What's New

In a week where sexual harassment allegations against powerful men continued to come to light and the situation continues to be dire in Puerto Rico, people have been turning to old traditions to keep their spirits high: Halloween, Stranger Things , and wondering what in the world is actually going with Taylor Swift right now . Well, it's that or wondering what in the world is happening in Spain ,...

When Peter Arvai founded Prezi in 2009, he didn't set out to topple PowerPoint. He just wanted to see better presentations. With the right tools, he figured, he could help people create visual aids that felt more engaging. Arvai was sick of sitting through slide decks containing walls of text and bullet-pointed lists, listening to the speaker ramble on while the audience squinted at the words on t...

I believe in Chromebooks. Windows and MacOS come with three decades of cruft, old ideas about how things work that don’t mesh with a new generation that sends more snaps than emails and doesn’t know what that weird rectangle on the Save icon even is. (It’s a floppy disk, kiddies. Look it up.) Now that the primary computer for so many people is a five-inch rectangle of glass in their pocket, it see...

I like my Echo. In my house, we use it to play radio stations, to get the weather, and to answer questions like "When was the Edo period?" One thing I don't often use the Echo for is music. That's because it sounds terrible. As good as Amazon's Alexa voice service is, the Echo's black tin can croaks out audio just a notch better than the 20-year-old Coby FM radio I keep in the garage. Learn more a...

Most people's idea of a good night's sleep involves a plush mattress, blackout shades, and maybe some sleeping pills. But Ulla Lohmann catches her best zzz 's hundreds of feet deep inside a rumbling volcano , lava casting a red glow all around. "It's like a night light," she says. The German photographer loves volcanoes so much her husband proposed to her atop one, and then the couple honeymooned...

When the trek to work involves multiple modes of transit, this gear will ease your way. At 2.76 pounds, Microsoft’s newest ultraportable is light enough to practically disappear inside your briefcase. And thanks to more than 14 hours of playback time, you can continue watching mov-ies when your evening train home is interminably delayed. | $999 Your feet need mobility machines too. Learn more abou...

Today, learning about science and tech is all play. Well, and maybe just a little work. You don’t need to be a fab-lab rat to work this simple 3-D printer. Kids can design their own objects using free software or print a predesigned trinket. | $250 (Ages 14+) It’s no Retina display, but Kano’s 16x8-pixel grid still dazzles. Make the LEDs glow using Kano’s simple web coding app. Program the screen...

Next time you’re driving down the road or walking down the street, pause to consider how you read your surroundings. How you pay extra attention to the kid kicking a soccer ball around her front lawn and the slightly wobbly, nervous looking cyclist. How you deprioritize the woman striding toward the street, knowing she’s heading for the group of friends waving to her from the sidewalk. Learn more...

Over the years, every so often, companies come along with a bold proclamation: The smartphone was designed wrong. Never mind that it's the most popular device ever created, or that it's occasioned countless markets and upended the way we live. What if it looked like, you know, something else? Usually such proclamations come from some dude with a Kickstarter, or as a Hail Mary from a flailing compa...

If I had to pick the moment I most appreciated the Google Pixel 2, it would be when our airboat driver-slash-tour guide put a hot dog and a piece of raw chicken in his pocket, dove into the New Orleans swamp, and began playing with a giant gator named Who Dat. I’m no social media whiz, but I knew there was Instagram gold unfolding in front of me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

Do you prefer your candy bars king size, regular, or fun size? I’ve always favored the middle. Regular size bars are big enough to satisfy, but not so huge that I feel that pang of guilt in my sugar-ridden stomach. Buying a tablet from Amazon is similar. You can opt for a cute 7-inch Fire, but there’s a good chance it’ll feel too small. Or you can buy a big 10-inch Fire, which, for some, will be u...

Eight years. It took writer/director Angela Robinson eight years to make her film about Wonder Woman’s origins. In that time Wonder Woman went from one of the few mainstream DC Comics characters not to have a standalone movie to being a bonafide box office powerhouse. In that time Robinson went from thinking she would never get her movie made to filming it during a hectic 25 days in October 2016,...

Opening up the Amazon Fire HD 10 will tell you everything you need to know about it. It doesn’t come in an immaculate white box, like an iPad or fancy Galaxy tablet, and there is no lid that makes that pleasant suction sound as you gently lift it, revealing a glass and metal slab so pristine it could part the heavens. Nope—my Fire HD 10 came in a cardboard pouch. Like a FedEx box, you simply tear...

R2-D2. Ewoks. BB-8. With nearly every addition to the Star Wars film franchise, there has been some new creature or droid that has delighted audiences and found its way onto lunchboxes and pajama bottoms. Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be no different. This time around, though, the fandom’s obsession with the movie’s creature du jour is already in full swing long before the flick hits theaters. Lea...

Last time Google made the best Chromebook ever, it was the Chromebook Pixel . The boxy, beautiful $1,000 laptop wasn't designed to go everywhere with you so much as to be so outrageously impressive that it might prompt someone to ask, "Wait, that's a Chromebook?" Google made it to prove a point, not take over the market. This time, Google went a different way. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Statistically speaking, there’s a pretty good chance you’re one of the 1.2 billion people who use Facebook Messenger at least once a month. Anecdotally, there’s a decent chance you harbor deep resentments toward its sluggishness, its bloat, and its liberally borrowed Snapchat features. Friends, there’s a better way. It’s called Messenger Lite . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

The market for devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home is so new that nobody really knows anything, except that smart speakers are fun as hell and they're probably important to the connected future of everything. Somehow. We're firmly in the spaghetti-throwing phase of the technology, as companies experiment in public to find out what works. Barely a week after Amazon unveiled a half-dozen ne...

First thing in the morning, the second your head pops off the pillow, you reach over and grab your Pixel off the nightstand. You check Twitter, thumb through email, poke at the New York Times app to make sure we're not at nuclear war . You stand, stretch, and say, "Hey Google, good morning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been almost a decade since anyone watched TRL and since then everything about its primary foci—music videos, celebrity culture, TV consumption—has changed. So when the network announced in July that it was bringing back its afternoon music-video countdown show, the prevailing question was: “Why?” TRL , the MTV show formerly known as Total Request Live , went off the air in 2008. On November 1...

Five years ago, Vlad Dragusin began making wooden cars in the evenings and on weekends. At the time, he was an architect at the design studio Gensler, and the cars were just a hobby—a way to escape the real world obstacles inherent in designing buildings. “With architecture, it gets to the point where you’re spending this much time on other things,” he says stretching his arms wide, “and this much...

Most of the time, I navigate to my social media apps reflexively, as though my finger and the icons are magnets. I don't even realize I'm doing it until my thumb taps the Instagram icon on my screen. Again. And again. And again. It’s a dirty digital habit, and it doesn’t make me happy. Maybe you can relate. Studies have repeatedly found that while social media connects us to one another, it also m...

Amazon's new Fire TV looks more like a Chromecast than a typical set-top box. It's a small rectangle attached to an HDMI cable, meant to go right behind your TV. But the tiny thing packs heat: It supports 4K and HDR, Dolby Atmos sound, and all the games and apps on the Fire TV. And most important, it supports Alexa, which Amazon hopes will be the remote control of the future. Amazon's announcement...

Even just mentioning the Super Nintendo brings memories flooding back: there’s little me, sitting in the playroom at the top of the stairs in my house in Massachusetts, battling my sister in Donkey Kong Country. She still swears she didn’t need my help, but deep down she knows I was the only one who could hack the mine cart levels. My family got a SNES a couple of years after its 1991 release, and...

For as long as Twitter has existed, it has been a place of brevity, if not levity. The 140 character limit—originally created so that tweets could fit into single SMS messages—is as much a part of the brand as the silhouetted bird. You want to yell about the NFL, hurl some insults at the president, or debate the parentage of Kylie Jenner’s unborn child? Fine. Just make it quick. Learn more about y...

Last night, CBS finally took the wraps off its oft-delayed new show , Star Trek: Discovery . The two-part debut ("The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars") gave fans the first new TV Trek since Star Trek: Enterprise ceased subspace transmission in 2005. And they were ready for it—last night's premiere set a single-day record for new signups for CBS' All Access streaming service. Learn mo...