Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending July 18, 2015)
The Web We Have to Save
What is getting lost as people spend more time in apps and less on the open Web.
—Brian Bergstein, executive editor
The Really Big One
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.
—Megan Barnett, deputy editor
The Mob’s IT Department
A darkly fascinating tale of two technologists drawn into a dangerous world of high-tech drug smuggling.
—Will Knight, senior editor, AI
Can I Post a Photo of a Bad Driver?
On the ethics of “digilantism.”
—Will Knight
Thanks to Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata, We’re All Gamers Now
A nice piece about the legacy of the games industry pioneer who sadly passed away this month.
—Will Knight
Unhealthy Fixation
Slate’s William Saletan has a very thorough takedown of the anti-GMO movement.
—Mike Orcutt, research editor
When Your Manicure Comes Alive
Is the world ready for 3-D-printed fingernails?
—Linda Lowenthal, copy chief
How Spyware Peddler Hacking Team Was Publicly Dismantled
How the secrets of a company that sells hacking and surveillance tools to disreputable governments were spilled when it became a hacking victim itself.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco bureau chief
Mapping Every Single Job in the U.S.
A visual documentation of America’s employment according to race.
—J. Juniper Friedman, associate Web producer
The Women Who Rule Pluto
The way I learned the planetary mnemonic was: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas”—not my very energetic, or enthusiastic, or emphatic mother, which is how it sometimes goes. By that same token, I was thrilled to learn that more women than ever played a crucial role in this NASA mission.
—Julia Sklar, intern
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora
The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.
Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.
Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.
This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language
A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.