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“A library of the future might also be, at its best, a sanctuary where we are encouraged to spend entire hours looking at just one thing.” —Michael Agresta, “What Will Become of the Library?” Slate (2014) The library of the future is more or less the same. That is, the branch is an actual and metaphoric Faraday cage. You enter, a node and a target, streamed at and pushed and yanked, penetrated by...

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Masdar City, a squeaky-clean planned city under development outside Abu Dhabi, grew from the sand with a single vision: help the United Arab Emirates wean itself off its own vast oil reserves. The 10-year-old micro-metropolis serves as an incubator for clean-technology companies. It incorporates the latest design and construction strategies to minimize its energy consumption. It runs solely on ren...

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“Roughly half of Americans would feel better about the concept of a robot caregiver if there was a human operator who could remotely monitor its actions at all times.” —“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center (2017) The thing is beeping at Brad. > Begin EOL protocol. OK? > Beep. > OK to begin? All he needs to do is accept. Click it and the action cascade will download to his tablet, set...

Online shoppers, media consumers, and app lovers are increasingly sucked into the world of recurring payments. On the bright side, subscription services offer convenience. They also establish a relationship between the company making a product and the person buying it; if you’re on the buying side, it means paying only as long as something is valuable to you. Plus, subscriptions often come bundled...

Hanging on the wall of Postmates' stealth R&D laboratory, there's a framed photo of an iconic scene from Star Wars, Luke Skywalker bent down beside R2D2. Except someone has used Photoshop to replace Luke's face with Ali Kashani, Postmates' VP of Robotics. Nevermind that Kashani has never seen Star Wars (he considers this a point of pride). Kashani recognizes the symbolism of his face in a world wh...

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No, self-driving cars aren’t here yet. But they are roaming a few select sections of American road. Waymo just launched a limited service in metro Phoenix (albeit with a safety driver behind the wheel); General Motors’ Cruise is testing in San Francisco; Ford is noodling around Florida; Aurora and Argo (which is closely aligned with Ford) swing through the hills of Pittsburgh. Learn more about you...

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At first bite, it seems no more than a clever way to boost sales at the expense of a competitor. When a hungry customer walks into a McDonald’s (or within 600 feet of one), they can use the Burger King app to order a Whopper for a single cent. The app will then provide directions to the nearest BK, where the now certainly famished customer can pick it up. The promotion, good until December 12, is...

I’d ridden the motorcycle part of the way up a small dirt hill, and was trying to simply reverse my way back down when I fell off the machine. As I went down, I tightened my grip, inadvertently pinning the throttle. I soon found myself underneath a pirouetting motorcycle. It was my first experience with the so-called whiskey throttle—and indeed my first experience of any kind on a motorcycle. Lear...

For the productivity-obsessed, a more joyful and efficient life starts with good habits. Our sensible routines prepare us for success: plan your day, wash your face, early to bed, early to rise, etc. If you have an iPhone and you've updated to iOS 12, you can streamline those routines on your phone across apps, and maybe even create new habits. Shortcuts (née Workflow) was introduced to iPhones an...

To recap: Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as chief operating officer in 2008, promising to make the popular but weird social network profitable. She went hard into advertising, marketing, and data-mining—and, by 2010, Facebook was going great guns. It’s been well in the black ever since. During these explosive years, the company enabled Russian troll farms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

We’re heading southeast on Interstate 10, headed into Tucson, Arizona, when we pass the group of men in orange jumpsuits and hard hats working on the side of the highway. “Inmates Working,” the sign on the back of the truck parked on the shoulder says. It’s the sort of sight that can generate a swirl of curiosity, pity, and distaste in a person, but the robot doesn’t register anything about who th...

If you could get rid of the keyboard on your laptop and replace it with a second tablet-like display, would you do it? In other words, would you prefer to work with two screens, Nintendo DS-style, instead of just one, like the MacBook-toting plebes of the world? Before you answer either way, you should spend some time with Yoga Book C930, a triumphantly pointless piece of technology that stands be...

In 2015, Microsoft introduced Edge, a homegrown browser it pitched as a modernized successor to Internet Explorer, and capable competitor to Google Chrome. Just three years later, Microsoft has raised a white flag, opting to rebuild Edge on Chromium, the same open-source rendering engine used by Chrome. As for Internet Explorer? Two years after its stopped getting feature updates, it's still more...

The year has not been kind to MoviePass, and MoviePass, in turn, has been unkind to its subscribers. Its increasingly precarious financial position—parent company Helios and Matheson, lost $137.2 million last quarter alone—has prompted increasingly onerous restrictions on its service, from draconian anti-fraud measures, to surge pricing, to restricting available movies and showtimes so severely th...

According to absolutely legitimate research I read about in the Daily Mail, 55 percent of couples say they argue about the temperature at which their home is maintained. While the whole house is clearly a battleground, certainly it’s the bedroom that is ground zero for such squabbles. Stereotypically, women like things hot, men like them colder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Skiers and snowboarders love to go fast. They seek the thrill that comes from strapping on a pair of freshly waxed planks (or just one) and gliding down a mountain trail with controlled speed through carved turns. To get that speed, competitive racers spend hours crafting the perfect combination of chemical waxes to reduce friction over changing snow conditions and achieve the slipperiest surface...

Waymo, the frontrunner in the self-driving car industry, today announces the moment everyone has been waiting for: It is officially “launching” a robo-taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, wherein riders will use an app to hail the vehicles to take them anywhere in an 80 to 100 square mile area, for a price. “Today, we're taking the next step in our journey with the introduction of our commercial sel...

Wherever the future of driving leads us, Porsche is sure of one thing: We’re going to need some excellent maps. And not just for navigation, either. That’s why Porsche is announcing today a collaboration with open source mapping platform Mapbox. Designers from the two companies are working together to explore new ways of using in-car maps, making them more than tools for getting from one place to...

If America’s biggest automaker’s crystal ball is working, the future of cars has way fewer cars. That’s the thinking driving General Motors’ major internal restructuring announcement, which came Monday. The company plans to stop producing many compact or sedan models, including the Chevrolet Cruze, Volt, and Impala, the Buick LaCrosse, and the Cadillac CT6. It will close at least three assembly pl...

The first PopSockets gripper I plastered to my phone's rear-end was a freebie gift thing I received from some company’s swag bag. Amidst the magnets, notebooks, business cards, and other marketing ephemera, there it was: the circular doodad that has leapfrogged selfie-sticks as the must-have mobile accessory for our smartphone-saturated society. When I fished it out of the tote, I felt secretly de...