Business, Spoken

In the late summer of 1954, a brilliant young psychologist was reading the newspaper when his eye fell on a strange headline on the back page: prophecy from planet clarion call to city: flee that flood. it’ll swamp us on dec 21, outer space tells suburbanite. His interest piqued, the psychologist, whose name was Leon Festinger, read on. “Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21.

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Emergency responders in northern Texas watch as an imaginary crisis takes over their social media feeds. A mass shooting has broken out at a music festival, they learn, and a terrorist organization is taking credit. The shooters livestreamed the entire grisly scene, and news outlets are already picking up the story. Word of the tragedy spreads like a virus online, riddled with misinformation and panicked confusion.

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Online advertising is terrible. Ads clutter your screen, slow down your computer, and drain your batteries. Publishers saddle pages with tracking technology that vacuums up your data so they can, ostensibly, serve you more relevant ads (though this practice really just leads to serious privacy concerns). Sometimes ads even try to install malware on your computer. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they’re all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport.

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The day Richard Feynman died, the blackboard in his classroom read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” When Ian Goodfellow explains the research he’s doing at Google Brain, the central artificial intelligence lab at the internet’s most powerful company, he points to this aphorism from the iconic physicist, Caltech professor, and best-selling author. But Goodfellow isn’t referring to himself—or any other human being inside Google.

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Comcast thinks it has an answer to cord-cutting: getting into the wireless mobile network business. But that alone might not be enough to stop its traditional cable customers from flocking to online video. Today the company announced that it will launch its own mobile phone and internet service called Xfinity Mobile.

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YouTube TV has arrived, and with it the potential to change how television works. Google-owned YouTube’s first foray into true cable-like television takes to the internet equivalent of the airwaves in select cities today: 40-plus channels of entertainment, news and sports for $35 per month, the so-called skinny bundle. So far, the service is still a little wonky.

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For years, the humble Arduino microcontroller—a cheap, open source, midnight-blue circuit board emblazoned with a tiny white infinity loop—has been a favorite tool of the DIY electronics crowd.

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Uber just released its first diversity report. For years, the ride-hailing giantshunnedthe practice adopted by most other major Silicon Valley companies. But Uber’s scandals have snowballed. Multiple claims of misogyny and sexual harassment suggest a company that doesn’t just have isolated problems but a pervasive culture of sexism. Uber’s responses have included a much-hyped conference call led by board member Arianna Huffington and this week the diversity report.

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On a dreary Thursday afternoon in March, the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, swelled with people who spend their lives trying to salvage the economies of America’s forgotten towns. Hailing from across the country, they hurried past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in their sharp suits and jewel-toned dresses, each one carrying a different proposal for how to keep their cities and states afloat.

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