There has been no shortage of explanations for the sudden, spectacular swoon in Facebook’s stock value last week. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an earnings report that its user growth had stalled. Young people, its most valuable demographic, keep spending time on TikTok, the irresistible…

Imagine that when your great-grandparents were teenagers, they got their hands on a groundbreaking new gadget, the world’s first fully immersive virtual-reality entertainment system. These weren’t those silly goggles you see everywhere now. This device was more Matrix-y — a stylish headband stuffed…

Sometime in 2021, I learned how to do something that I suspect will greatly improve how I deal with what already looks to be a harrowing 2022. This thing I learned sounds trivial, a practice so simple you’d think there’d be no need for special instruction — which is probably why a lot of us go…

The foreign-policy journalist Joshua Keating used to write a series for Slate called “If It Happened There,” in which he reported on political and cultural developments in the United States in the tone of an American foreign correspondent sending dispatches from a nation on the other side of the…

For decades, the chip-making giant Intel reigned as one of the most technically advanced companies in Silicon Valley. It was Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore who famously predicted that computer chips would keep getting unimaginably more powerful. And it was Intel’s products, the x86 line of…

The nicest thing you can say about the Health Misinformation Act, proposed in July by the Democratic senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Luján, is that it means well. The internet has been a key accelerant of widespread myths, misunderstandings and lies related to Covid-19; Klobuchar and Luján’s…

In testimony before a Senate subcommittee last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, raised a number of important and complex policy questions about how society might better regulate the wayward social-media giant. But she also raised a very basic question, one…

Late last week President Biden achieved something I’d thought impossible: He got me to feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg. Sure, it was only a little bad, but that’s no small feat. As I spent the weekend brushing up on funereal dirges to play on my tiny violin, I couldn’t help but marvel at the…

Cities, you may have heard, are toast. The argument is straightforward and seemingly incontestable: The coronavirus thrives among close clusters of human beings, and nowhere are humans clustered closer than in big cities. The virus’s toll seems to make the connection plain. New York City, the most…

The internet is dying. Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of…