Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire
The rise, fall and stubborn survival of a teenage Internet celebrity who discovered that the real world can be a very scary place.
The rise, fall and stubborn survival of a teenage Internet celebrity who discovered that the real world can be a very scary place.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely Rolling Stone Apr 2011 25min Permalink
A profile of 14-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson.
Lizzie Widdicombe New Yorker Sep 2010 25min Permalink
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
Ashlee Vance Businessweek Apr 2011 Permalink
At times, Mr. Hsieh comes across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them.
A profile of the Zappos CEO.
Motoko Rich New York Times Apr 2011 10min Permalink
How and why Zappos works.
Alexandra Jacobs New Yorker Dec 2009 15min Permalink
An insider history of the fall of Myspace; from Rupert Murdoch calling Facebook a mere “communications utility” to the disastrous 2006 deal with Google that demanded huge pageviews and ads everywhere, and finally the present day ruins of a titan.
Yinka Adegoke Reuters Apr 2011 15min Permalink
A site for handcrafts flirts with an IPO.
Max Chafkin Inc. Apr 2011 20min Permalink
I love combing through The Atlantic’s archives. There’s almost no better way of grasping the strangeness of the past than to flip through a general interest magazine from 1960. Here, we find Fred Hapgood grappling with what human intelligence meant in the light of new machines that could do something like thinking. Intelligence was being explored in a new way: by finding out what was duplicable about how our minds work. Hapgood's conclusion was that if you could automate a task, it would lose value to humans. What tremendous luck! Humans value that which only humans can do, he argued, regardless of the difficulty of the task. And that because computers were so good at sequential logic problems, we'd eventually end up only respecting emotional understanding, which remained (and remains) beyond the reach of AI.
Fred Hapgood The Atlantic Aug 1974 30min Permalink
Steven Levy’s piece on cypherpunks and Internet libertarians could not feel more relevant in the wake of WikiLeaks’ rise and the heavily scrutinized role of online organizing in recent revolutions. During Wired’s first year, I’d just gotten an Internet account and had somehow stumbled on the magazine. It became my guide to this hybrid life that we all live now, half-online, half-offline.
Steven Levy Wired May 1993 30min Permalink
"I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both 'keep up' with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests."
An essay on technology’s reach into daily life.
Alice Gregory n+1 Nov 2010 10min Permalink
The closest thing that the international network of hackers Anonymous has to an organizer lives in a 378 sq. ft apartment in Dallas and, at the time of this interview, was on his fourth day of opiate withdrawal.
Tim Rogers D Magazine Jan 2012 30min Permalink
A story written about Twitter and one its founders, Evan Williams, when the company’s chief source of revenue was subletting desks in their partially filled office.
Max Chafkin Inc. Mar 2008 15min Permalink
An artifact from the era when MySpace was king.
James Verini Vanity Fair Mar 2006 20min Permalink
How smartphones are changing a continent.
J.M. Ledgard Intelligent Life Mar 2011 20min Permalink
A technical, thrilling account of how Pinboard, a tiny bookmarking service, dealt with the fire hose of new users after news leaked that Yahoo would discontinue Pinboard’s massive rival, Delicious.
Maciej Ceglowski Pinboard Blog Mar 2011 Permalink
“If 4chan sounds trivial, that’s because it is. The site certainly doesn’t make much money…In fact, you could say that 4chan has cornered the market on the trivial on the Internet, which is no small feat (the trivial usually spreads by accident on the Web, according to no logic).”
Vanessa Grigoriadis Vanity Fair Apr 2011 Permalink
The next frontier of search is… everything. Voice recognition, image recognition, and why Google’s data set is one of the most valuable scientific tools of our age.
Wade Roush Xconomy Jan 2011 30min Permalink
Inside the most ubiquitous distraction of its era.
Tom Cheshire Wired (UK) Apr 2011 20min Permalink
Thoughts on the current era of online anonymity.
Tess Lynch The Morning News Mar 2011 Permalink
The definitive story of a ubiquitous software. PowerPoint’s origins, its evolution, and its mind-boggling impact on corporate culture.
Ian Parker New Yorker May 2001 20min Permalink
A profile of Jack Dorsey, co-founder (and displaced CEO) of Twitter. Dorsey’s latest venture, a mobile credit card system called Square that only officially launched in February 2011, already processes more than a million transactions per day.
David Kirkpatrick Vanity Fair Apr 2011 Permalink
“While its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.”
Michael Joseph Gross Vanity Fair Apr 2011 30min Permalink
Best Article History Tech Media
The challenges facing the historians of the internet.
Ariel Bleicher IEEE Spectrum Mar 2011 15min Permalink
How a journalism professor named Dan Sinker became the most entertaining part of the Chicago mayoral race.
Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic Feb 2011 10min Permalink
Tackling the science of cooking, one perfect french fry at a time.
Mark McClusky Wired Mar 2011 20min Permalink