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When Ole Witt showed up at the police department in Jaipur, India asking if he could take some pictures of the office, an official in charge told him it would be no problem—Witt would just need to wait a few minutes. Until then, he could take a seat. Maybe have a chai. "In the end," Witt says, “He made me wait 14 hours." Thankfully, that impressive display of slow-moving bureaucracy was precisely...

OnePlus is an odd duck in the smartphone business. It tends to make one phone at a time with a simple and clear goal: to pack all the latest trends and tech into an Android phone that costs about $500. It doesn’t waste time developing a ton of custom features, like LG’s crazy AI-powered camera, nor does it make any effort to woo U.S. wireless carriers. If you want a OnePlus phone, you have to buy...

The sun has burned through the early morning marine layer, and the breeze is gentle and warm enough for me to abandon my hoodie. It looks like a perfect day to head out onto the Pacific Ocean. But as soon as we exit the harbor walls at Marina Del Rey, near Los Angeles, the 29-foot sport-fishing boat starts to heave. “We have some great waves out here today,” says Kelsey Albina, one of my guides fo...

You don’t look for the essence of a city in its monuments or its museums. You look for it in its streets, where the covenant at the core of urban life—the sharing of space—plays out. For the past century, the personal car has dominated that arena, shaping the streets and environments around it. Roads are straight and wide for faster travel; intersections are regulated to protect distracted humans;...

This week, the Senate voted 52–47 to revive an Obama administration rule ensuring equal treatment for online traffic—the so-called “net neutrality” rule recently erased by the Trump FCC. But the vote wasn't really about "net neutrality." Instead, it was a deeply political, bipartisan call—three Republican senators, including Susan Collins of Maine, signed on—for internet freedom writ large. Learn...

Two years later, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was so enjoyable about the first Deadpool movie. Was it the action? The fourth-wall-breaking? The swearing? The cocaine and masturbation jokes? Well ... yes. A hard-R bloodbath that gleefully polluted the pristine sea of squeaky-clean superhero movies, Deadpool went on to make more than $783 million worldwide at the box office. It was the kind of...

Among the (many, many) things you probably do not know about juggling is the fact that it is, at times, a physically grueling act. It's something I certainly failed to appreciate before meeting Alex Barron. We recently met at a squash court in Burbank, California so I could watch him practice his craft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recording a phone call used to require an external gadget that connected a digital recorder to a desk phone's base and handset. It's still one of the most reliable ways to capture a conversation, but it's not exactly convenient. These days, smartphone apps and cloud services make recording phone calls easy and convenient—whether you want to save a conversation with grandma, or a particularly candi...

Over the past six months, on a patch of desert ranchland outside Marfa, Texas, one man's mysterious vision has been taking shape. First, nine massive chunks of quarried black marble were trucked in from northern Mexico and craned into a circular formation, echoing Stone and Bronze Age erections in the British Isles. Next, one of the megaliths, the "king stone," was outfitted with a state-of-the-ar...

The modern car has a problem. Over the past decade, automakers have raced to offer their smartphone-addled customers a bonanza of features: navigation, texting, phone calls, satellite radio, Bluetooth, ways to check tire pressure and oil temperature, suspension settings, charging status, and more. Then they try to stick all those things into an interface whose users are usually pretty busy—driving...

Between Silicon Valley’s disruption-happy tech giants and Detroit’s suddenly totally on board automakers, it’s easy to think of America as the center of the self-driving universe. And so it seems a bit backwards that Audi has decided to release the world’s most capable semiautonomous driving feature in … Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What’s the shiniest, most exciting new technology for transportation? Well, there are plenty of candidates! We’ve got the self-­driving car and drones big enough to carry people. Elon Musk is getting ready to bore hyperloop tunnels. When it comes to moving humans around, the future looks to be merging with sci-fi. But from where I stand, the most exciting form of transportation technology is more...

I never should have started watching Westworld. Not because I didn’t think it’d be good. An HBO show based on a Michael Crichton idea starring Evan Rachel Wood with all kinds of artificial intelligence? Sign me up! The problem wasn’t that Westworld wouldn’t be enjoyable, it was that it’s the kind of show that invites obsession. The kind that presents Big Questions—that never get answered. I worrie...

The first time I wore the HTC Vive, it was like putting on a century-old metal diving suit. It was a heavy, hideous-looking 3D-printed early unit with a thick bundle of cords streaming out the back. It was so delicate that one of the developers had to hold the cables them so I could walk around without breaking it (or myself). Looks aren’t everything, though. That prototype Vive sent me down to th...

On Friday, for the first time in four years, Amazon has raised the price of its Prime benefits program. What once cost $99 annually now costs $119 for new members; existing Prime subscriptions will get bumped whenever they renew, starting June 16. But while nobody likes a 20 percent hike, it's a good reminder that Amazon Prime is as worth it as you want it to be. If past is prologue, the price cha...

If you were asked to name the craziest thing that ever happened to an Aston Martin inside a laboratory, you’d likely invoke some witty repartee between James Bond and Q. But that’s only because you don’t know how Aston’s engineering department developed the roof for the 2018 DB11 Volante. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wind is the worst. It messes up hair, it blows stuff in eyes, and most famously and rudely of all, one time it made a bridge in Washington twist and undulate until it exploded. Alright, maybe that was the fault of the engineers, not the wind. But still, strong gusts have the potential to threaten many technologies, including a new one: drones. If you’ve ever taken a quadcopter out on a windy day,...

In 2014, a Rolling Stone poll declared Bob Dylan’s "Masters of War" the best protest song of our time. Recorded in April of 1963, during that fierce spell of racial and economic tumult, Dylan, in his folksy pragmatism, rages against the Cold War and the military industrial complex. "You play with my world/ Like it’s your little toy," he sings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

Everyone from the ACLU to the Koch brothers wants to reduce the number of people in prison and in jail. Liberals view mass incarceration as an unjust result of a racist system. Conservatives view the criminal justice system as an inefficient system in dire need of reform. But both sides agree: Reducing the number of people behind bars is an all-around good idea. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

TickTock has run out of time. Don’t fret if you don’t know what that is—after all, the startup launched just a year ago. But in that time the company cycled through four different consumer robot concepts in the hopes of shaping the future of the home, moving beyond simpleton Roombas to truly intelligent machines. After TickTock's collapse, though, co-founder and ex-Googler Ryan Hickman is talking...

It’s not even that good a play on words: May the Fourth Be With You. That’s all it takes to have a holiday? A pun? The joke at least has been around almost as long as Star Wars itself; official Star Wars doctrine traces the etymology to an ad congratulating Margaret Thatcher on the day she won the election to become Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, just two years after the first movie premiered....

Last week was so busy that we barely got to talk about failed Senate candidate Roy Moore filing a lawsuit claiming sexual misconduct allegations against him threw off his 2017 campaign. There also wasn't much time to talk about Stormy Daniels suing President Trump for defamation, or Paul Ryan’s surreal war with the House Chaplin, or even the fact that there’s a volcano erupting in Hawaii. Seriousl...

Westworld watchers, we knew this moment was coming. The second season's third episode, "Virtù e Fortuna," opens not in Westworld but in an India-themed park. Where Westworld is an emblem of the colonization of Native American land, this park represents Britain's takeover of the subcontinent, and the racial-social hierarchy is clearly encoded: Women in saris and men in turbans—the hosts—walk amidst...

The month-long launch window for NASA’s new Mars lander, InSight opens this weekend. InSight will be the first spacecraft to use a robotic arm to place its instruments on another planet’s soil—effectively unraveling the innards of the Red Planet. It’s also the first interplanetary mission to launch from the West Coast instead of Cape Canaveral, and it may not be the last. InSight isn’t a rover, li...

Toys and Star Wars are inextricably linked forever and ever. Star Wars creator George Lucas famously waived part of his directing fee and retained the insanely lucrative rights to Star Wars merchandise in a deal that has gone down in history as a catastrophic blunder on the part of 20th Century Fox. The studio was skeptical this oddball space movie would resonate with audiences, even if its critte...