Rough Drafts

Kevin Kelly paints a disturbing vision of the next 30 years: A world governed by alien AIs, with screens on every surface, crowdsourced advertisements and influencer marketing campaigns assaulting us from all directions, and overwhelming flows of ephemeral data and “facts” making it impossible to ju

Narrative specificity means avoiding generalizations and using details to make your story come to life. Leave it out, and your words will be hollow and dead, like empty snail shells strewn across the dirt. It’s not surprising that many writers miss this point, particularly in politics and business.

Yesterday I realized a dream I’ve had ever since I started open water swimming around 2010. I swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco. It’s about 1.25 miles though we covered a bit more water than that due to fighting the current a little. In all, it took me one hour and 13 minutes in pretty […]

So Gizmodo publishes a story whose headline reads “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” and the Internet goes predictably apeshit. There’s just one problem: The story doesn’t deliver what the headline promises.

The breaststroke has a faint sense of femininity attached to it these days. There’s the name, of course: Anything beginning with “breast” seems inevitably female, at least a little bit. But it’s also a slower stroke than the crawl, otherwise known as freestyle. You could use the breaststroke in a fr

The media is in a state of upheaval. 2015 was a stormy year, and signs indicate that 2016 will be even more turbulent. Last month brought the news that Al Jazeera America will shut down, that Facebook multimillionaire Chris Hughes is throwing in the towel on his ill-fated attempt to bring the New Re

Sometimes we get just what we deserve. This week the news hit that Wired is about to start offering an ad-free edition of its website for a reasonable subscription fee. For $3.99 you get access to a version of the website that shows no ads at all. That’s a pretty reasonable-sounding $1 per week, whi

Using Facebook can make you depressed, according to a survey of some relevant social-science research. But the same research suggests three ways to hack your mind-Facebook interface.