Author: Taylor Lowery

The indicators are easy to overlook if you’re not looking for them when you stroll around the open floor plan of a mid-size tech company on a Tuesday morning. The status updates on the project management board on the wall were created overnight by a system that examined the code commits from the day before, found a dependency problem, and reallocated three tickets before anyone got to their workstation. These entries were not written by a human. A tool that listened in on the call, extracted the action items, and sent them to the appropriate parties without being asked wrote…

There are labs deep within Apple’s Cupertino campus that are rarely seen by journalists and that the firm does not publicly discuss. These labs are located beyond the visiting areas, the product display halls, and the cafeterias that smell of whatever the engineers are eating at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Apple folklore describes the durability laboratories as spaces where iPhones are dropped thousands of times from exact heights onto perfectly calibrated surfaces until someone is happy that the number is high enough. Though maybe more significant, the battery labs are less well-known. What transpires within them will ultimately reveal…

Locate a genuine antique arcade cabinet with a monitor placed into a wooden housing, a control panel polished by ten years of use, and artwork along the sides faded to a sort of nostalgic pastel, then hit start. Flat sprites, two or three frames of walk motion, and an adversary approaching from the right with a predictable telegraph fill the screen. Punch, kick, and go forward. It was never difficult. It was never an attempt. The beat-em-up genre was based on a loop that is so fundamental that it hardly counts as game design in the contemporary sense: keep moving,…

Virgin Galactic spent years getting ready to send paying passengers to the edge of space and back at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, a structure that resembles a cross between an airport terminal and a movie set, situated on a level expanse of scrubland beneath an immense sky. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were sold for tickets. They signed waivers. Customers reportedly received a large number of legal documents before to boarding. Beneath those documents was a question that no one in the fields of international aviation or space law has yet to provide a legally enforceable response…

You begin to see them when you drive out toward Prince William County, Virginia, beyond the strip malls, commuter subdivisions, and the area where the landscaping gives way to cleared flat ground. On a peaceful morning, the buzz of industrial cooling units operating in rows outside the walls of enormous low grey buildings set back from the road could be heard from a hundred yards away. The structures were ringed by security fence. Data centers are what these are. As it happens, Northern Virginia has more of them than any other place in the world, and more are being constructed.…

At one point, perhaps two hours into Pokémon Pokopia, the game makes clear what it is and what it aims to be. A Bulbasaur travels in from the tree line, sniffs around, and chooses to stay in the tiny clearing you’ve created along a river. It has a few wooden platforms, some tall grass scattered at the boundaries, and a water feature made of blocks the Ditto protagonist learned to install after making friends with a Psyduck. No conflict. Not a Poké Ball. The wobbly animation that has characterized this franchise for thirty years is absent from the catch screen.…

Most homes have a drawer with charging cords inside that is difficult to close due to the contents. They come in a variety of colors, including black, white, USB-C, and old Micro-USB ends. At least one of them has a frayed jacket close to the connector due to repeated bending at the incorrect angle. Every new phone comes with a charging cable, every hotel room has the wrong sort, and every airport has someone crouched close to a floor outlet with their luggage obstructing a way. Despite this, charging cables are possibly the most commonplace and generally hated component in…

Imagine a physical loan officer’s desk in 1962, with a map of the city tacked to the wall behind it, some neighborhoods marked in red marker, and the implicit knowledge that applications from those areas would not be accepted, regardless of the applicant’s financial situation. Redlining was eventually outlawed. It is regarded as one of the most significant and intentional instances of housing discrimination in American history, a methodical way to keep Black families from accumulating wealth for future generations through homeownership. It was intended to be abolished by the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.…

One of the most bizarre intelligence coups in recent memory was quietly hailed by law enforcement organizations worldwide in 2021. Under the pretense that the phones provided true end-to-end protection, the FBI had been running a phony encrypted phone platform dubbed ANOM for a number of years, distributing the devices through criminal networks. They didn’t. All communications went via FBI servers. By the time the operation came to an end, it had resulted in arrests in over a dozen nations and the seizure of cash, guns, and drugs in amounts that made headlines for weeks. Practically speaking, the operation was…

Watch what happens when you sit in any university library, the kind with long wooden tables, the soft hum of air conditioning, and a sign near the entrance telling students to turn off their phones. Nearly every table will have someone pick up their phone within ten minutes, unlock it, take a quick look, and then put it back down. Sometimes they don’t seem to read anything at all. The gesture has become so reflexive that the person performing it frequently doesn’t seem to be aware of the decision they just made, which is part of what makes it intriguing.…