One clammy August night in 2011, newly relocated to New York City, I watched Music Twitter collectively lose its shit. Jay-Z and Kanye West had just released Watch the Throne, their buzzy, long-prayed-for joint album about wealth, class, and #BlackExcellence. The timing was, in retrospect, paradoxical: August 8 was also Black Monday. Global stock markets…

If you're an astronaut, you're used to being treated both like royalty and like a lab animal—imperial guinea pigs, perhaps. Next year, these august examinees will enroll in a new kind of experiment as they strap themselves into the first private, human-ready spacecraft to lift off of US soil.That's not the only historic event to…

In the meantime, Facebook has been used again and again to spread mass disinformation, from hate speech that fueled the massacre of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar to WhatsApp propaganda that helped elected far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to troll armies tasked with attacking the enemies of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump. In almost…

Yay! Another trip around the Sun. New Year's Eve is sort of like the birthday celebration for the Earth (or at least according to the Gregorian calendar). But it doesn't just have to be about a party. You can also add some physics into your celebration.How Fast Is a Champagne Cork?Why does a cork shoot…

Look, this is the last post I’m writing in 2019 and I’m tired. But I can’t let the year close without taking stock of how well tech stocks did this…

The Pallone-Thrune TRACED Act, a bipartisan bit of legislation that should make life harder for the villains behind robocalls, was signed into law today by the president. It’s still possible…

Welcome to the third annual TechCrunch Include Progress Report. Our editorial and events teams work hard throughout the year to ensure that we bring you the most dynamic and diverse…

The income share agreement (ISA), a financing model where students pay for an education program with a certain percent of their income for several years after graduating, has been one…

2019 was the year wireless earbuds went mainstream. The category has been around much longer, of course, and Apple really broke the whole thing open a full three years ago…

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today, the last day of 2019, we’re taking a second…