Tag: New Yorker
Higher Calling: Raising the Minimum Wage
In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen...
Why Smart People Are Stupid
Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball....
Can Humans Fall in Love with Bots?
A common first encounter with Siri, Apple’s virtual-assistant program: you lob her some easy questions and, satisfied with her replies, toss her requests of...
Inside Google’s Driverless Car
Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They...
Valuing the Free Digital Economy
Twitter’s recent I.P.O. bonanza gave us all some striking numbers to consider. There’s the company’s valuation: an astounding twenty-four billion dollars. And its revenue:...
Who Gained From Twitter’s Underpriced I.P.O.?
Here is a list of companies that were worth less than Twitter’s twenty billion dollars, as of Friday afternoon: Macy’s, the department-store chain; Adidas,...
The N.S.A. and Obama: Who Watches the Watchers?
The news that the National Security Agency was monitoring the telephones of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many other foreign leaders is less...
The Assassination of J.F.K., Fifty Years Later
Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lucky for us, but they can be worldly judges of poetic legislators. Lincoln’s soul survives...
The Real Guide to Using Twitter
Twitter is a platform that brings together millions of people to read and spread breaking news, to flirt with celebrities, to interact with brands,...
The Psychology of Online Comments: Your Thoughts?
Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments,...
