CATEGORIES

A Full-Term Gig - Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business.

Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.

Inside the Uncanny World of TikTok Home Remodeling - Turn a tree into a luxury apartment. Retrofit a bedroom for a million children. The videos are bizarre-and going very viral. Who's behind them?

If you've been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you've stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man, identified as Little John, was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws.

The Hole in the Map of the World - On the surface, there's nothing unusual about it. just a spot of ocean. but beneath the waves lurks something incredible: a massive waterfall. and in its mysterious depths, the fate of the world churns.

Tip of Iceland, you'll find what's often called a marginal body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere. On Google Maps it gets three stars: very windy, says one review. It's also where something rather strange is happening. As the rest of the planet has warmed since the 20th century-less in the tropics, more near the poles-temperatures in this patch of ocean have hardly budged. In some years they've even cooled. If you get a thrill from spooky maps, check out one that compares the average temperatures in the late 19th century with those of the 2010s. All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there's one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.

The Eternal Truth of Markdown -An exegesis of the most ubiquitous piece of code on the web.

Markdown is not just a piece of software. It's also a markup language it's used to format plaintext, which then appears the way you want it to on, say, the internet. Markdown the markup language was designed to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible, according to creator John Gruber's syntax guide. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

Terminal Velocity - Murphy, a competitive runner since high school, was an avid user of the exercise app Strava, and he frequently checked the app while traveling to see where locals liked to run.

It was 2 am at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover. His options at this quiet hour, in the expansive halls of the concourse, were pretty much nil. There would be no nibbling on ahi tartare at the Crú Food & Wine Bar for at least another seven hours, and the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's signature caramel apples had long since been cached for the night.

What's the future for Western 'super apps'?

Super apps create a single interface to unify a broad ecosystem of services such as messaging, e-commerce, and transport. With consumers making all of their purchases within one walled garden, the user engagement and data benefits for the app owner are obvious and substantial. These apps have become a major part of the Chinese technology landscape, so we asked two leading experts: Could the concept successfully break through in Western markets?

THE TELEVISUAL HIJACKING OF ALFONSO CUARON

Gravity, Children of Men, the best Harry Potter film-and now a seven-part miniseries?

THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXES TRAE STEPHENS

The venture capitalist and cofounder of the defense-tech startup Anduril has worked with Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and Elon Musk.

THE ULTRACOOL CASH GRABS OF BOOBI ALTHOFF

Now the Tik Tokker turned podcaster is out to prove her worth-by being herself.

THE MIDLIFE NOT -A-CRISIS OF MARK CUBAN

Though he's soon to be out at Shark Tank, the billionaire has a massive new \"disruption\" in the works. He's certain it'll save lives.

THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE OF MEREDITH WHITAKER

It's free. It doesn't track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it's a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.

THE SICK (AND SLOW) BURNS OF JOSH JOHNSON

The comedian tells jokes the way he found fame: slowly, and then all at once.

THE DAD-ROCK DIPLOMACY OF ANTONY BLINKEN

Two major wars. A rising China. Hackers everywhere. He's from the US government, and he's here to help.

WAIT, GO BACK

To mature as programmers, newer generations need to take a lesson from Google’s programming language.

Cooler Heads - The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.

The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat. In Phoenix, Arizona, where almost 400 people died from heat exposure last year-and where falling on the pavement can leave a third-degree burn-the question isn't whether this summer's temperatures will kill people, it's how many.

Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).

To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.

Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.

Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.

Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.

This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick

I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again

WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.

DAMAGE CONTROL

According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.

AN IMPERFECT STORM

CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?

THE TECH WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING NOVELIST GOES META

In which Robin Sloan writes Moonbound-a science fiction book about science fiction-and our writer writes his way into total insanity.

Do The Math - Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages.

Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages. Programming paradigms are mainly divided into "imperative programming" and "functional programming." The dichotomy isn't clear-cut, as a growing number of languages support both styles, but for our purposes it may be enough to say that in imperative programming you write code as a series of steps, line by line, while in functional programming you define mathematical functions and let the machine worry about the steps. In terms of actual functionality and usage, imperative programming is the far more common approach.

Screen Saver - Dumbphone life is about

There are still nice things on the internet. Dumbphone life, as r/Dumbphones moderator Jose Briones told me, is about "recovering your time and attention for the things you actually value." Of course, getting sucked into a subreddit because it was algorithmically suggested to me based on my extensive online browsing-is the antithesis of that. But it's how I found r/Dumbphones, now my favorite place on the internet.

Your online girlfriend is a workforce.

Because I have a deep and childish fear of being exposed as uncool, I try hard to act nonchalant when I´m around people with lives more interesting than my own. This is the tactic I employed last year when I met an OnlyFans star, a fit cosplayer and Japanophile who has soared into an enviable tax bracket by selling what she terms "exxxtra spicy content."

11,196 Years in Prison

Faruk Özer made crypto seem like the sation to decades of economic dysimction. Then he became Turkey's most wanted-and hated-man.

DeLorean vs DeLorean

Decades after her dad's iconic sports car time-traveled into movie history, Kat DeLorean wants to build a modern remake. There's just one problem: Someone else owns the trademark on her name.

THE BEHIND THE SCENES TECHNO-WIZARDRY OF ARATI PRABHAKAR

She has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot.

THE FORENSIC EMPIRE OF ELIOT HIGGINS

As fakes and deceptions proliferate at record speeds, one guy has maintained a miraculous nose for the truth-the founder of Bellingcat, the world's biggest citizen-run intelligence agency.

THE COMMUNIST & THE CELEBRITY

CHINA MIÉVILLE WRITES A NOVEL WITH THE INTERNET'S BOYFRIEND.