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

How a young entrepreneur built a media empire by repackaging memes.

To whom does San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood belong?

A group of journalists and researchers wade into ugly corners of the Internet to expose racists, creeps, and hypocrites. Have they gone too far?

Creating, and then attempting to dismantle, a fake persona based on a man who died in 1984.

How Facebook ‘likes’ landed Jelani Henry in Rikers.

“Traffic was never the problem. Everything else was.”

What the first-sale doctrine means for the future of copyright.

Why the boom in scientific progress stalled.

On a 16-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind.

A profile of Anita Sarkeesian, who has recieved death threats as she exposes misogyny in the $25 billion video game industry.

How making the most successful video game ever changed Alexey Pajitnov’s life.

A profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

Superstar coders, like actors and athletes, now have agents.

The rapid rise of a wordless language.

“The Anonymous mystique had allowed a group of incompetents to hijack, then discredit, an important grassroots movement in the eyes of national media.”

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

On an African-American entrepreneur and race in Silicon Valley.

Mars One says it will send four people to colonize the planet by 2025. The company claims more than 200,000 have paid to apply for the privilege. But a deep look at Mars One’s plan and its finances reveals that not only is the goal a longshot, it might be a scam.

The grim world of outsourced content moderation.

The on and offline search for the prime suspect in last month’s celebrity nude photo hacking scandal.

“The idea for Handybook occurred to me when I was studying at Harvard. It was so hard to find a reliable cleaning service to tidy my apartment! You know?”

“There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.’

The Wikipedia origin story.

An author confronts her troll.