Instapaper

The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them

Rachel Feltman: Hey listeners, it’s Rachel here. Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to acknowledge our unexplained absence from your feed over the last few weeks. To make a long story short, Scientific American was sold to a new parent company in June, which caught our team by…

3 days ago

I’m Jimothy, the Short-Spined Raccoon Who Has Taken the Internet by Storm, and the Collective Weight of Your Adoration Is Breaking My Already-Compromised Back

Kirk McElhearn, back in February: I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you still get…

3 days ago

mcsweeneys.net

“A video just a few seconds long and accompanied by a simple question, ‘What am I looking at?’ was enough to turn a Seattle raccoon into a global internet sensation this week. The viral critter—dubbed ‘Jimothy’ by the internet—has a shorter spine than the average raccoon. His unusual appearance is…

5 days ago

How I went from an e-bike hater to a believer

theverge.com

A wise person once observed that cycling in my neighborhood in Seattle is like going uphill both ways. It’s the absolute truth. My house? On a hill. The business district I want to get to? On a different hill. The route to the coffee shop? Hills galore. And inevitably, as I’d grind through another…

1 week ago

Mornings in Cupertino Have the Aroma of Napalm Once Again

We finally know the name of a Maya mathematician

‘It Seems You Have a Different Policy’ Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update Tuesday: I got a fun email from former Apple executive, Nest founder, and one-time Stratechery Interview subject Tony Fadell in response to yesterday’s Update about Apple suing OpenAI (published with…

1 week ago

Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s.

The math world just got a new genius—a prodigy who announced himself by affixing his name to his signature feat of numerical prowess. But he won’t be winning any awards—he died more than 1,000 years ago in the Maya empire that once flourished in Mesoamerica. We’ve long known that the Maya did math.…

2 weeks ago

nytimes.com

Hundreds of berry breeds are raised and tested each year at the company’s main test plot in Northern California.Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times The California giant has helped turn a local, seasonal treat into a worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut. Hundreds of…

2 weeks ago

First Look: iOS 27 Public Beta

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not…

2 weeks ago

theatlantic.com

Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The…

2 weeks ago

First Look: macOS Golden Gate Public Beta

Balcony solar is all the rage in Germany. Why not in the US?

Let’s just get this out of the way: I liked macOS 26 Tahoe. I liked it because it marked the first time in years where Apple seemed to embrace the fact that Mac users deserve productivity improvements, not just syncing up with whatever (often useful, yes) new features were being introduced to iOS. I…

2 weeks ago

canarymedia.com

Balcony solar is all the rage in Germany. Why not in the US? A new Utah law promoting balcony solar reveals the challenges of making the clean-energy tech mesh with the U.S. grid. By Akielly Hu 1 May 2025 Link copied to clipboard (Felix Kästle/picture alliance via Getty Images and Grist) This story…

3 weeks ago

John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope

Apple Should Eliminate the App Icon ‘Squircle Jail’

In September 2014, in the wake of a series of hacks that stole private photos from the iCloud accounts of multiple celebrities, Tim Cook wrote an open letter to customers that was published at apple.com/privacy. Apple seemingly no longer hosts a copy of the letter. (That tends to happen to memorable…

3 weeks ago

Consistency, But in Excellence Not Appearance

Paul Kafasis, in a post at Rogue Amoeba’s blog titled “Free the Icons”: Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it.…

3 weeks ago

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled…

4 weeks ago

“Icons that are iconic” – Unsung

unsung.aresluna.org

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem. On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness;…

4 weeks ago

Review: The D Line's stunning interiors leave its barren street-level plazas wanting

latimes.com

The Westside subway extension has long been L.A.’s most stubborn urban fantasy: an infrastructural mirage chugging toward the sea, and then, with less sex appeal, Westwood. Stalled since the ’80s, the first western leap of the elusive project is now real. And in the month or so since the Metro D…

5 weeks ago

Apple’s eras keep changing, and so do mine

MacOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons From Menu Items

My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release…

1 month ago

Alright folks, I finally read 'Abundance'

Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in platforms like Google…

Jun 11, 2026

climatecoloredgoggles.com

Wind turbines in the San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, seen in 2023. (Photo by Spiglanin) Confession time: Until last month, I hadn’t read “Abundance.” The 2025 book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has divided progressives with its provocative argument that environmental regulations are stifling…

May 27, 2026

Democrats Who Are Soft on Republicans Have Got to Go

nytimes.com

Newsletter Jamelle Bouie May 9, 2026 Credit...Nadiya Nacorda for The New York Times See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie…

May 27, 2026

Everyone Thinks Trump Won Last Night. They're Wrong

messageboxnews.com

Trump ran on a platform of lowering costs, securing the border, and cracking down on immigration. But after a year and a half, it’s clear that’s not really why Trump ran for a return to the White House. We know he doesn’t give two shits about lowering costs. He says “affordability” is bullshit and…

May 20, 2026

A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience | Quanta Magazine

quantamagazine.org

neuroscience A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience April 24, 2026 “Neurons that fire together, wire together” is not the full story. A novel mechanism explains how the brain can learn across longer timescales. Read Later The brain stays incredibly plastic…

May 18, 2026

Exclusive: Nithya Raman reveals her climate plan

climatecoloredgoggles.com

Programming note: Yesterday, I published an exclusive story about Los Angeles firing its chief heat officer — the latest confounding move by Mayor Karen Bass. Today, I’m publishing an interview with Nithya Raman, one of the candidates to replace Bass. My story includes an exclusive first look at…

May 15, 2026

35 years ago, the Mac got an era-defining upgrade

The rising cost of fertilizer and fuel prices is pushing some farmers to the brink

Multitasking! Aliases! File sharing! System 7 had it all. A lot of Mac users don’t remember a time before Mac OS X (or macOS, or OS X, depending on the era), but before OS X arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us from the…

May 13, 2026

npr.org

Sledge Taylor, 73, walks his corn fields just outside Como, Miss. on Friday, April 17, 2026. The corn stalks are currently between vegetative stages known as V3 and V5, normally when Taylor would be applying nitrogen fertilizer. But he said he may not do it this year because of the cost of…

Apr 30, 2026

That was Tim, this is Ternus: Some first thoughts on Apple’s CEO transition

The New York Times Printed the Wrong Crossword Grid Last Sunday, and I Find That Timing Serendipitous

Tim Cook didn’t get to be a part of a “thoughtful, long-term succession plan” in 2011. After stepping in for Steve Jobs multiple times during the Apple co-founder’s fight with cancer, Cook became CEO, and Jobs became executive chairman just 43 days before Jobs died. Apple didn’t dictate the…

Apr 27, 2026

My First 700-Mile EV Road Trip—What Worked and What I’d Change - TidBITS

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago: Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle…

Apr 26, 2026

tidbits.com

As I wrote in “Living with Digital Key 2 on the Hyundai IONIQ 5” (6 April 2026), I recently took my first long trip in an electric car. While I’m still far from an expert, I learned a lot and am looking forward to our next trip in June. For this trip, I drove from Ithaca down to Arlington, VA, near…

Apr 26, 2026

Why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive mass extinction

Songbirds reveal the dark side of making new brain cells as adults

On the final day of the Cretaceous period, some 66 million years ago, Earth was teeming with a dazzling variety of dinosaurs. In North America, the superpredator Tyrannosaurus rex stalked its favorite prey, the three-horned Triceratops. In Asia, agile raptors eyed herds of duck-billed and armored…

Apr 25, 2026