perception

Deep doubt impacts more than just current events and legal issues. In 2020, I wrote about a potential “cultural singularity,” a threshold where truth and fiction in media become indistinguishable. A key part of the threshold is the level of…

When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses.That vision is now…

As if he didn’t have enough to deal with amid his beef with Kendrick Lamar (or perhaps to distract from it), Drake showed up on a remix of parody rapper Snowd4y’s cover of Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah,” called “Wah Gwan Delilah,” that…

Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks…

In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content…

On May 29, 2007, journals and communities began disappearing from LiveJournal. The missing journals and groups went unclickable, mute, struck through with a single-line font effect. To a banhammer, every query looks like a nail: depictions…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous…

Public perception of psychological operations soured in a big way in the mid-1970s, when details of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program were first released, detailing a plot—more based in science fiction than science—to brainwash subjects using…

Still, I.S.S. has landed at an awkward time for the actual ISS. Russia and the US are far from a nuclear conflict, but they are on opposite sides of a brutal war in Ukraine that’s gone on for nearly two years and resulted in hundreds of…

While Netflix is busy pumping out more shows than any one person could watch (probably), Amazon Prime Video has remained the place to go for a few of the best shows around. Trouble is, navigating the service’s labyrinthine menus can make…