Notes from a Burmese Prison
This story is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil and is not compatible with RSS readers. But you can (and should) read it at The Verge’s website.
Features
The tragedy of Supernatural
When you picture a virtual reality headset user, you’re probably not picturing someone like Sherry Dickson. At 69, the snowy-haired, retired elementary school teacher hops into her Meta Quest headset five days a week, for roughly 60 to 90 minutes at a time. She’s not attending live concerts or watching immersive films. Dickson, a fitness […]
How to fireproof a city
Down the street from the Los Angeles Angels’ stadium in Anaheim, a crowd gathers to watch two homes burn. In less than 30 minutes, one structure is reduced to its smoldering, blackened wood frame, while the other, thanks to simple changes to its design, is remarkably unscathed. Of course, this was the point of the […]
I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows
It was an overcast January morning in 2025 the day I decided to delete my operating system. The Ubuntu installer warned me that it would remove everything on my hard drive, permanently wiping the entire Windows 10 installation I’d been running for years at that point. I hesitated for a second – maybe I should […]
Chipwrecked
The AI data center build-out, as it currently stands, is dependent on two things: Nvidia chips and borrowed money. Perhaps it was inevitable that people would begin using Nvidia chips to borrow money. As the craze has gone on, I have begun to worry about the weaknesses of the AI data center boom; looking deeper […]
Feeding the machine
When he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. […]
The war on disinformation is a losing battle
As he called the House Judiciary Committee into session on a cold and snowy February day in Washington, DC, Chairman Jim Jordan was ready to take a victory lap. American free speech had been critically threatened, and now it was saved – in large part thanks to him and his committee. “What a difference a […]
How the creator economy destroyed the internet
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has the most popular YouTube account with over 450 million subscribers, or a little over 1 in 16 people in the world. His success with high-production, high-output stunt videos have made him the aspirational model for independent content creators everywhere: the actualization of the promise that, thanks to the […]
Stop, Shop, and Scroll
In 1914 Joseph Pilates was sitting in a World War I-era internment camp watching his fellow inmates waste away when he had an idea. As he later recounted to a journalist, the skinny prison courtyard cats kept spry and limber, stretching and moving even as they starved — could the German citizens interned in the […]
The new silicon valley (literally)
Arizona’s economy was once dominated by the “five C’s”: cotton, cattle, citrus, copper, and climate. But a new C has emerged that could grow to overshadow the rest: chips. New semiconductor manufacturing facilities are springing up across the greater Phoenix area, stretching across blocks of new roads with names like “Processor Parkway” and “Transistor Terrace.” […]