Earlier this year, Carla Engelbrecht flew to Phoenix, sat on the couch in a stranger's living room, and observed the stranger watching—or possibly playing or experiencing—a movie-length installment of Black Mirror. In the film, called Bandersnatch, a young English programmer named Stefan tries to adapt a nonlinear fantasy novel into a nonlinear videogame, and the…

Pay attention to the structure. That's one of the first things they teach you when you start writing for television. If you want to tell a decent story, you have to be sure of its shape. You have to be deft and dexterous enough to thread together all the “beats” of the narrative, weaving character…

On Sunday, June 9, The New York Times published its 25,415th daily crossword since the newspaper debuted its first in 1942. Times puzzle editor Will Shortz mentioned that this particular crossword had been in the works for more than a decade—but as the puzzle-obsessed internet immediately pointed out, it could have been much longer. The…

The last week of internet madness started, of course, with the death of Jeffrey Epstein, and the numerous resultant conspiracy theories that followed—including one shared on Twitter by the President of the United States. Of course, it didn't help that Epstein was removed from suicide watch for mysterious reasons before his death, or that two…

The deep recesses of the number line are not as forbidding as they might seem. That’s one consequence of a major new proof about how complicated numbers yield to simple approximations.Quanta MagazineAboutOriginal story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of…

Uncork Capital, the now 15-year-old, early-stage venture firm formerly known as SoftTech VC, has closed up two new pools of committed capital totaling $200 million: $100 million for its sixth…

Minecraft is getting a free update that brings much-improved lighting and color to the game’s blocky graphics using real-time ray tracing running on Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics hardware. The new…

Disrupt Berlin 2019, our premier European tech conference, takes place on 11-12 December and draws 3,000 people from more than 50 countries. Every year we work hard to improve our…

Want to give your kids access to Spotify, but only the “clean” stuff? It’ll be an option soon. Spotify’s family plan — the one that gets you six accounts for…

WeTransfer, the Amsterdam-headquartered company that is best know for its file-sharing service, is disclosing a €35 million secondary funding round. The investment is led by European growth equity firm, HPE…