Tag Archives: tech-culture

Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing. Barroso, a 22-year veteran …

TenochtitlÁn has been rebuilt, or at least a 3D version of it has, and the fascinating work has quickly gone viral. Digital artist Thomas Kole, originally from Amersfoort, Netherlands, has re-created the capital of the Aztec, or Mexica, empire with so much detail that it looks like a living metropolis. …

I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s mega-bestseller Steve Jobs. I’m sure somewhere else in the office are covers representing his other subjects—Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, …

At the end of July, entrepreneurs Nils Paar and Gino Taselaar flew to Portugal for Boom, a seven-day festival that bills itself as a “psychedelic global gathering of music, arts, culture and hands-on sustainability.” Both began experimenting with psychedelics in their early twenties, and had attended the biennial event several …

Mina Hsiang returned to the United States Digital Service, the US government's rapid digital fix-it squad, on January 26, 2021, when the streets of Washington, DC, had hardly been cleared after Joe Biden’s inauguration. She was one of the group’s founding members but had spent the past few years working …

The dating scene in Los Angeles is tough. Doubly so if you’re not fresh out of college. That’s what Evelyn found when a relationship of two decades came to an abrupt end last year, casting her back into the dating pool at 50. “All the beautiful twentysomethings are here trying …

Many bosses have demanded, requested, or wheedled their staff to return to the office over the past year, often to minimal effect. The CEO of LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr delivered an abrupt return-to-office ultimatum—and gutted the company’s staff. Last month, Grindr gave its all-remote staff two weeks to pledge to …

A place at an Indian Institute of Technology is a golden ticket. There are 23 IITs across India, the country’s most elite technology training institutions: a production line for CEOs. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Flipkart’s founder Sachin Bansal are among their alumni. So are Infosys founder N. R. Narayana …

When Patricia Moore was 26, she looked in the mirror and saw an 85-year-old woman. Crow’s feet clustered at her eyes, her back hunched, and silver hair gathered around her face. Another person might be horrified. Moore held a hand to her cheek, astonished and thrilled at the transformation. Back …

Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the words of Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, or David Foster Wallace do. Yes they can make music. But Taylor …