Quartz Obsession

The beat-heavy, electronic music from Nigeria has been gaining a global fan base and is a point of pride across Africa. It’s also finally helping local artists make real money. But is Afrobeats establishing a path to global domination that other genres can follow, or is an entire continent being reduced to one country’s signature sound? Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi Transcrip...

Those internet security tests that ask you to retype blurry numbers or pick out photos of traffic lights have an important job: They stop robots from gumming up the internet. But by using them everywhere, we’re training computers to see the world like we do, and they’re getting really good at it. What happens as it gets harder to prove our humanity online? Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Cit...

It’s anonymous, it’s stable, and it’s accepted pretty much everywhere. And despite the rise of mobile payments and the ubiquity of credit cards, it’s still moving everything around us; more cash is in circulation than ever. We talk about the pros and cons of cash in a world increasingly dominated by mobile payments, and try to figure out if cash is here to stay. Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Al...

The global economy needs true randomness to encrypt messages and make sure elections are honest. But not all randomness is random enough, and humans and computers alike are really bad at generating it. So we turn to natural sources like seismic waves, radioactive decay, and lava lamps (yes, lava lamps) to generate it for us. Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi Transcript: https://q...

Let's go down the rabbit hole, together. Coming Oct. 12, 2021.