot about the double standards men and women face.
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Why the U.S. Should Provide Universal Basic Income
The government should consider giving out monthly Social Security checks—no strings attached.
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Instagram / Thanh Do / The Atlantic How Daquan Went From Homegrown Instagram Account to Modern Media Conglomerate
Meme accounts are big business now—and plenty of people are eager to get in on the action.
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Alexis Madrigal The Strange Infinities of e-Commerce
When it costs as much to retail 200,000 things as one thing, the world gets a little odd.
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Andrea Leoni / Getty More Bridges Will Collapse
Two disasters in Europe are the latest examples of the decline of infrastructure—as an idea as much as a physical thing.
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Ian Bogost The Mopeds Are Coming
Shared, electric motor scooters are racing to catch up with Bird, Lime, and other kick-scooter brands, as tech companies attempt to reinvent urban mobility. But can these vehicles ever find a place in America?
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Rebecca Cook / Reuters The Most Powerful Publishers in the World Don’t Give a Damn
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is protecting Alex Jones’s publishing power in the name of “what serves the public conversation best.” His reasoning is absurd.
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Ulrich Marx / Getty Is AI Ready to Prevent School Shootings?
Facing a project with no room for mistakes, companies are striving to ensure the technology is up to the task.
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Nicolas Ortega What It’s Like to Wallow in Your Own Facebook Data
For the past 13 years, I’ve given the platform my photos, my videos, my likes, and untold hours of my time. Sifting through it all was amusing and surprising—and weirdly sad.
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Joe Skipper / Reuters Of Course Twitter Loves Elon Musk
Tesla’s billionaire CEO is revealing exactly what the social platform is truly optimized for—the amplification of powerful voices.
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Oli Scarff / Getty What Does It Mean to Ban Alex Jones?
The inconsistent embargo on Infowars demonstrates the breadth of tools tech companies have to police speech.
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Wikipedia / The Atlantic Wikipedia, the Last Bastion of Shared Reality
The culture wars are coming for the best utopian project of the early internet. Can it survive the informational anarchy that’s disrupted the rest of media?
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Irene Rinaldi What Your Boss Could Learn by Reading the Whole Company’s Emails
Employee emails contain valuable insights into company morale—and might even serve as an early-warning system for uncovering malfeasance.
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Adam Butler / AP The Draconian Dictionary Is Back
Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. An Object Lesson.
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How Video Can Create a Just Society
Filming bystander footage can help protect human rights.
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Andrew Wong / Getty Apple Is Worth One Trillion Dollars
This is what it really looks like to “change the world.”
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Matt Whittaker / Reuters Can Philanthropy Save a City?
The cash-strapped city of Stockton is hoping so, courting millions of dollars from private investors to solve a whole host of social problems.
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NASA / MSFC / Sergey Peterman / Shutterstock ... Too Much of a Good Thing at NASA
The agency’s culture of optimism is essential for launching people and robots into space. But it can lead to problems with budgets and deadlines.
