Business, Spoken

There’s a trust crisis afoot. Earlier this week, Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer report suggested that trust is collapsing in America. In a survey of 33,000 people across more than 28 countries, only a third of Americans responded that they trust the government, a 14 percentage point decline from last year. Fewer than half of us trust the media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

Fired Google engineer James Damore says he was vilified and harassed for questioning what he calls the company’s liberal political orthodoxy, particularly around the merits of diversity. Now, outspoken diversity advocates at Google say that they are being targeted by a small group of their coworkers, in an effort to silence discussions about racial and gender diversity. Learn more about your ad ch...

In 1978 a young woman named Maria Klawe arrived at the University of Toronto to pursue a doctorate in computer science. She had never used a computer—much less written a line of code—but she had a PhD in math and a drive to succeed in a male-dominated field. She was so good that, nine months later, the university asked her to be a professor. Today, however, computer science is one of the few STEM...

Amazon's list of finalists for the location of its second headquarters holds few surprises. Following months of hype in cities and small towns across America, the 20 that made the final cut are altogether expected—major business centers and transit hubs like New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, mixed in with some political powerhouses, like Washington, DC and Northern Virginia. Amazon's pic...

Do you trust me? Do you trust what you are about to read, assuming you keep reading? (Keep reading!) Do you believe that I comported myself ethically during my reporting, did not make anything up, did not use the work of others without credit? Let me put that another way: Do you trust that this article will make you feel better, or correct, about the world? Do you think that I, as the writer, have...

Last year’s national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace began in the tech industry. In the months that followed Susan J. Fowler’s February blog post about sexual harassment at Uber, a number of well-known tech executives---particularly, venture capitalists and startup executives---were ousted from positions of power after allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct. But with...

As a candidate for president, Donald J. Trump scarcely mentioned the word "tech." One year since he took the oath of office, that hasn't changed much. And yet just a year in, the Trump administration has shaped policy in ways that will radically alter the country's long-term ability to innovate—and often not for the better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There comes a time in every hyped-up business trend’s life cycle when the noise becomes so intense it’s comical. Cryptocurrency, bitcoin, and most important, the blockchain technology that underlies them, have reached that moment. Executives in just about any industry imaginable—music, advertising, medicine, pizza delivery—are now eager to discuss how they can capitalize on “the blockchain.” (Note...

As if there wasn’t enough angst in the world, what with the Washington soap opera, #MeToo, false nuclear alerts, and a general sense of apprehension, now we also have a growing sense of alarm about how smartphones and their applications are impacting children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg promised to spend 2018 fixing Facebook. Last week, he addressed Facebook making you feel bad. Now he’s onto fake news. Late Friday, Facebook buried another major announcement at the end of the week: How to make sure that users see high-quality news on Facebook. Facebook’s solution? Let its users decide what to trust. On the difficult problem of fixing fake news, Zuckerberg took the...

In May 2015, The New Yorker published a profile of the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen. In it, writer Tad Friend joined Andreessen in his living room to watch an episode of Halt & Catch Fire, the AMC drama chronicling the rise of personal computing in the early 1980s. The scene provided an intimate window into the billionaire’s home life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

Thomas M. Wagner has uploaded over 300 science fiction reviews to YouTube since 2013. He’s not a major star, but his content has attracted an audience of around 4,400 bookworms who subscribe to his channel. In return for their attention, Wagner likely receives less than $100 a month in advertising revenue, according to the analytics company SocialBlade. The vast majority of YouTube comprises niche...

In 2014, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja were bitcoin-obsessed engineers hanging out at pizza-fueled meetups in San Francisco. Their conversation often turned to the central problem of bitcoin: How to make it more useful? The bitcoin network’s design effectively limits it to handling three to seven transactions per second, compared with tens of thousands per second for Visa. Poon and Dryja recogniz...

News spread Monday of a remarkable breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Microsoft and Chinese retailer Alibaba independently announced that they had made software that matched or outperformed humans on a reading-comprehension test devised at Stanford. Microsoft called it a “major milestone.” Media coverage amplified the claims, with Newsweek estimating “millions of jobs at risk.” Those jobs se...

Apple has faced mounting criticism in recent years for avoiding taxes in the US and Europe. Wednesday, it offered critics 38 billion replies. More precisely, Apple said it would pay an estimated $38 billion in tax to bring back to the US some of the cash it has stashed overseas over the years. Apple says the payment would be the largest tax payment of its type in history. But it’s also a pretty go...

The engineer at the heart of the upcoming Waymo vs Uber trial is facing dramatic new allegations of commercial wrongdoing, this time from a former nanny. Erika Wong, who says she cared for Anthony Levandowski’s two children from December 2016 to June 2017, filed a lawsuit in California this month accusing him of breaking a long list of employment laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

In the fall of 2016, Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, paid a visit to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. This was not unusual; part of Hankes’ job at the civil rights organization was to track white supremacists online, which meant reading their sites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the news­paper, pressure the broad­cast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head. This actually happened once in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

Late last fall, in the gleaming white lobby of Madison Square Garden, uniformed attendants were posted at security stations to make thousands of smartphones stupid. Chris Rock was playing his 10th show in a 12-city international tour, and at every stop, each guest was required to pass through the entryway, confirm that his or her phone was on vibrate or silent, and then hand it over to a security...

It’s late November 2016, and I’m squeezed into the far corner of a long row of gray cubicles in the call screening center for the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) child neglect and abuse hotline. I’m sharing a desk and a tiny purple footstool with intake screener Pat Gordon. We’re both studying the Key Information and Demographics System (KIDS), a blue screen filled wi...

In November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg started sprinkling a new phrase, or perhaps a new idea, into his quarterly call with investors. “It's important to remember that Facebook is about bringing people closer together and enabling meaningful social interactions,” he said. Research, he continued, demonstrates that interactions with friends and family on social media is particularly “meaningful....

Earlier this month, a Vanity Fair report revealed sordid tales of Silicon Valley sex parties. But the tales, while full of unsavory and salacious details, did not include any names, raising questions in some minds about their truthfulness. Two people familiar with one of the parties---including one who attended---tell WIRED it was hosted by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of the fir...

In 2015, Twitter permanently banned alt-right troll Chuck Johnson, after he tweeted that he wanted to "take out" civil rights activist DeRay McKesson. Johnson now says the San Francisco-based company infringed on his First Amendment rights. But the law may say otherwise. On Monday, Johnson filed a lawsuit against Twitter, arguing that the company banned him for his political beliefs in what he bel...

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If you've ever struggled to pair your phone with a Bluetooth speaker or set up a wireless printer, you know that it's often easier to connect to a server halfway around the world than to a gadget across the room. That's a problem as we increasingly use our phones to pay for stuff, unlock doors, and control everything from televisions to thermostats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...