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…

When the Internet first arrived, we printed things more and more and more. Then something changed — Remember the “paperless office”? Back around the second world war, high-tech thinkers started predicting the demise of paper in white-collar workplaces. After all, if computers became ubiquitous and we all used “electronic mail”, then why would we need so many printed memos, letters, and reports? From the 50s up to…

Or, why “=SUM()” is the most common “hello, world” in history — Every once in a while, people wonder “what’s the most popular programming language on the planet?” If you check the recent surveys, usually they’ll say it’s Javascript or Python. But I always argue these surveys are off base. I maintain that if you wanted to find the place where the…

What it’s like when you’re a rocket nerd, an outer-space environmentalist, and opposed to Russia’s invasion — Russia’s recent disaster of a moon landing has prompted some curiously divided feelings in me. On the one hand, I’m super excited by the recent surge of moon missions. I was a young child in the mid-70s, when the Apollo moon landings were still ringing like a cultural bell; our…