The winter of 2014 was painfully cold in New York City. The sidewalks were frozen with slicks of ice, an inhospitable grid of accidents waiting to happen. But stamped across bus stop shelters and plastered across subway billboards, one simple catchphrase kept cropping up: Welcome to New York. The person behind this message was Taylor Swift, the city’s newly-christened “global welcome ambassador.” “Welcome to New York” also happened to be the title of the opening song on Swift’s fifth studio album, 1989, which was released to instant fanfare and chart success on Oct. 27 of that year.
It was a perfect marketing campaign: New York, capital of all things cool, meet Swift, America’s country-pop queen. By association, Swift made it clear she was entering a new pha…
It’s no secret that And Just Like That has stumbled when it comes to developing substantive storylines for its new (and, notably, BIPOC) characters. But while Che, Seema, and LTW have been given questionable plots, no one has been done as dirty by AJLT as Dr. Nya Wallace.
In season one, Nya was introduced as Miranda’s law professor, who was reconsidering her feelings towards motherhood after an unsuccessful round of IVF—while also re-evaluating her relationship with her musician husband, Andre Rashad, who was pressuring her to have a baby. By the end of it, Nya stayed true to her feelings of uncertainty about getting pregnant and decided to take some time apart from her husband, while he went away on tour. It was a relatable storyline that allowed us to get…
For decades, psychedelics have evoked a freewheeling past, calling to mind images of hippie counterculture and swirly neon patterns. Recently, however, psychedelics have become synonymous with serious, forward-looking science. Researchers at renowned institutions are researching the mental-health effects of pairing psychedelics with psychotherapy, and with the promising research has come a surge of investment in new psychedelic start-up companies.
Few people have done more to return psychedelics to the popular imagination—while lending them a dose of credibility—than author Michael Pollan. In his bestselling 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Po…
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Title IX, the federal legislation mandating equal opportunities for men’s and women’s participation in sports, turns 50 on June 23. The golden anniversary offers opportunities to recognize the advancements of women’s athletics, such as the pioneering collective bargaining agreement, agreed to on May 18 by the United States Soccer Federation, the U.S Women’s National Team Players Association and the United States National Soccer Team Players Association, that creates true pay equity in the sport. Players like Megan Rapinoe, who along with teammate Alex Morgan was the leading goal-scorer for the United States during its 2019 World Cup …
Elon Musk’s chaotic leadership of Twitter has brought us to a clarifying moment in how we think about work, leadership, and peak performance. On the one hand, his burnout-fueled decision-making seems like a regression—a step, or many steps, backwards, given what we know about the connection between human energy and decision-making. But on the other hand, he’s showing us the vivid results of that backward-looking model: total chaos. Musk’s second month at Twitter has been an extension of his master class in how not to make decisions. And the lesson is clear: we only have so much cognitive energy—and what we choose to spend it on, and how we renew it, really matters.
Last week began with Musk installing mattresses at Twitter’s offices in San Franc…
The competition to build the iPhone of artificial intelligence is heating up.
On Tuesday, the technology startup Rabbit unveiled its contender: a small, orange, walkie-talkie style device that, according to the company, can use “AI agents” to carry out tasks on behalf of the user.
In a pre-recorded keynote address shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Rabbit’s founder Jesse Lyu asks the device to plan him a vacation to London; the keynote shows the device designing him an itinerary and booking his trip. He orders a pizza, books an Uber, and teaches the device how to generate an image using Midjourney.
The gadget, called the Rabbit r1, is just the latest in an increasingly active new hardware category: portable AI-first devices that can interact wit…
Think, for a moment, about who you would call if you were having a bad day. If you’d screwed up a deal at work, or gotten into an argument with your spouse, or were feeling frustrated and sick of it all: Who would you want to talk to? There’s probably someone you know will make you feel better, who can help you think through a thorny question, or share a moment of heartbreak or joy.
That person, for you, is what I like to call a “supercommunicator” (and odds are, for them, you are a supercommunicator, too.) All of us, at times, achieve moments of supercommunication. But there are some people who are supercommunicators much more consistently—they know how to connect with nearly anyone, to make conversations easier, to make us feel like we’ve really been heard. We all kn…
This year, during the heat of summer, when temperatures in New York surpassed 90°F, the 22 solar panels on the roof of my house were doing absolutely nothing.
This is not something I learned until September, four months after my husband and I bought this house with a purportedly functional leased solar system in upstate New York, months after logging into a website that inaccurately told us that the panels were working, months after we forked over $6,000 to prepay the remainder of the 20-year lease to the company supposed to be maintaining the solar panels, Spruce Power, which happens to be the largest privately held owner and operator of residential solar in America.
A third-party technician dispatched to our house by Spruce in September blamed squirrels that chewed on som…
In most cases, news that a company could be bought out at a price higher than its market value sends investors into a buying frenzy that rackets up the company’s share price. But that wasn’t exactly the case for Twitter on Thursday.
The company’s stock fell almost 2% during regular trading on the day that Elon Musk offered to buy the social media platform for $43 billion—roughly $7 billion more than its current market valuation.
The lack of support from investors is one of the reasons Wall Street analysts are skeptical that Twitter’s board of directors would accept the offer. It could be a sign that investors are underwhelmed with Musk’s bid, particularly over concerns as to how he would finance it. By Thursday afternoon, a flurry of inves…
Imagine taking a long, hot shower without wasting water and energy.
That’s the guilt-free promise of a recirculating shower, which continuously filters, sterilizes and reuses water that would otherwise go down the bathroom drain. The technology reduces water consumption up to 90% and energy use by 80% compared to a conventional shower, according to manufacturers of the devices.
“We are addressing two of the problems the world is facing, climate change and water shortages, without sacrificing the shower experience,” said Troels Grene, chief executive officer of Flow Loop, a Danish company that has developed a recirculating shower called the Eco Loop.
Flow Loop is one of several startups bringing the technology to market in northern Europe, with plans t…