Fridge magnets are more than tacky souvenirs. They’re vessels for our memories. I was getting a glass of water at a friend-of-a-friend’s party when I noticed their fridge. Or rather, what was on it. Every single magnetized inch of it was covered in souvenir refrigerator magnets. They came from every continent and from many of the planet’s better-known islands, and they had…

What’s the deal with drones? At first glance, they’re basically glorified remote controlled airplanes with computers and cameras stuck to them: not exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect to quicken the blood or excite the soul of most normal human beings. …

I wrote something for the ICRC about drones, public trust, and why we can’t brute-force the public into being universally OK with the presence of little flying robots that are extremely hard to tell apart from one another. You can read it here. Ever since that mind-bendingly awful heat wave…

Using data to explain why some parts of the US are less cool than others. I currently live in New England, but I am not from New England. There’s a lot of things I find strange and inexplicable about the Frozen Northeast, but way up there at the top of the list? Almost no one has central air conditioning. I’ve long been annoyed by how…

I am a technology skeptic. Sometimes I think we really would have been better off if we had forgotten all about leaving the ocean, and had instead remained cheerful filter feeders at the bottom of a tropical sea. But I’ll admit to this: smartphones have made the American road trip…

There are better ways to spy on your family members — As if late 2020 wasn’t exhausting enough, Amazon has announced the Ring Always Home Cam, a flying camera drone for your house. It is sublimely dumb, a supposedly innovative tool that is neither innovative nor useful. It is a home-security device that can easily be defeated by a cat. …

Whether we like it or not — 2019 has been a distinctly dramatic year for Facebook. Since January, the social media behemoth has been hit with a $5 billion fine for privacy violations and remains embroiled in U.S. antitrust investigations. …

I have long been fascinated by why people are so disquieted by drones. While pretty much every one alive in 2019 experiences some degree of acute tech anxiety, drones, as a category of objects, still inspire an unusual amount of disquiet — much more so than, say, an iPhone. This…

We’ve probably all seen this image, which purports to show how knuckle-dragging chimpanzees turned inexorably into fully-evolved men who look just like Buff Abraham Lincoln. …