Hollywood and tech firms want to reduce culture to a slurry of interchangeable bits. Let’s not help them out — I remember the first time I started hearing the word “content”. It was back in the late 1990s, during the delirious height of the “dot com” boom. Corporations were rolling out web sites, the hawt digital technology of the day. These companies all wanted their web-sites to be “sticky” —…

The advent of AI deepfakes means we’ll waste endless hours arguing about what’s real — Back in 2019, the legal scholars Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney defined a useful concept: The “liar’s dividend”. They were worried about how deepfakes could create political chaos. Tools for producing realistic-but-fake video and audio were becoming cheaper and cheaper. Anyone who wanted to throw an election by making fake…

They boost literacy, kickstart foreign film, and improve comprehension — So: Subtitles are hot now! You likely knew this already; you may well use them yourself. But this is a big shift from TV- and movie-viewing when I was young. Back in the 80s, watching video with subtitles was considered extremely weird. …

People who describe how they solved a problem make the Internet a better place — The other day, I was doing some audio-editing on my Mac using Logic Pro — but I kept getting maddening errors. Sound would play for a few seconds, then stutter; then the whole software would grind to a halt. A popup error-box would say “The last selected audio interface is…

I didn’t — and now I have the tinnitus to show for it — It was last summer — June of 2022 — when I first heard the high-pitched ringing. I was lying in bed, trying to sleep. I’d spent about half an hour reading a book to chill myself out, and I could feel myself drifting off, when I realized: Huh. …

American lawns waste water, kill biodiversity, and generate huge amounts of pollution. It’s time to rewild them — I understand why Americans love their lawns. They can be mesmerizingly pretty. When you behold a huge spread of lawn mowed into perfect cross-hatching — the sun casting microshadows that accentuate the checkerboard pattern — you are looking at a type of artwork: Nature transformed by pure geometry. It’s like…

It’s a big driver — pun intended — of why housing is so hard to build — In his terrific new book Paved Paradise, Henry Grabar opens by telling the story of an affordable-housing project that was derailed … … by parking. Back in 1999, Solana Beach — a small beachside town near San Diego — set aside a parking lot to be turned into an apartment…

When literature lives inside your head, it shapes the fabric of your thought — Back in the early 2010s, as we began staring at smartphones all the time, people began worrying that all these digital thingamabobs would ruin our memory. If you could look something up instantly, maybe our brains would rot. We wouldn’t be able to remember anything, even if we tried! I…

Whether you’ve completed an Iron Man triathlon or barely managed three push-ups, Strava users will mash the “kudos” button for you — The ills of social media are well known by now. You’ve got sociopathic big-tech algorithms ceaselessly scrounging for hot-button posts that rile the masses. You’ve got doomscrolling. You’ve got trolling and dogpiling and entirely new bespoke forms of coordinated harassment being A/B tested as we speak. You’ve got Nazis, literal…