One of the most valuable cars in the world crashes going 200 mph on the Pacific Coast Highway. Its owner claims to be an anti-terrorism officer. In fact, he’s a former executive at a failed software company—and a career criminal. The unraveling of an epic con.

What happens when a successfully funded Kickstarter product fails to launch?

Giving up the iPhone ghost, and other forays into knock-off technology.

USB sticks bearing digital video are the new radio.

Even the dumpster divers of America are becoming tech-savvy, well-earning entrepreneurs.

The promises and pitfalls of self-tracking devices and apps.

An illustrated look at modern love, texting, and sex.

The surprisingly difficult work of building bots that can walk.

An engineering team races to create a next-generation computer.

The first installment of The Soul of a New Machine.

An ambivalent look at Google Glass, the “Model T of wearable computing.”

The long road to Google’s self-driving car.

“In 1981, with a computer built into my shoe, I walked into a Las Vegas casino and beat the house.”

Ego, hubris, and the failure to adapt.

What the rapidly changing world of teenage hook-up culture means for young women.

“Turns out your laptop—or camera or gaming system or gold necklace—may have a smidgen of Congo’s pain somewhere in it.”

A startup’s plan to launch a fleet of cheap, small, ultra-efficient imaging satellites and revolutionize data collection.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

“I am not a tech journalist. I have never done this before. I don’t know what’s going on. Like most journalists everywhere, I am hungover.”

A trip to CES, “what a World’s Fair might look like if brands were more important than countries.”

Bangka Island, a frequently lethal link in a global electronics supply chain.

A history of the cell phone ringtone.

Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of “Goodies,” by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook. As ringtones become part of our environment, they could push pop music toward new levels of concision, repetition, and catchiness.

After years of avoiding the uncomfortable truths about how his gadgets are made, a Mac fanboy travels to Foxconn to see for himself.

Update 3/16/12: This American Life retracted this story today after it was revealed to have “contained significant fabrications.”

The artist discusses her latest record, Biophilia, science and music education. 

Up until she developed a vocal-cord nodule a few years ago, Björk made a point of not investigating how that instrument worked. “With arrangements and lyrics,” she says, squinting over her coffee, “I work more with the left side of my brain. But my voice has always been very right brain. I didn’t try to analyze it at all. I didn’t even know until I started all this voice work, two years ago, what my range was. I didn’t want to let the academic side into that—I worried the mystery would go.”

The autonomous car of the future is here:

I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.