Weekend Longreads 2022
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Thursday, December 22 2022
- How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis (NYTimes)
- How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine (Washington Post)
- Bob Gottlieb Is the Last of the Publishing Giants The 91-year-old editor waits for his 87-year-old star writer, Robert Caro, to turn in his book. (Vulture)
Friday, December 16 2022
- Spotify’s grand plan to monetize developers via its open source Backstage project (TechCrunch)
- YouTube Stars Cash In Video Rights for Millions of Dollars (WSJ)
- ChatGPT and the Imagenet moment
Friday, December 09 2022
- How AI That Powers Chatbots and Search Queries Could Discover New Drugs (WSJ)
- The Hype Around Esports Is Fading as Investors and Sponsors Dry Up (Bloomberg)
- Programmable Ink
- How CoinDesk’s FTX scoop left a hole in its corporate overlord (The Verge)
- Enter the wind tunnel
- 36 Hours - Wellington, New Zealand (NYTimes)
Friday, December 02 2022
- Generative AI: autocomplete for everything
- Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI (The Atlantic)
- The Grown-Up Art of Andor
- A French Village’s Radical Vision of a Good Life with Alzheimer’s (The New Yorker)
Wednesday, November 23 2022
- The Tiny and Nightmarishly Efficient Future of Drone Warfare (The Atlantic)
- Robert Iger Returns to Disney Facing Radically Different Streaming Landscape (WSJ)
- America has an earthquake early-warning system now — on your phone (Washington Post)
- The Weird-Looking, Fuel-Efficient Planes You Could Be Flying in One Day (WSJ)
Friday, November 18 2022
- Tweet thread from @MosquitoCapital on the many ways Twitter could break (Twitter)
- Nvidia RTX 4080 review: performance, for a price (The Verge)
- 1Password wants to ditch passwords without locking you in to one platform (Fast Company)
- Why Big Tech Is Throwing $1 Billion at Sucking CO2 From the Air
Friday, November 11 2022
- Basically everything on Amazon has become an ad (Vox)
- Can Crypto’s Richest Man Stand the Cold? (Bloomberg)
- Matter is here, but it’s still a long road to the simple smart home (The Verge)
- Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
- Unfollow? Block? And who gets custody of the WhatsApp groups? How to break up in the digital age (The Guardian)
Friday, November 04 2022
- Bored Ape Yacht Club tell all: The untold story of the $4 billion crypto startup (Fast Company)
- The ‘Viral’ Secure Programming Language That’s Taking Over Tech (Wired)
- The Race to Be Figma for Devs: CodeSandbox vs. StackBlitz
- The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet
- Inside the weirdly competitive industry of robots writing letters in human handwriting (Fast Company)
Friday, October 28 2022
- Smartphone Storage Space Is the New Turf War for Game Makers (Bloomberg)
- The First Minute of Every Phone Call Is Torture Now (The Atlantic)
- The Try Guys and the Prison of Online Fame (NYTimes)
- The Crypto Story (Bloomberg)
- Which AI Creates the Best
- The Fantasy of Instant Delivery Is Imploding (Bloomberg)
- The beginning of the monster Game of Thrones Twitter Thread (Twitter)
Friday, October 21 2022
- Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? (MIT Technology Review)
- How Gamers Beat NFTs (Bloomberg)
- The Hottest App Right Now? One Where Teens Have to Say Nice Things About Each Other (WSJ)
- I Turned My Home Into a Fortress of Surveillance (The Atlantic)
Friday, October 14 2022
- WhatsApp is now a spammers’ paradise in India (Rest of World)
- The GIF Is on Its Deathbed (The Atlantic)
- Can Kickstarter’s new CEO help the company get its mojo back? (Fast Company)
- The computer errors from outer space (BBC)
- How the Glengarry Glen Ross “Coffee Is for Closers” Scene Got Made
Friday, October 07 2022
- Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere (Bloomberg)
- The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
- Swiss Dropout Worth $14 Billion Moves Startup Away From Porn (Bloomberg)
- The Next Big Battle Between Google and Apple Is for the Soul of Your Car (WSJ)
- How To Download All of Wikipedia onto a USB Flash Drive in 2022
- A Canticle for Leibowitz
Friday, September 30 2022
- Google is trying to reinvent search — by being more than a search engine (The Verge)
- Twitter Is in This Mess Because Jack Dorsey Was Too Busy Being a Bitcoin Influencer (Bloomberg)
- Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)
- Someone is pretending to be me.
Friday, September 23 2022
- The Sneaky Genius of Apple’s AirPods Empire (Bloomberg)
- How a Quebec Lithium Mine May Help Make Electric Cars Affordable (NYTimes)
- Unauthorized Shein boutiques are popping up across Mexico (Rest of World)
- College Dropout Turns Thiel Fellowship Into a $2 Billion Figma Fortune (Bloomberg)
- Why Do All These 20-Somethings Have Closed Captions Turned On? (WSJ)
Friday, September 16 2022
- The AI Unbundling (Stratechery)
- Deere Invests Billions in Self-Driving Tractors, Smart Crop Sprayers (WSJ)
- The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion (The New Yorker)
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books (The New Yorker)
Friday, September 09 2022
- With Stable Diffusion, you may never believe what you see online again (Ars Technica)
- They built a Minecraft crypto empire. Then it all came crashing down (Rest of World)
- Inside the World’s First No-Coiner Conference
- Just a Few People Crowned Some of YouTube’s Earliest Hits (The Atlantic)
- The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse (The Guardian)
- Apple’s features graveyard: Once heavily marketed, now gone
- The ‘deaditors’ of Wikipedia
Friday, September 02 2022
- An Apple Watch for Your 5-Year-Old? More Parents Say Yes. (NYTimes)
- Interview: Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum
- Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator
- The Rise of Tech Blogs in the Mid-2000s
- Kids Yell “Poop” At Alexa, And These Musicians Profit
- AMAZON’S THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER IS SMALL-SCREEN HIGH FANTASY DONE RIGHT (The Verge)
Friday, August 26 2022
- The Crypto World Can’t Wait for ‘the Merge’ (NYTimes)
- Ethereum Overhaul Risks Creating a New Class of Kingpins (Bloomberg)
- TikTok, Hospitals And Tutoring Apps: The Many Tentacles Of Chinese Tech Giant ByteDance (Forbes)
- After the Zodiac Killer’s ‘340’ Cipher Stumped the FBI, Three Amateurs Made a Breakthrough
- ‘BlackBerry’: Story of Doomed Smartphone Company Casts Jay Baruchel & Glenn Howerton, XYZ Films Boards Sales for TIFF (EXCLUSIVE) (Variety)
Friday, August 19 2022
- Browser Startups Take Aim at Google Chrome, Apple Safari (WSJ)
- The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars (New York Magazine)
- Streaming Is Starting to Look A Lot Like Cable TV (Bloomberg)
- Woman Pictured In The Viral ‘Girl Explaining’ Meme Explains The Origins And Her Reaction To Sudden Internet Fame
- How Nokia Ringtones Became The First Viral Earworms (The Verge)
Friday, August 12 2022
- How Did Two Unknown Latin Music Operators Make $23 Million From YouTube? The IRS Says They Stole It
- Tornado Cash Crackdown Shows Limits of Regulating Cryptocurrency Services (WSJ)
- Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes (Ars Technica)
- New – AWS Private 5G – Build Your Own Private Mobile Network
- The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs (Wired)
- The End of Manual Transmission (The Atlantic)
Friday, August 05 2022
- The endless search for a crypto use case
- It’s paintbrushes at dawn as artists feel the pressure of AI-generated art (TechCrunch)
- CNN Exclusive: FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt US nuclear arsenal communications
- THE UNSUNG INVENTOR WHO CHASED THE LED RAINBOW (IEEE Spectrum)
Friday, July 29 2022
- The Buy Now, Pay Later Juggernaut Is About to Be Tested (Bloomberg)
- F.T.C. Chair Upends Antitrust Standards With Meta Lawsuit (NYTimes)
- Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car?
- TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants (The New Yorker)
- RollerCoaster Tycoon taught me to be a ruthless capitalist
Friday, July 22 2022
- Chiplets helped save AMD. They might also help save Moore’s law and head off an energy crisis.
- Meta’s next big bet: The ‘metaversity’
- Amazon C.E.O. Andy Jassy Breaks From the Bezos Way (NYTimes)
- The Great Fiction of AI (The Verge)
- The Re-Reinvention of the Travel Agent
Friday, July 15 2022
- How Three Arrows Capital Blew Up and Set Off a Crypto Contagion (Bloomberg)
- The Standards Innovation Paradox
- Advanced E.V. Batteries Move From Labs to Mass Production (NYTimes)
- How the Webb sends its hundred-megapixel images a million miles back to Earth (TechCrunch)
- The Webb Space Telescope’s Profound Data Challenges (IEEE Spectrum)
Thursday, July 07 2022
- Keeping Phones Running in Wartime Pushes Kyivstar to the Limit (Bloomberg)
- The Metaverse in 2040
- Not Just a Tennis Podcast, but Rather ‘The’ Tennis Podcast (NYTimes)
- Inside a Superfan’s Secret Friendship With Eddie Van Halen (Rolling Stone)
Thursday, June 30 2022
- Did Razzlekhan and Dutch Pull Off History’s Biggest Crypto Heist? (Bloomberg)
- Cyber Pirates Prowling Ship Controls Threaten Another Big Shock (Bloomberg)
- The Accidental Media Critics of YouTube (NYTimes)
- HOW ONE OF GAMING’S MOST INTIMIDATING GENRES SPAWNED A LEGION OF HITS (The Verge)
Friday, June 24 2022
- Web3 Use Cases: Today
- Where are all the crypto use cases?
- How Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities were frustrated in Ukraine (Washington Post)
- Self-Driving Big Rigs Are Coming. Is America Ready? (WSJ)
- How Townscaper Works: A Story Four Games in the Making
Friday, June 17 2022
- What Should You Do With Your Options During a Downturn? (Every)
- ‘Wallets and eyeballs’: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace (The Guardian)
- A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster (Bloomberg)
- Proton Is Trying to Become Google—Without Your Data (Wired)
- What Is Quantum Entanglement? Skip the heady and abstract physics lectures. Let’s talk about socks (IEEE Spectrum)
- The Best Sci Fi Books for Beginners
Friday, June 10 2022
- These Drones Could Bring You 5G Networking After a Hurricane
- Facebook Made This 29-Year-Old Rich; War Made Him A Billionaire (Forbes)
- The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge (The New Yorker)
- Nintendo’s Big Piracy Case Is A Very Sad Story
Friday, June 03 2022
- Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.
- Columbus, Ohio is quickly becoming the Midwest’s tech hub (TechCrunch)
- The Internet Encyclopedia of Memes (Every)
- Looking Glass might have just invented the GIF’s 3D successor (The Verge)
- Does a Comedian Really Need an Audience? (NYTimes)
Friday, May 27 2022
- The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere (MIT Technology Review)
- In India’s Mobile-Payments Boom, Even Beggars Get QR Codes (WSJ)
- The Collison Brothers Built Stripe Into A $95 Billion Unicorn With Eye-Popping Financials. Inside Their Plan To Stay On Top (Forbes)
- THE UNSTOPPABLE MACHINES BEHIND THE GAME CONSOLE SHORTAGE (The Verge)
- Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives (The Guardian)
Friday, May 20 2022
- Cyber Insurers Raise Rates Amid a Surge in Costly Hacks (WSJ)
- The Decade of Cheap Rides Is Over
- The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans (NYTimes)
- Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? (Quanta Magazine)
- Star Wars: The Rebellion Will Be Televised
Friday, May 13 2022
- Terra: To the Moon and Back
- Why financial engineering has gone full circle with Terra
- Tech workers in Latin America want to make Spanish the primary language of programming (Rest of World)
- The Thing That Makes It Work Means It Doesn’t
Friday, May 06 2022
- Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise (Wired)
- Elon Musk’s Fixer Is Quietly Tending the World’s Biggest Fortune (Bloomberg)
- Russians plunder $5M farm vehicles from Ukraine – to find they’ve been remotely disabled
- A VISIT TO THE HUMAN FACTORY (The Verge)
- The Endgame
Friday, April 29 2022
- Elon’s Giant Package
- Weather Prediction Startups Grow as More Volatile Storms Loom (Bloomberg)
- As Polaroid’s SX-70 turns 50, instant photography is booming (Fast Company)
Friday, April 22 2022
- ApeCoin & the death of staking
- Cutting-Edge Crypto Coins Tout Stability. Critics Call Them Dangerous. (WSJ)
- Rivian CEO Warns of Looming Electric-Vehicle Battery Shortage (WSJ)
- Video Game Junkie Quietly Builds $3 Billion Payments Powerhouse (Bloomberg)
- The Sidekick Was the Best Smartphone Ever
Friday, April 15 2022
- The Talent Vortex: Mafias and Magnets
- Musk Needs ‘Massive Loan’ or Big Tesla Sale to Buy Twitter (Bloomberg)
- Blind Ambition (Every)
- Stablecoins Are in a War for Dominance and It’s Getting Ugly (Vice)
- How Chris Dixon’s Dive Down The Crypto Rabbit Hole Made Him The World’s Top Venture Capitalist (Forbes)
- AMONG EUROPE’S EX-ROYALS (The Atlantic)
Friday, April 08 2022
- The Scoop: Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse
- Millennial Billionaire Ryan Breslow Created Buzz, And Enemies, Attacking Stripe And Shopify. He’s Just Getting Started. (Forbes)
- SCOOP: Crypto Fund Paradigm’s Assets Under Management Climb 343% to $13.2 Billion
- The Metaverse Has Bosses Too. Meet the ‘Managers’ of Axie Infinity (Vice)
- This Startup Promised People Free Crypto If They Scanned Their Eyeballs. Now People Feel They’ve Been Scammed.
Friday, April 01 2022
- Online shopping in the middle of the ocean (Rest of World)
- Want to See the Weirdest of Wikipedia? Look No Further. (NYTimes)
- Why Moderating Content Actually Does More To Support The Principles Of Free Speech
- A History of Hup, the Jump Sound of Shooting Games (Wired)
- In the Shadow of the Star Wars Kid
Friday, March 25 2022
- LAPSUS$: How a Sloppy Extortion Gang Became One of the Most Prolific Hacking Groups (Vice)
- The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto’s Future
- There’s something off about ApeCoin
- Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation (Wired)
- Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All (GQ)
Friday, March 18 2022
- Substack’s Ideology (Every)
- A Big Bet to Kill the Password for Good (Wired)
- Razzlekhan: The Untold Story Of How A YouTube Rapper Became A Suspect In A $4 Billion Bitcoin Fraud (Forbes)
- Six months in, El Salvador’s bitcoin gamble is crumbling (Rest of World)
- The neon shortage is a bad sign (Vox)
- Beating Japan at Its Own (Video) Game: A Smash Hit From China (NYTimes)
Friday, March 11 2022
- The Great Tech Hub Exodus Didn’t Quite Happen (Wired)
- Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall
- Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence? (Quanta Magazine)
- The rise of Canva, the $40 billion design juggernaut (Fast Company)
- AngelList: A Venture Constellation
Friday, March 04 2022
- How shunning Russia could offer the U.S. tech giants an easy win (Politico)
- Tech Companies Are Reopening Their Offices, but Tech Work Has Changed Forever (WSJ)
- The Role Of Turkish Drones In Ukraine’s War
- These women are staking their claim to Web3 and the metaverse (Fast Company)
- The ‘Incredible Treasure Chest’ of Homestar Runner (Vulture)
Friday, February 25 2022
- A moment of clarity
- Web3 Developers Have Found a Functioning Metaverse. It’s ‘Minecraft’. (Vice)
- CAN THE LAW KEEP UP WITH CRYPTO? (The Verge)
- Crypto Scammers’ New Target: Dating Apps (NYTimes)
- Amazon’s sprawling grocery business has become an ‘expensive hobby’ with a cloudy future (CNBC)
Friday, February 18 2022
- The World Needs What Intel Makes. Can It Make a Comeback? (NYTimes)
- Free your mind: Meditation could be VR’s next killer app
- No one cares about your redesign
- If Russia Invades Ukraine, TikTok Will See It Up Close (Wired)
- Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet (GQ)
Friday, February 11 2022
- Flexport Is Silicon Valley’s Solution To The Supply Chain Mess—Why Do Insiders Hope It Sinks? (Forbes)
- How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook (Wired)
- Sony’s AI Drives a Race Car Like a Champ (Wired)
- Russia’s drone army contains heaps of Western electronics. Can the U.S. cut them off? (Washington Post)
- The Little Streaming Comedy Platform That Couldn’t (Vulture)
- Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power
Friday, February 04 2022
- HOW ONE COMPANY TOOK OVER THE NFT TRADE (The Verge)
- The Unnerving Rise of Video Games that Spy on You (Wired)
- North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (Wired)
- Startup Investors Cut Valuations Amid Tech Stock Rout, Dismal IPOs (WSJ)
- How IBM’s Watson Went From the Future of Health Care to Sold Off for Parts
- Don’t forget Microsoft
Friday, January 28 2022
- Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs (YouTube)
- Three things web3 should fix in 2022
- The NFT Art World Wouldn’t Be the Same Without This Woman’s ‘Wide-Awake Hallucinations’ (Rolling Stone)
- Nothing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers
- Your Hotel Concierge Is Probably a Texting Robot. Srsly. (WSJ)
- Why Netflix Just Had Its Worst Day in A Decade (Bloomberg)
- Netflix stock market woe is warning to Hollywood (FT)
Friday, January 21 2022
- How Did ID.me Get Between You and Your Identity? (Bloomberg)
- The SPAC Ship Is Sinking. Investors Want Their Money Back. (WSJ)
- THE INSIDE STORY OF IBEER, THE UNDERDOG BEER APP THAT MADE MILLIONS
- The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots (The New Yorker)
- How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete (The New Yorker)
Friday, January 14 2022
- Remembering VRML: The Metaverse of 1995
- After the Beanie Baby bubble burst (Vox)
- Crypto Firms Gear Up for Battles Over New Rules in Washington (Bloomberg)
- Xbox players are fed up with forced crossplay against PC gamers (The Verge)
- Academics want to preserve video games. The game industry is fighting them in court. (Washington Post)
Friday, January 07 2022