What's New

According to Google's "Frightgeist" map of trending costumes, there's no way around it: it's gonna be a very Fortnite Halloween. From Miami up to Boston and Anchorage down to LA, the Epic Games title is dominating people's searches for holiday getups. (At least, mostly; New England seems to be really into unicorns and fairies, and Glendive, Montana inexplicably is into "The ’50s" as a costume idea...

Snapchat Dysmorphia n. A fixation on perceived flaws in one’s appearance, caused by seeing too many filtered photos. People used to show up in plastic surgeons’ offices with photos of movie stars, asking for Angelina’s lips or Jon Hamm’s chin. Today they come with selfies, asking to look like themselves. Not the human selves that mock us all in fitting-room mirrors, of course, but the sparkling, d...

It's hard to imagine anyone has had a career like Ed Catmull's. He was hired by George Lucas to run Lucasfilm's computer division in 1979; seven years later, after Steve Jobs bought that division from Lucas, he co-founded Pixar with Jobs and then-Disney-ex-pat John Lasseter. There, he helped develop RenderMan, the studio's revolutionary computer animation software, which it still uses today. Learn...

Do you need a fitness wearable? Obviously, yes. Even if you're not interested in counting every step, every day, you can now use a fitness wearable to check your texts, listen to music, or effortlessly pay for a macchiato. The increasingly porous boundary between fitness trackers, sport watches, and smartwatches has resulted in a tough year or two for Fitbit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

The Mega Millions lottery jackpot has reached an absurd $1.6 billion, which translates to about 1.4 percent of a Bezos. The odds of winning are a comically low 1 in 302,575,350. Still, you almost certainly won. To make sure, here's how to follow along with Tuesday night's historic drawing as it happens. The drawing takes place at 11 pm EDT, out of ABC affiliate WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. The good...

Recently I was invited to join a panel to discuss Regulatory Hacking: A Playbook for Startups, a new book by venture capitalist Evan Burfield. The book is sort of a guide for new companies looking for a win-win—doing good by doing well—in highly regulated sectors like health and education. It argues that startups have the opportunity to make trillions of dollars solving global challenges that, in...

The promise of Patreon, the membership platform for independent artists and creators, has always been simple: If your fans like your work, they will pay you for it. No need to slough off cash from advertisers, or make shady deals with brands. It's just you, your fans, and the stuff you make for them. Patreon has slowly introduced new ways for creators to milk the most out of these fan relationship...

The thoroughbreds weren't running that morning. I was in the parking lot of the Santa Anita Park horse track, to the east of Los Angeles, for a different sort of race. The orange cones demarcate an autocross course that a solid driver in a high-performing car should be able to complete in about a minute. Ready? Yep. I slam my foot down, and the Bolt launches forward. Learn more about your ad choic...

If you were a baseball fan in 1921, you might have huddled around a radio to listen to the World Series. And when, in Game 8, you heard that George “High Pockets” Kelly of the New York Giants hit the title-winning grounder, you might have cheered—or if you were a Yankees fan, thrown your newsboy cap to the ground and uttered some old-timey obscenity. Today, our ardor for the national pastime hasn’...

A scooter nightmare for cities might look something like this: Thousands of unused, rickety twists of metal and tire, sprawled across sidewalks. No walking, no wheeling: Just private companies’ private property, littered across public space. Of course, no American city really looks like that, even though the scooter-share craze has reached well over two dozen major urban places. Learn more about y...

Orange Is the New Black’s sentence is up. Netflix announced this week that the show’s seventh season, hitting the streaming service next year, would be its last. After that, it’s dunzo. For many viewers, this is sad news—the inmates of Litchfield have been a part of the conversation for a long time now. But for everyone else, and for the future of TV broadly, it’s a move that’s long overdue. Learn...

There are two things you need to know about my visit to Lime’s San Francisco office to see their new scooter, a thick, rugged white and green thing they’re calling Gen 3. The first is that I showed up almost 20 minutes late after getting caught in the city’s underground metro tunnel for half an hour. The second is that I walked-ran into the office building and onto its elevator, where I found Lime...

Cars are getting smarter and more capable. They're even starting to drive themselves, a little. And they're becoming a cause of concern for European and American safety agencies and groups. They're all for putting better tech on the road, but automakers are selling systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, or Nissan’s Pro Pilot Assist, with the implied promise that they’ll make driving easier and safer, and...

A few years ago, I gave my parents-in-law a Chromecast for Christmas. They needed an easy way to watch Netflix and Chromecast was the hip, hot new thing. This will be perfect, I thought. I was wrong. The problems added up quickly. Their Wi-Fi was spotty, so the Casting icon didn't always show up on their phones, which was tough since casting video from their phones was a strange new concept to beg...

Do you remember Ember? Maybe not by name, but perhaps you recall the company’s defining concept: a mug that keeps your drink at your preferred temperature, and not a degree cooler, for hours at a time. On Wednesday, it got just a little bit better. Please know up front that the latest news from the Ember Ceramic Mug and Travel Mug is about as iterative as it gets. In fact, it’s barely about the mu...

In early 2015, Netflix made one of the most dramatic deals in the company’s career, announcing it had paid close to $12 million for Beasts of No Nation, a grim war tale starring Idris Elba. By then, the streaming service had already found Emmy success with original series like House of Cards, and had even earned a couple of Academy Award nominations for its documentaries. Learn more about your ad...

It contributes to filter bubbles, he said. It risks silencing people, he said. And when it’s not silencing them, it might be incentivizing them to behave badly, or basely, he said. His biggest criticism of the social media site he runs was that it could be nudging its users in the wrong directions. “What does the service currently incentivize?” asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on stage at the WIRED25...

Amazon has a new Kindle with an old name. It’s an updated version of the Kindle Paperwhite, which is Amazon’s best-selling Kindle e-reader—likely by a large margin, though we’ll never know because Amazon doesn’t share Kindle sales numbers. The Paperwhite is a good Kindle. This new one, which you can now preorder for $130, is a little bit better. It has the same six-inch, high-resolution display as...

Smart displays are the new smart speakers. A day after Facebook revealed Portal, a WiFi-connected video-chatting device for your home, Google has announced Home Hub, a new 7-inch smart screen that acts as a voice-controlled conduit for the Google Assistant. It's Google's first smart home gadget that's comprised largely of a touchscreen display, after having launched three different display-free sm...

Like most people, you’ve probably watched Get Out at least once. Maybe twice. But the best way to see Get Out is with Jordan Peele sitting right next to you. Last spring, long before Get Out's eventual Oscar win, the movie was released on home video with a commentary track from its writer-director. A decade ago, in the pre-streaming era, this wouldn’t have been news: Back then, seemingly every mov...

Yesterday Facebook took down 559 domestic political pages and 251 accounts for violating its terms of service on coordinated inauthentic behavior—“networks of accounts or Pages working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing.” While Facebook has been frequently critiqued for hosting and inadvertently aiding foreign disinformation campaigns, this is the first time a collection...

You want the real windows into someone's soul? Look at their Reddit subscriptions. It's all there: their passions, their hobbies, their ideological leanings, their love of terrible haircuts and sublime anonymized cringe. And if they're anything like me, those subscriptions also tell the tale of a life spent diving down rabbit holes. Origami. Board games. Trail running. Pens. Cycling. Mechanical ke...

A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a dramatic landing after their ride to space, a Russian Soyuz rocket, failed minutes after takeoff. The incident caused the crew to initiate emergency abort procedures, landing a few hundred miles away from the launch site. Both Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin are safe. The crew launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:40...

The man flying the drone didn’t know he was violating a temporary restriction on flights around New York City (the president was in town for the 2017 United Nations General Assembly). He didn’t know he had just two minutes to land before he violated the prohibition on nighttime flights. And he didn’t know his DJI Phantom 4—300 feet up, 2.5 miles away from him, and well beyond his line of sight—was...

After gathering strength from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico overnight, Hurricane Michael blasted across the Florida Panhandle Wednesday afternoon, pummeling the area with winds up to 155 miles per hour. That makes the Category 4 hurricane one of the all-time strongest landfalls in US history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices