Business / Tech Culture

Katie Drummond: Fascinating. Well, we're going to take a short break. When we come back, we're going to pick up where we left off and talk about how concerned Americans actually should be about their privacy and about DOGE accessing their…

We check with everybody to see if we have their consent, from every part of their body, to receive medicine. Then our medical doctor and registered nurse distribute the medicine through a shot—it’s all intramuscular.If it’s your first time…

When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at…

Leah Feiger: And so many have been. Absolutely.Katie Drummond: So many have been, so my answer has been this will go through court and it will churn through the legal system, and it will be slow and messy and painful, but that is what the…

Lauren Goode: I also think if there is a bright spot, it's probably going to be some of the apps that are very specific for people that help people winnow down what they're looking for and find someone who is aligned with what they want,…

Unlike the Fleshlight, which is flamboyantly anatomical in design—some versions are even molded to resemble the crotches of individual porn stars—the eggs are downright discreet. “It looks like a fun tech product, even though it’s not that…

What a great idea I had for the first Plaintext of 2025. After following the frantic competition between OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic to churn out brainier and deeper “frontier” foundation models, I settled on a thesis about what’s…

Zoë Schiffer: Booktok got me fully immersed in the romantasy world. Now I'm incapable of reading normal literature. Thank you.Lauren Goode: I'm going to assume that romantasy is romance and fantasy?Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yes it is. Dragons.…

For 25 years, Chris Anderson has been the maestro of wit, wisdom, and, sometimes, gooey blather that is TED. Since he took over the reins of the small but influential annual conference of “technology, entertainment and design” in 2000, he’s…

It’s been just over a week since DeepSeek upended the AI world. The introduction of its open-weight model—apparently trained on a fraction of the specialized computing chips that power industry leaders—set off shock waves inside OpenAI. Not…