Michael Nguyen, once a a tailor to the stars, is the founder of Longevity House, an exclusive club where the ultra-wealthy are dipping into high-tech ways to prolong their lives. There’s the BioCharger, a device that fights chronic disease and other ailments, a red-light therapy room, experimental fecal transplants, and access to various specialists, from […]
Technology
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The Twisted Life of Clippy
In the 1990s, Microsoft created a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office that users found annoying — so it was swiftly retired. For Seattle Met, Benjamin Cassidy recounts the history of an unloved and doomed office assistant that has lived on in pop and nerd culture. These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable […]
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Care Tactics
In an ableist world, health care systems and tech innovators are more invested in high-tech solutions and shiny objects that don’t consider disabled folks’ actual needs during the design process. Many in the disability and caregiving communities rely on their own creative hacks instead, leaning on a culture of collaboration and shared knowledge to make […]
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The Great Fiction of AI
Can artificial intelligence write novels? Josh Dzieza looks at how independent authors have begun to experiment with AI writing programs like Sudowrite and Jasper to write their stories faster. The piece explores questions around ethics and authorship, and its design is A+. It requires a strange degree of sympathy with the machine, thinking about the […]
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The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach
After a year of loss and grief, Madison Marquer signed up to lead a team of gamers at a community college in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Brendan I. Koerner chronicles the journey. By early 2021, Walsh had gathered ample evidence to prove that esports could bring in as many as 20 student-athletes per year and boost the […]
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‘I Felt Like I Was a Prisoner’: The Rapid Rise of US Immigration Authorities’ Electronic Surveillance Programs
Across the U.S., an electronic surveillance system, built on ankle monitors and voice- and face-recognition technology, is tracking an increasing number of asylum seekers and people seeking permanent residency in the country. For many, it feels like they never left prison. ICE spokespeople and officials at the Department of Homeland Security espouse the technology-driven approach […]
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The Man Who Controls Computers With His Mind
After an accident in 2006, Dennis DeGray became paralyzed from the collarbones down. Eager to participate in experimental research in the area of brain-computer interfaces, DeGray has electrode arrays embedded in his cortex, and is one of a few dozen people in the world who can control various forms of technology with his thoughts. If […]
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Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution
I know, I know: another story set at a gathering of brotastic crypto-utopians. But this one is no scene piece. Instead, it manages to stake out a thoughtful middle ground between the wonkiness of a blockchain white paper and the rolled eyes of “Web3 Is Going Just Great” — smart, incisive, and informative enough for […]
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‘Where the Bats Hung Out’: How a Basement Hideaway at UC Berkeley Nurtured a Generation of Blind Innovators
For decades, an underground hideaway at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library — better known as “The Cave” — gave rise to a generation of blind leaders, including Joshua Miele, a MacArthur genius grant winner who now builds adaptive technologies at Amazon. The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically — tricks for surviving Berkeley were as […]
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Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
The weirder things get in the world, the easier it is to believe that what we know as reality is in fact happening within the confines of some sort of program. Physicists, despite their love of ideas like quantum entanglement, tend not to agree. But in this shaggy, personable essay, Jason Kehe — under the […]