In the spring of 1991, when I was a junior at Princeton, I took John McPhee’s seminar on nonfiction writing. Back then, I was an English major who hoped to become a novelist, and I focused primarily on writing short stories. I had no real interest in nonfiction. I hadn’t published a single word in…

Today, I’m talking with Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft and one of the company’s AI leaders. This is Kevin’s third time on Decoder, and he’s one of my favorite guests. He thinks a lot about the relationship between technology, art, and culture, and he’s unusually willing to…

As previewed earlier this month, Google today released the NotebookLM app for Android ahead of I/O 2025. This native experience starts on a homepage of your notebooks with filters at the top for Recent, Shared, Title, and Downloaded. The app features a light and dark mode based on your device’s…

Amber Scorah knows only too well that powerful stories can change society—and that powerful organizations will try to undermine those who tell them. In 2015, her 3-month-old son Karl died on his first day of day care. Heartbroken and furious that she hadn’t been with him, Scorah wrote an op-ed about…

The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was…

Merger mania FCC Chair Brendan Carr is letting ISPs merge—as long as they end DEI programs Verizon got FCC approval after ending DEI. Now Charter and Cox plan to merge. Jon Brodkin – May 19, 2025 1:20 pm | 26 Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr speaks during the 2024 Conservative…

This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand in March of this year. Over the course of…

Podcast Dept. For years, “Chapo Trap House” and other podcasts have paired anti-capitalist ideas with the rhetorical style of social media. Is a new form emerging? July 26, 2021 Two shows harness a progressive energy, but they differ sharply in affect.Illustration by Miguel Porlan On the evening of…

President Trump’s chaotic implementation of new tariffs has roiled markets and wrecked decades of international cooperation and free trade agreements. At the heart of these actions, and one of the motivating forces of his political movement, is the belief that the de-industrialization of the U.S.…

Words and Images: Joshua Holko www.jholko.com Backstory: I have been a full-time professional Nature and wildlife photographer for almost thirty years (www.jholko.com). I have specialised in Polar and sub-polar photography and have made over 100 expeditions to both the Arctic and Antarctic. I have…

May 16, 2025 Canon News Some news from the interweb of eager rumor mills. The Canon EOS R7 Mark II is in the spotlight (again). Canon’s once-glorious 7D line – the go-to for wildlife photographers who wanted a “diet 1D” – might be soon released in a new iteration as the EOS R7 Mark II. The rumor…

If you’ve ever stubbed your toe on a pile of outdated camera gear, you know the sting of clinging to equipment you never use. It’s like hoarding pizza boxes after the slices are gone—pointless and a bit embarrassing. Dust Bunnies and Gear Piles—A Love Story You Never Wanted We’ve all been there.…

Trump in the UAE last Friday. (Win McNamee/Getty) 🔌 🤖 💭 With corporate outlets obeying in advance, supporting independent political media is more important right now than ever. PN is possible thanks to paid subscribers. If you aren’t one already, please click the button below to sign up and support…

REVIEW ESSAY The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World by Zack Beauchamp PublicAffairs, 2024, 272 pages Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian Zone Books, 2025, 272 pages Following her defeat in the 2016…

May 16, 2025 Thoughts on thinking I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation…

Git is designed in part to enable experimentation. Once you know that your work is safely being tracked and safe states exist for you to fall back upon if something goes horribly wrong, you're not afraid to try new ideas. Part of the price of innovation, though, is that you're likely to make a mess…

Personalization is core to Android, and Material 3 Expressive — one of our biggest updates in years — is all about making your device feel unique to you. Material 3 Expressive gives you new ways to show your style and personality, delivers smooth interactions and surfaces glanceable, helpful…

Erik Baker , June 17, 2023 Daniel in the Lion’s Den On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg Daniel Ellsberg, speaking at a press conference in New York City, 1972. (Bernard Gotfryd) | Library of Congress Word Factory W o r d F a c t o r y Steven Spielberg’s film The Post begins with Daniel Ellsberg…

If Democrats want to understand why president-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House, a good place to start might be the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, hosted by two self-described leftist bros who, without mockery or tongue-in-cheek elitism, explore the complicated past and feverish present…

Last week, Databricks raised a massive $10 billion Series J, during which they also disclosed some high level financials of their business. This, coupled with Snowflake being public, gives us the opportunity to compare the financials of these two, as I’m sure every growth fund that looked at the…

It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people. Last year we announced HDR or "High Dynamic Range" photography was coming to our popular photography app, Halide. While most customers celebrated, some were confused, and others showed downright concern. That's because HDR can mean two different, but…

You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all fired. But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts? Let’s say, where’s…

Last week, the CPython developers rolled out CPython 3.14.0b1. This week, PyCon 2025 kicks off in Pittsburgh, PA. Both events mark a significant milestone for the effort to ship and stabilize free-threaded Python. This is the story of the first year of that effort and how our team at Quansight…

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Last summer, as political debate swirled over the future of Georgia’s experiment with Medicaid work requirements,…

The Spring of 1988 In the spring of 1988, Alan Cooper sat in front of a computer in a large boardroom at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, patiently waiting for Bill Gates to arrive. At the time, Cooper's main business was writing desktop application software to sell to publishers.…

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched. Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the…

Meagan Day Here at Jacobin, we make a major point to uncover the class basis of politics. Yet I can’t bring myself to say outright that the 2024 general election was solely “about economics,” if the implication is that people were just voting to get rid of inflation. To me, it seems obvious that…

When I played around with the technology that would eventually become OnlineOrNot back in 2021, a quick search showed me that there were 200 listed alternatives to the tool I wanted to replace. I thought most of them sucked. There are even more today. Over the years, many more started and shut down…

Trail of Bits has collaborated with PyPI for several years to add features and improve security defaults across the Python packaging ecosystem. Our previous posts have focused on features like digital attestations and Trusted Publishing, but today we’ll look at a equally critical aspect of holistic…

Git is designed in part to enable experimentation. Once you know that your work is safely being tracked and safe states exist for you to fall back upon if something goes horribly wrong, you're not afraid to try new ideas. Part of the price of innovation, though, is that you're likely to make a mess…

Estimating the completion time of tasks is important work. It’s also something that brings great anguish to a lot of engineers and software developers, and causes significant friction between dev teams, management, other departments, and customers. This is because almost everybody is still talking…

13 May, 2025 While recently traveling to the U.S., I was completely locked out of my TD Personal Banking account. TD relies heavily on SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) for customer logins. I had, quite reasonably, disabled my Canadian SIM to avoid the usual price gouging and roaming…

By Juraci Paixão Kröhling (OllyGarden) | Thursday, April 03, 2025 OpenTelemetry (OTel) is often touted as the future of observability, promising vendor neutrality and comprehensive data collection. But what’s the reality for those who use it daily? We sat down with several engineers and SREs to get…

The appeal of "vibe coding" — where programmers lean back and prompt their way through an entire project with AI — appears partly to be based on the fact that so many development environments are deeply unpleasant to work with. So it's no wonder that all these programmers stuck working with…

As the population of older Americans balloons, the financial costs associated with aging are, too. Many millennials and Gen Xers are facing a stark reality: their parents and grandparents don’t have the means to pay for long-term care — and they’ll need to help foot the bill, especially since…

If a hall of fame were established for contemporary book reviewers—well, why not? There’s one for ad executives, poker players, and probably porn stars—Christopher Hitchens would very likely be its second inductee. (James Wood, of course, would be the first.) About an amazing range of literary and…