“Is UR safe?” read a chalked message on a walkway on the University of Rochester’s campus on Sunday night, September 10. “Not for women. Not for us.” Pastel text gave the time and details of a protest scheduled for that Wednesday. By eight the next morning, the chalk was washed away, leaving wet, blank pavement. […]
Late last summer, MoviePass introduced a seemingly impossible offer: See a movie every single day in theaters, paying only a monthly fee that, in most markets, amounts to less than a single ticket. It worked. Earlier this month, MoviePass hit 1.5 million subscribers, growing much faster than anyone expected, including MoviePass. But amassing customers was […]
America is entering a period that may one day be known as The Great Forgetting. Alzheimer’s, a disease defined as much by the accumulation of mental lapses as by tangled proteins in the brain, is an ailment of the aging. Sixty-five-year-olds have a one in 10 chance of a positive diagnosis. By age 85, the […]
An inarguable truth, if you are fortunate enough to have all the necessary components: There's something sacred about being a kid and playing videogames with your sibling. Not because videogames are that important, necessarily, or essential to family relationships. But because there's an alchemy there, in huddling close to some old television, diving together into […]
People look for inspiration and happiness in a vast array of places. Some see school kids walking out of class across America to take a stand for gun control and find hope. Others note that 7-Eleven now has customizable tater tots and are filled with joy. What do they get when they look at the […]
Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures and help make scientific discoveries, they have also confounded their human creators, who never expected so-called “deep-learning” algorithms to work so well. No underlying principle has guided the design of these learning […]
When a raindrop falls in San Francisco, it has two choices: flow east into the San Francisco Bay, or west into the Pacific Ocean. A ridgeline divides the city into two, slicing through the Presidio, hugging the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, and skirting Twin Peaks. As the land drops off in either direction, […]
From its title to its premise, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy reads as a dark joke. Whether that a joke includes you or not, though, is impossible to say. It's true that the PC game is uproariously, darkly funny. It has a simple aim: climb this mountain. The only problem is that your character […]
I can't help myself. When I'm out in the real world and I see something cool, I have to turn it into a physics problem. It's just what I do. In this case, I was changing planes in the Atlanta airport. Like many other airports, Atlanta has a mini subway to take you between terminals. […]
Nothing rankles some Star Wars fans more than mentioning The Prequels. Derided when George Lucas started releasing them in 1999, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith have been a sore spot from the beginning, a cartoonish blemish given to an otherwise perfect franchise. In the intervening years, critics have […]