Business, Spoken

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You live, it’s true, in a Golden Age of Television, and at least some of that gold comes in the form of lucky coins from leprechauns that reanimate unfaithful dead spouses. Which is to say, some of the most premium-est of premium TV right now is genre—science fiction and fantasy. It’s American Gods, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Westworld, The Leftovers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop says nothing about the future of technology. The team in Redmond didn’t concern itself with the way things will be in 2025—which ports users will want, what kind of device they’ll use, how they’ll feel about bezels. Instead, Microsoft built a laptop optimized for 2017. Contrast that approach with Apple’sMacBooks. To trim every millimeter from its laptops, Apple inven...

President Trump's irate and irrational tweets have already gotten him in plenty of trouble, and will, no doubt, continue to be an issue as he pushes for approval of his controversial travel ban before the Supreme Court. Now, free speech advocates are condemning Trump not just for what he's saying on the platform, but for what he's preventing his constituents from saying to him. Learn more about yo...

Apple’s iMac updates and new HomePod speaker drew most of the attention at the company’s World Wide Developers keynote. But tucked away in the middle were a short few minutes in which software chief Craig Federighi casually launched Apple into one of the tech industry’s fiercest competitions– the contest to help developers build the next generation of AI-powered applications. Learn more about your...

Net neutrality isn’t the simplest concept to grasp. Explaining it works best via example: Net neutrality means, say, that internet providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, which also have their own television and streaming video services, can’t create “slow lanes” for competing services. They can’t gum up traffic from sites such as Netflix and Dish’s SlingTV in favor of their own. But net neutra...

Fourteen-year-old Isabel Catalan stares intently at her laptop as she walks me through a recent assignment one sunny morning a few weeks before summer vacation. The studious eighth grader and I are sitting in a tiny, colorful classroom at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy, a small private elementary school in the tree-lined Philadelphia suburbs, which also happens to be my alma mater. In most ways, Norwoo...

Sitting on a stage in Wuzhen, China, a historic city up the river from Shanghai, Google chairman Eric Schmidt described what he called “the age of intelligence.” But he wasn’t talking about human intelligence. He meant machine intelligence. He trumpeted the rise of deep neural networks and other techniques that allow machines to learn tasks largely on their own, either by finding patterns in vast...

After this weekend’s attacks in London, President Trump became embroiled in a spat with the city’s mayor, where the president criticized British authorities for not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough. In its crude way, that confrontation underscored a deeper divide between the United States and much of the rest of the world over what taking terrorism seriously means. Learn more about...

A couple weeks ago,during an unassuming antitrust conference at Oxford University, a German bureaucrat uttered a few words that should send a chill through Silicon Valley. In front of a crowd of nearly 200 competition law experts—including enforcement agents, scholars, and economic policy-makers from the United States and Europe—Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s antitrust agency, Bundeskartell...

Just past midnight on Wednesday morning, the man who gave us the word "bigly" added yet another term to the American lexicon: "covfefe." The president's since-deleted late-night tweet, which read, cryptically, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe," launched a thousand Twitter takes. Some of the jokes were great. Some were so very, very bad. (We're looking at you, Ted Cruz. Learn more about...

On HBO’s Silicon Valley, startups promise to “change the world” by tackling silly, often non-existent problems. But this season, the show’s characters are tackling a project that really could. In their latest pivot, Richard Hendricks and the Pied Piper gang are trying to create new internet that cuts out intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and the fictional Hooli. Learn more about your ad choice...

The web’s favorite file format just turned 30. Yep, it turns out the GIF is a millennial, too. At the same time, 30 makes the GIF ancient in web years, which feels a bit weird, given that the proliferation of animated GIFs is a relatively recent phenomenon. Today, Twitter has a GIF button and even Apple added GIF search to its iOS messaging app. Such mainstream approval would have seemed unthinkab...

On February 16, Mark Zuckerberg published “Building Global Community,” a6,000-word open letter directly addressed to Facebook’susers. “To our community,” Zuckerberg begins. “On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A disembodied voice sounded over a loudspeaker. "Incoming. Take cover," it warned to anyone within earshot. Then, the sirens began to wail. Erin Delaney assumed it was a drill. She peeked down the hallway to see how other people were responding. Then she hit the deck. It was not a drill. The NATO base in Kabul where Delaney had been working for weeks was being attacked. Delaney, 24, had never had...

Kathryn Minshew is a female co­founder and CEO of The Muse, a popular online job search destination for millennials. She doesn’t have a technical degree, although she was a top computer science student who aced the advanced placement exam for computer science when she was in the tenth grade at Thomas Jefferson High, a prestigious math and science magnet school in northern Virginia. Learn more abou...

Last Thursday Republicans proposed a new law that would require companies from Comcast and Verizon to Facebook and Google to get your permission before selling your internet browsing history. Sounds familiar? Probably, because last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a sweeping set of privacy rules that did much the same thing, rules that Republicans voted to scrap just two months ag...

Ross Diedrich had gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he'd stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out. Now he was standing in front of six angel investors, wearing a blazer over a T-shirt printed with the word covered—the name of...

Ross Diedrich had gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he’d stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Data mining is such a prosaic part of our online lives that it’s hard to sustain consumer interest in it, much less outrage. The modern condition means constantly clicking against our better judgement. We go to bed anxious about the surveillance apparatus lurking just beneath our social media feeds, then wake up to mindlessly scroll, Like, Heart, Wow, and Fave another day. Learn more about your ad...

Two days before delivering the keynote at Google I/O, the company’s annual State of the Union address, Sundar Pichai is worried about losing his voice. Sitting at the coffee table inside his remarkably spartan office at company headquarters, the Google CEO speaks softly, even by his standards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is it possible that someday we will elect an AI president? Given some of the recent occupants of the White House, many might consider it an upgrade. After all, humans are prone to making decisions based on ego, anger, and the need for self-aggrandizement, not the common good. An artificially intelligent president could be trained to maximize happiness for the most people without infringing on civi...