Some two months after Elon Musk closed his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, we’ve seen information leaks, layoffs at the social media company, and that day everyone thought Twitter was going to shut down, but it didn’t. With reports of hate speech on the platform rising, many brands are eyeing Twitter cautiously, with some suspending their advertising altogether. But through the Twitter tumult, there’s a larger, deeper question brands are confronting: should they even be on Twitter in the first place?

CES is underway in Las Vegas this week. The annual consumer electronics event attracts tech companies large and small, along with developers, journalists and policymakers. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who covers smart home technology for The Verge, is attending the convention. She spoke with Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams about the new gadgets and the announcements being made in the smart home realm.

2022 was not a great year for crypto. It started with a bang as crypto ads went mainstream in the Super Bowl. And then the year ended with an implosion. Crypto hacks piled on scandals and sliding valuations, one company fell and then another, culminating with the spectacular collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now under investigation for fraud. So will this crypto winter start to thaw in 2023 or head into deep freeze? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with crypto journalist and host of the “Unchained” podcast, Laura Shin, about what she thinks is in store for the industry this year.

Deep inside a mountain, a full day’s hike from any road, in a dry, deserted part of West Texas, a foundation funded by Jeff Bezos is building a giant clock that’s hundreds of feet tall. It’s been called the Millennium Clock, the 10,000 Year Clock and the Clock of the Long Now. Like the Pyramids, Stonehenge and the Colosseum, its makers hope it will outlast our civilization and tick for 10 millennia. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, which has been building the roughly $40 million prototype of the clock in Texas.

Trucking can be dangerous job – long, often tedious hours behind the wheel, the unpredictability of the weather and of course, other drivers. And yet, trucking is an essential part of supply chain. 72% of the nation’s freight gets from point A to point B in a truck, according to the American Trucking Associations. Most of those holiday gifts you might be enjoying right now got to you on a truck. So truck drivers are an essential part of our economy. The companies that hire and manage those drivers have started bringing a lot more technology into big rigs, including artificial intelligence and sometimes automation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Karen Levy, author of “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance” about how these tools are being used in the industry.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are basically digital certificates of ownership, a virtual claim that an image, GIF or even a song belongs to you. And while some artists were initially happy to jump into this new space, others have been surprised or furious to find that people, not themselves, beat them to it. Last year, several musical artists publicly complained after the website HitPiece temporarily listed NFTs for their songs or albums without the artists’ permission. But does selling someone else’s art as an NFT break the law? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Aram Sinnreich, a professor and chair of the communication studies division at American University, around the time of this dust-up. He said all this gets into a gray area, at least when it comes to existing copyright law.

It’s been a big year in tech: the race to build the metaverse, the rise and fall of NFTs, chaos in the crypto sector, amazing views of galaxies far, far, away and research breakthroughs that will change the way we live. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams and Marketplace Tech producers Jésus Alvarado and Daniel Shin discuss what stories they’ll be following in 2023.

This is the time of year when we hear a lot about predictions for the year ahead, but futurist Amy Webb is known for looking to the future year-round. Not just for 2023, but even further out to the technology that will drive meaningful shifts in how we live and experience the world. Webb recently co-authored a book with geneticist Andrew Hessel called “The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology,” where she explores the role synthetic biology will play in shaping our world. In the not-so-distant future, Webb said, it will play an even bigger role in our health, what we eat and even how we have kids.

Earlier this year, a report from Bloomberg said Grand Theft Auto 6 will be getting a female protagonist. It would be a notable change — there are far fewer playable female characters than male ones in video games. And for a long time, women have been typecast as damsels in distress, like Princess Peach from Super Mario, or as sex objects depicted with little clothing and exaggerated proportions, like Lara Croft from the 1990s Tomb Raider games. She’s an archaeologist who explores old ruins in teeny, tiny shorts and a tank top. This revisiting of an earlier episode of “Marketplace Tech” examines how the portrayal of women in video games has changed in recent years.