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…
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…
Leopards in Mumbai City
So, can people and leopards coexist in Mumbai? I ask Vidya Athreya, an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India. She studies human-leopard interactions in heavily populated areas. Her research formed the plot of the Bollywood…
Elephant Conservation Conundrum
Those who grew up in southern India may fondly recall temple elephants with their tinkling neck-bells. As children, we didn't notice the shackles on their legs. Elephants have iconic status in India, they were used…