For Yelp, Extortion Has a Starring Role
Yelp uses the power of its rating system to bully small businesses into buying their expensive advertising; if they decline, so do their ratings.
Category: Culture
Disruptive Technologies Outpace Our Adaptability
As digital technologies improve exponentially, the pace of change has become too great for healthy adaptation.
How Climate Change Could Affect Culinary Culture
Climate change is already affecting agriculture. What will this mean for iconic food items that help define cultures? Can we gracefully adapt?
Walter Lippmann’s Enduring Relevance
In the 20th Century, Walter Lippmann was one of America’s most gifted political theorists. Forty-three years after his death, he may still be.
Podcast #11: Narayan Liebenson on Mindfulness and Attention
Narayan Liebenson, a guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, speaks to us about the benefits of mindfulness and attention. How might smart devices be impacting our ability to be present?
Culturing Boundaries: The Right to be Offline
France recently passed legislation that’s being billed as a “right to be offline.” What’s behind it, and can we learn something from the French conception of work/life boundaries?
Podcast #10: Nicole Freedman on Bike Transit
When Nicole Freedman became Boston’s first “bike czar,” the city had been rated worst in the country in bike friendliness by Bicycling Magazine. A decade later, it’s been in the top ten with a growing network of protected lanes and one of the nation’s first major bike-sharing programs. Freedman describes what it takes to change culture around transit and how everyone can benefit.
Node to Self
If the Internet is a global neural network, then who are we?
Podcast #8: Tim Wu On Attention and Communications Networks
Tim Wu is a renowned scholar on our communications networks, having coined the phrase “net neutrality” and written extensively on the subject both inside and outside of government and academia, including the White House and Columbia University. His latest book, The Attention Merchants, is a history of advertising, and it’s not pretty. He spoke with us about our declining private spheres, the current state of the Internet, and the effects of what he calls The Cycle, as new communications technologies inevitably move from open to closed.
2016, The Year in Review
A look back at the biggest technology-related stories of 2016.