For this week’s podcast, I’m talking to our friend Casey Johnston, a tech journalist turned fitness journalist turned independent journalist. Casey studied physics, which led her to tech journalism; she did some of my favorite coverage of Internet culture as well as Apple’s horrendous butterfly laptop keyboards. We worked together at VICE, where Casey was…
This week, we’re going to try something new at 404 Media. Which is to say we’re going to try doing nothing at all. The TL;DR is that 404 Media is taking the week off, so this is the only email you’ll get from us this week. No posts on the website (except a scheduled one…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here’s some of the most intriguing studies I came across this week: We’ll lead with a nostalgic trip down memory lane—so far down the lane, in fact, that we’ll end up in the Sun’s infancy 4.6 billion years ago. Most of us didn’t have to deal with supernovas exploding in…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss wrestling over a good headline, what to read this summer, and Super 8 film. EMANUEL: I would really love it if the people who accuse us of…
Imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem. Do you leave the meeting to go and help? Now, imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem. Do you stay in the meeting rather than help? If you answered “no” to both…
Nathan’s friends were worried about him. He’d been acting differently lately. Not just quieter in his high school classes, but the normally chatty teen was withdrawn in general. Was he sick, they wondered? He just didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he’d tell them. That was partially true. But the cause for his restless nights…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Çatalhöyük, a settlement in Turkey that dates back more than 9,000 years, has attracted intense interest for its structural complexity and hints of an egalitarian and possibly matriarchal society. But it’s…
On one side of the world, a very online guy edits a photo of then-Vice President Nominee JD Vance with comically-huge and perfectly round chipmunk cheeks: a butterfly flaps its wings. A year later, elsewhere on the planet, a Norwegian tourist returns home, rejected from entry to the U.S. because—he claims—border patrol agents found that…
The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines which sells travellers’ detailed flight records in bulk to the government, only just registered as a data broker with the state of California, which is a legal requirement, despite selling such data for years, according to records maintained by the California…
