History

Before being fired five days into her stint as White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia spent much of the day attempting to explain her past.Throughout her brief tenure, Zacharia’s résumé was the source of much intrigue. Foremost was the…

Reece Rogers: Not hard at all. Not hard in the least. Our features director, Reyhan, was in the office recently and asked if she could see them, and she was a bit shocked. So I feel like we'll leave it at that. But it was not some kind of…

“i’m willing to believe that is more deliberately aestheticized among young women on tumblr,” says adam aleksic, an internet linguist who goes by etymologynerd, “but none of the mega online communities use regular punctuation.” he and i…

The piece appeared in a remarkable anthology from 1996, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, published by Seal Press, a sort of consciousness-raising meeting in book form. One of the anthology’s editors, Elizabeth Reba…

Welcome to Kernel Panic!, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up here.Meta’s new personal assistant,…

Yesterday, I spent the morning at OpenAI’s annual DevDay, where over 2,500 nerds discussed building software and marveled at the latest artificial intelligence models. The biggest reveal of the day was Dots, the company’s new, always-on…

Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of humanlike thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the…

Here’s a fun history lesson for you. Don’t worry, we’ll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had…

What I came to understand is that the only people crazy enough to deploy or release a biological weapon into the community, knowing full well that the blowback would be extraordinary and would create a pandemic around the world, would be…

Meta’s Muse mascot is named Jolly. It's an adorable, cuddly representation of Meta’s AI agent that you can dress however you want—like a doll. At the company’s recent Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s furry Muse donned a toga and…