Ian Bogost

The sun is setting on computers. In October, Google finally—finally—rolled out a new black-background view for its Calendar app. This is just the latest in a string of recent software darkenings. In July, Wikipedia went light-on-dark. And a few years […]

Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield met during the first week of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Both were pursuing Ph.D.s in English. The two married four years later. After graduation in 1985, Troost landed a tenure-track

There are better ways to address Google’s dominance. Illustration by The Atlantic November 22, 2024, 10:27 AM ET This past summer, a U.S. district court declared Google a monopolist. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed its proposed remedy. This

No surprise, I thought, as I disposed of the 12-volt charging adapter I had purchased for my car. I’d bought the thing on Temu, the Chinese low-cost-shopping app, as part of a larger haul of random other stuff that the

This is a relapse, not a fix. Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic November 15, 2024, 5:57 PM ET Bluesky, a Twitter-style, short-post social-media site, has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in just

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Some objects are so familiar and so ordinary that it seems impossible to imagine that they did not always exist. Take the school backpack, for example. Its invention can

The New York Times is once again poking readers’ eyes with its needle. A little digital gauge, like the one that might indicate that your boiler or nuclear-power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in

Can we talk about the cables in our lives? I’ll start: I have a circa-2020 iPhone, which features a Lightning port for charging. My monitor, laptop, and e-reader all have ports for USB-C, the connector that looks like a pill;

The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be

I worry that the calculator we’ve known and loved is not long for this Earth. This month, when I upgraded my iPhone to the latest operating system, iOS 18, it came with a refreshed Calculator app. The update offered some