Drunk!
A good book can take you to some unexpected places. The whiskey room at a giant tech company furnished with colorful beanbags and foosball tables is one. When coders at Google hit a creative wall,…
A Quantum Life
They called him “The Professor” because by the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test.…
The New Breed
BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a…
Cat in the Agraharam
The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word. But you don't…
Coded Bias
IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn’t “see” her face. Until, that is, she…
Girl, Decoded
Rana el Kaliouby sketched by R. Rajesh of The Hindu As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with…