Filling a water bottle at a public fountain is a pain. It never fits, so you have to tilt your bottle sideways—which makes it even harder to get the water into the narrow mouth. But there are new fixtures that solve this problem; you might have seen them in office buildings or airports. Along with…
Alexa, Siri, Watson, and their talking AI siblings serve to make our lives easier, but they also reinforce gender stereotypes. Polite, subservient digital secretaries like Alexa and Siri are presented as female. Assertive, all-knowing Jeopardy! champion Watson is most often referred to as “he.” New generations of AI are coming that will make this problem…
What is the internet if not a place for poor unfortunate souls to turn when they don’t know who they are? Astrology memes have risen in popularity because people like it very much when someone boils down their entire being into highly specific, yet extremely broad, character traits. (The Co-Star app proves folks like their…
First, they came for headphone jacks. Buttons are next.Last week at CES 2020, two companies showed off prototype smartphone designs with no physical buttons. Imagine it: a phone with no dedicated controls to change the volume or toggle the power. Yet if you tapped certain areas on the edges of the seamless screen, the phone…
Two days ago, I finally gave up Windows 7. I don't dislike Windows 10, but there's just always been something special about Windows 7. It was svelte. It actually ran faster and took up less hard drive space than its predecessor, the much-maligned Windows Vista. It looked great. We Windows users could finally hold our…
After nine Star Wars movies, two Star Wars stories, and countless TV show episodes, The Mandalorian has finally given us something utterly priceless. No, not Baby Yoda—although, yes, I would die for that damn thing. I refer to the Mandalorian himself: a protagonist who finally understands military tactics.He’s an expert at cover and concealment. He…
If you resolved to watch more presidential debates in 2020, first, are you sure there's nothing else in your life you need to work on? And second, it's time to walk the walk.The seventh Democratic debate gets underway Tuesday, January 14 at 9 pm EST (6 pm Pacific). It's the last time candidates will meet…
Hello, and welcome to The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. The big news of the day is, of course, the Oscar nominations, but there’s more than that. Let’s get started.Joker and The Irishman Top the Oscar NominationsDespite the anticipation they drum up, the Oscars are nothing if not predictable. (Seriously, predicting who will be nominated…
Google today announced its plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The fact that Google will drop support for these cookies, which…
U.S. consumers have shown strong interest in Disney’s new family-friendly streaming service, Disney+, according to new data from Sensor Tower, which focused app trends in the final quarter of 2019.…
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