Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether.

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Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing, which was attended by Google, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation. But it concluded as a pointed condemnation of Google over recent reports that the company is building a censored search engine for China.

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For Democrats, there are already plenty of signs pointing to a good election night this November. There's the record number of House candidates outraising their Republican incumbent rivals. There's the unlikely rise of Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke giving Ted Cruz a real run for his seat. There are the upset victories in state legislature races, like the one in Virginia last fall. And of course, there are polls showing Democrats with a steady lead over Republicans on a generic ballot.

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On Monday night, when the cofounders of Instagram announced that they had quit Facebook, reportedly over Mark Zuckerberg’s meddling, it marked the end of an era in more ways than one. It shattered the partition that protected the beloved photo-sharing app from the sins of its parent company. The departures also extinguished the idea of Facebook as a “family of companies.

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Twitter on Tuesday announced a new policy addressing “dehumanizing speech,” which will take effect later this year, and for the first time the public will be able to formally provide the company with feedback on the proposed rule. The policy will prohibit “content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.

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Cobbling together a DIY dossier about a celebrity is a time-honored internet tradition. Scan a few Wikipedia pages, click through some Google images, scroll through social media accounts, maybe some dubious gossip sites, and you have a snapshot of the person’s life. Now Google wants to do that detective work for you, accessible in a format that owes a lot to Instagram stories, except showcasing the highlights of a person’s life instead of just their day.

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When it came into being in 2006, Twitter seemed perplexing. Publishing teensy, 140-character updates? Whatever was that good for? Twitter seemed like a ghastly mashup of the preening narcissism and nanosecond attention spans that defined the worst trends in digital culture. Tim Ferriss, writer of productivity books, called it “pointless email on steroids.” Who cares what you had for lunch? But critics misunderstood it. What Twitter truly portended wasn’t small, it was huge.

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Henry Zhu makes software that's crucial to websites you use every day, even if you’ve never heard of him or his software. Zhu manages a program called Babel, which translates code written in one version of the programming language JavaScript into code written for another version of the language. That might not sound like a big deal.

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When we launched WIRED, we were accused of being Pangloss­ian optimists. I embraced that as a badge of honor. The Digital Revolution was reinventing everything, and that was good. Twenty-five years on, that optimism is no longer justified—it’s necessary. Indeed: militant optimism. WIRED’s premise was that the most powerful people on the planet weren’t the politicians or generals, priests or pundits, but the people creating and using new technology.

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When a man overseeing $5.7 trillion speaks, the global business community tends to listen. So when BlackRock founder Larry Fink, head of the world’s largest asset management company, posted a letter to CEOs demanding greater attention to social impact, it sent shockwaves through corporations around the globe.

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