For Dweb Digest I wrote a short profile of the archivist Rick Prelinger, and his work to create decentralized copies of vast tranches of archival data alongside his friends and partners at the Internet Archive. It was a lot of fun driving over to their East Bay warehouse and sitting down to talk to him and his team about how they find, clean, capture and share vast amounts of video taken from almost anywhere you […]
December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen. David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway. I was particularly taken by the […]
This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]
I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today about my extreme distaste for Sora, the new social video app from OpenAI that was built to create and share fake videos. “At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever […]
Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience! But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam. (See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.) I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job […]
For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve […]
Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic. On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined. It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in […]
If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the […]
The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November. The news meant landed a little different for […]
Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal. You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret. The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a […]
Start here 