How to Watch Donald Trump’s Impeachment Trial

Impeachment trials are a rarity in the great American experiment: President Donald Trump’s is only the third to take place in over 200 years of US history. If you want to witness this historic event yourself, get ready to hunker down and check your local listings this week—especially given that Mitch, McConnell, the Senate majority…

Continue Reading How to Watch Donald Trump’s Impeachment Trial

The 7 Best Messenger Bags: Peak Design, Mission Workshop, and More

I love shoulder bags, from full-on messenger bags to smaller sling packs. Backpacks are better for heavy loads or all-day trekking, but for lightweight everyday needs, nothing beats a bag I can sling over my shoulder or across my body.Why? With a shoulder bag, everything I need is easily accessible and within easy reach. I…

Continue Reading The 7 Best Messenger Bags: Peak Design, Mission Workshop, and More

Sonos Will Soon End Software Support for Its Older Speakers

Wireless speaker company Sonos has long boasted about making products built to last, despite fast-evolving technology standards that sometimes render connected devices obsolete. Now, the Santa Barbara, California-based device maker has to abandon some of its older products.Four of Sonos’s products are losing software support starting this May. These are some of the company's most…

Continue Reading Sonos Will Soon End Software Support for Its Older Speakers

Maps Are Biased Against Animals

Type Serengeti into Google Maps. The screen immediately zooms in on a large light-green section of northern Tanzania, displaying a few man-made roads and a red border. The birds’-eye-view graphics identify the mile markers, topography, and glamping accommodations of the iconic Serengeti National Park with remarkable precision. But a crucial element is missing. In such…

Continue Reading Maps Are Biased Against Animals

The Macabre Science of Animal Mass Die-Offs

Unfolding right now across swaths of Australia is an ecological catastrophe, as massive, turbo-charged fires reduce whole landscapes to nothingness. Tens of thousands of koalas had no way of escaping. Livestock lie dead in fields. Innumerable animals have perished, with many species likely pushed to extinction. The few survivors could well starve or fall victim…

Continue Reading The Macabre Science of Animal Mass Die-Offs

The Tiny Brain Cells That Connect Our Mental and Physical Health

Fourteen years ago, I was paralyzed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that left me unable to walk for nearly a year. Mine was an unusual case in its severity but the pathology of the condition is well understood: As in all autoimmune diseases, my immune system was behaving like an army gone rogue.…

Continue Reading The Tiny Brain Cells That Connect Our Mental and Physical Health

The Secret History of Facial Recognition

Woody Bledsoe was sitting in a wheelchair in his open garage, waiting. To anyone who had seen him even a few months earlier—anyone accustomed to greeting him on Sundays at the local Mormon church, or to spotting him around town on his jogs—the 74-year-old would have been all but unrecognizable. The healthy round cheeks he…

Continue Reading The Secret History of Facial Recognition

The Unbearable Softness of Engineered Fabrics

Heebie-jeebies is both the informal and the default technical term for a dysphoric response to an innocent-seeming stimulus. Styrofoam, celery, wicker: Something in these materials represents a sensorial crisis for certain human bodies. The primordial heebie-jeebies—revulsion perceived variously in the spine, the molars, the bristling of hairs on the back of the neck—are conjured best…

Continue Reading The Unbearable Softness of Engineered Fabrics

Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes

Tim Ryan is an excitable 42-year-old film savant with a mop of reddish hair. In his early twenties, he worked as a news­paper reporter in Rhode Island and spent his downtime bingeing the classics. “Like Godard, and Russian propaganda films,” he says. Eventually he moved to the Bay Area, where the fledgling movie-rating website Rotten…

Continue Reading Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes