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There are certain seminal moments in history, and July 9, 1981, should surely stand among them. That was the day Nintendo officially began selling Donkey Kong to arcades—and introduced the world to a mustachioed little fellow named Jumpman. Jumpman was a simple soul with a simple talent: jumping. He jumped over barrels thrown at him by the game’s eponymous gorilla villain. Learn more about your ad...

Every once in awhile a new science show comes on TV. I find some of them pretty good and others not that great. I was pleasantly surprised to find Outrageous Acts of Danger on the Science channel features a reasonable amount of science and makes it interesting. It does this by making otherwise common science demonstration absurdly dangerous. One recent episode riffed on the classic physics demo in...

What has befallen the New York City subway in the past few years—climbing ridership and plummeting on-time performance—is like a bad stomach bug. It is nigh impossible to track down the exact culprit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tech IPOs have been known to soar. Exponentially so. That fabled hockey-stick curve is the thing that every early investor and company founder hopes will appear on a stock chart after going public. Anything short of it, and the narrative around the company can be a resounding “meh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this week, the New York Times posted a comprehensive accounting of President Donald Trump’s lies. It is, among other things, a triumph of web design. Orange, san-serif dates turn each falsehood into bricks in a vast wall. Scrolling turns the wall into a wave, a tsunami of mendacity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy long weekend, friends. How’s it going? Feeling rested? After last week, you deserve a break. And that's not even because everything that happened last week was bad—Jay-Z did drop a new album to apologize to Beyoncé and Germany did legalize same-sex marriage, after all—it was all just kind of a lot. In other words, it was another seven days on the internet. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Smartphones are amazing. And smartphones are terrible. It's a central paradox of modern life: The devices that help us find rides and friends and food and sex and adorable puppies are the same ones that disconnect us from the life in front of our eyes, kill our attention span, give us FOMO, and turn the world into a series of torrential feeds we can't stop trying and failing to keep up with. Learn...

I don’t have many pet peeves in the kitchen but washing plastic storage bags might just top that tiny list. As the guy who started his high school’s recycling program, I just can’t bring myself to throw them away, but damn, those bags are no fun to clean. Take your pick: washing them in the sink leaves the back of your had covered in cooking juices and oil while sticking them in the dishwasher tur...

Smartwatches have outshipped Swiss watches for several years. Before an uptick in March, the Federation of Swiss Watches had posted a 20-month-straight decline in exports, part of a disastrous downward sales trend. If the numbers continue on their current trajectory, these digitally enabled wearable computers may take the lead in actual sales dollars by 2020. The mechanical watch world has been sl...

Here's a sentence I never expected to write: Drag and drop changes everything. Today, Apple releases the public beta of iOS 11, the latest version of the operating system driving the world's iPhones and iPads. These early releases are SOP and help Cupertino ensure its software is fully baked before launch. Anyone with a taste for risk and patience for bugginess can install iOS 11 now, ahead of its...

Snapchat has always known exactly where you are. What, you thought everyone saw that “Greetings from the Brooklyn Bridge” filter? Until recently, Snapchat didn’t do much with your location data beyond serving up geofilters and pushing location-specific stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine you could build your own Android phone from scratch, with the ability to bend a Chinese manufacturing colossus to your whims. What would you make? That is more or less the story of OnePlus, the Chinese company founded in 2013 to produce premium smartphones. But don’t call it a startup: OnePlus is a subsidiary of BBK Electronics, the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer (it also o...

Physicists like to share the legend of a professor who asked students how they might determine the height of a building using a barometer. The story goes on to list some of the ways you might do that. You could drop the barometer from the roof and record the time it takes to hit the ground. Or you could offer the barometer as a bribe to the building manager and ask him the height. Learn more about...

Phoenix just provided another reason to hate flying: the heat. With temperatures there expected to hit 119 degrees Fahrenheit, airlines canceled more than 40 flights today. Wait. What? Airplanes can't fly because it's too hot? That's crazy. No, not really. According to news reports, the heat poses a particular problem for the Bombardier CRJ airliners, which have a maximum operating temperature of...

When you work at Twitter, you get near-daily updates to the app to test. These beta versions often provide a glimpse of new features, and most of them are small. So when a major update landed two weeks ago, one thing stood out: The quill icon, which everyone knows you press to compose a tweet, was no longer an icon, but a single word: Tweet. This experiment in iconography didn't last. A subsequent...

It’s easy to get lost in the great pantheon of consumer drones. Even just looking at industry leader DJI’s options, there are enough choices to set your head spinning faster than a quadcopter blade. Today we’ll focus on one choice: the DJI Phantom 4 Pro+. Coming in at a cool $1,800, this marks the top end of what could be considered DJI’s consumer line, with the next level up being the $3,000 pro-...

In a dystopia, there are no happy endings. Despite what June says or thinks, life will never return to the way it was. Moira can’t erase the nights of ritual rape. Janine can’t restore the eye the Republic of Gilead took from her. June can’t be there for her daughter’s childhood. But as long as there’s resistance, there’s hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve always assumed Apple would eventually run out of ways to improve the iPad. It long ago made the processor faster than anyone needs. You won’t find a sharper, more accurate, more responsive screen on a tablet. The battery lasts days, plural. And really, what else matters? Sure, the speakers suck, but chalk that up to the limitation of air-blowing physics. What makes the new 10.5-inch iPad Pro...

Pretty much everyone agrees that distracted driving is bad. And the most common distraction just might be your phone. People seem convinced that they must see that notification or status update right now. This can cause problems when you're driving. You know, crash problems. That's why I'm excited to see the next version of Apple iOS features something called driving mode. Your phone will know you...

Nothing lasts forever. In fact, some things only last two years, two months, and 14 days. That’s how long, at least, Amazon’s absurdly cheap unlimited cloud storage made it. Now that the greatest deal in tech has come to an end, it’s worth taking a fresh look at your data-stashing options. Amazon’s Unlimited Everything plan truly was unprecedented when the company announced it in 2015, and went un...

To escape a nightmare, sometimes you just need to remember that your life is worth waking up for. In the two most recent episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) learned that two of the people she cared about most—her husband, Luke (O-T Fagbenle), and her best friend, Moira (Samira Wiley)—are still alive. When she thought she was alone in Gilead, June just focused on surviving...

You know how one "dog year" is equal to seven human years, because your furry friends squeeze a whole lot of living into their shorter lifespans? Well, serial entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk seems to experience life in somewhat the same way. The Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company boss believes everything should happen more quickly than most people assume is possible. In Elon's world, deadlines...

I am finally living the lifethat futurists promise will bring me the happiness and balance I crave. The autonomous car has freed me from the slog of commuting. Rather than driving, I am using my time productively, for I am always connected, always working. Actually, I am squatting in my Subaru witha laptop, reclined against a nursing pillow, hoping no one calls the cops. And I’m not sure whetherth...

The tech industry is waging a war on bezels, and the iPad Pro is the first Apple product to benefit. Today at WWDC, Apple’s annual gathering of developers, the company announced a new version of its tablet, with a 10.5-inch screen. It’s a different size, but only in one sense. The new 10.5-inch Pro is physically almost exactly the same physical dimensions as the previous 9.7-inch Pro, just without...

Apple’s last mind-blowing computer invention was almost a decade ago. Steve Jobs reached into a manila envelope, and pulled out the slimmest, lightest clamshell anyone had ever seen. Didn’t matter that it cost about the same as a used car; one look and you knew it was the future. Since then, Apple’s progress has been slow—and hasn’t always felt like progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...