The future of homo sapiens.

An argument for outing a notorious message board member: “Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit’s role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women. I am OK with that.”

The trials and silliness of Facebook, from beyond the grave.

"In a last, desperate attempt to recapture our imaginations, Madeline began posting pictures of herself with dead celebrities like Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, even Benjamin Franklin. But they were doing things like high-fiving, watching TV, and playing darts. As a community, we agreed it was in bad taste."

For the first time, the giants of the tech industry are spending more on creating, buying, and fighting patents than they are on R&D.

Part of New York Times’ ongoing iEconomy series.

Separated from his older brother at a train, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan found himself lost in the slums of Calcutta. In his 20s, living in Australia, he began his search for his birth home armed with nothing but hazy memories and Google Earth.

Convicted and facing jail time plus a crippling fine in Sweden, the founders of the torrent site The Pirate’s Bay have scattered across the world towards new lives: fatherhood in Laos, a junkie’s life in Phnom Penh, and start-up work in Berlin.

The people behind “the only American luxury compact sport sedan.”

The environmental impact of server farms.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

A 15-year-old hacker and his tricks.

How meteorologists are improving their predictive powers.

A look inside Google’s Ground Truth.

An essay about phone dials and a response to the end of blogging.

How Wall Street got addicted to trading at the speed of light.

How the self-proclaimed “inventor of all things streaming” went from dot-com millionaire to crime ring accomplice.

“For the first few days after the surgery, it was difficult to separate out my newly implanted sense from the bits of pain and sensation created by the trauma of having the magnet jammed in my finger.”

A tech reporter tells the story of his ruined digital life.

No, but for security software companies it’s a useful fiction.

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

The author ("media inventor" Robin Sloan) describes this as a "short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization."

"That night, at the bookstore, I started working on the new visualization, thinking I could impress Kat with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype."

Why people play violent video games.

How shoes are ruining our feet.

How an art project led to a visit from the U.S. Secret Service.

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”