5it

Forecasting Who Would Re-Offend

May 23, 2016

In today's edition: Queering tech, race and algorithms, Uber and the environment, Ursula Burns, the Manhattan that could not be built, and healthier old age....

Enthusiasts for Extraterrestrial Communication

April 21, 2016

In today's edition: Doubt, tuning neural networks, a literary history of word processing, Martian messaging, 15 billion transistors, and the current state of...

To Make Claims About Genetic Difference

April 11, 2016

In today's edition: in praise of maintenance, all the trees, Mumbai's housing, the Panthers and genetics, nutrition science, and the best damn story you may...

Bind the Citizens Together in Bricks and Mortar

April 7, 2016

In today's edition: the magnet in my finger, small AI, Beijing's urban plan, bringing down the highways, the history of seeds, and making your DIY brain...

Brilliant Negative Space

March 28, 2016

In today's edition: Afrofuturism, Mr. Robot, the hammer of choice, transient autism, fertility tracking, universal basic income, and predictive policing. ***...

Find Some Safe Space for Her Nascent Utopian Community

March 10, 2016

In today's edition: Things I read while on paternity leave. 1. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Taken together, a prescient...

A Dense, Perfectly Flat Plasma: A Highly Efficient Mirror

February 4, 2016

In today's edition: the transhumanist candidate, Equipay, VHS tape and lasers, the mutable genome, the opera of the telephone, a disappearing coastline, and...

Our Bodies Sometimes Extract

January 29, 2016

In today's edition: heartbreak, the problem of the calorie, gorilla guerrillas, The New Sound of Music, what Coke doesn't want you to say, and animal...

What Are These Vibrations For?

January 27, 2016

In today's edition: plane brain, FOIAing Slack, the ocean worlds approach to exploration, Minsky mind, and the impending end of humans winning any game. Real...

An Architectural Breathing Apparatus

January 26, 2016

In today's edition: content memories, speculative art air, the history and future of laundry, Minsky, inequality, and Trumps' tweeps. 1. The #content of...

Film Existed Primarily in Memory

January 25, 2016

In today's edition: the X-Files, Larry Page, Latino punk, what a film used to be, digital advertising problems, and the most sued tech company. 1. Science,...

The Material Conditions of Mundane Software Use

January 20, 2016

In today's edition: vocaloids, the end of parking, a flag of no nation, Oakland's tech, deep Silicon Valley history, and Powerpoint. We already co-create...

A Flat Screen Television Across the Pacific

January 15, 2016

In today's edition: a heartwarming story about drones, what eyes are, human-assisted search, Amazon freight, colorization, and vines. When the Real Future TV...

Covert Agency

January 14, 2016

In today's edition: a Stingray yarn, working around algorithms, computing master metaphors, evaluating moonshots, and the airport restroom of the future....

To Explore the Deeper Possibilities of The

January 12, 2016

In today's edition: revenge porn, feminist futures, the purpose of life, the future of work, Bowienet, and machines that get jokes. It's here! After the...

Which Biological Materials Are Collectively Owned

January 6, 2016

In today's edition: open-source sex hormones, the metastructure, brain reductionism, exploring segregation, simulating the sunset, and The Lonely Web. 1. A...

Quantifiable Information, Liquid Body Armour, Etc

January 4, 2016

In today's edition: fighting, stealing, machine learning for artists, neuroimmunology, and the mental health of farmers. 1. The future of war. "The future of...

Between Display and Environment

December 31, 2015

So, it's December 31. It's been a wild year. We made a TV show (which comes out next month!). And made the Real Future Fair happen in November. It's been a...

Inadvertence, Miscalculation, Misperception

November 11, 2015

In today's edition: portable benefits, stingrays, sleep music, accidental apocalypse, and digital work in the country's poorest places. 1. Unlinking benefits...

Hop in Any Unproven Aircraft

November 5, 2015

In today's edition: the New Deep South, slowed-down Chippunk, new spreadsheets, regional language, and two guys who will fly anything. ***The Real Future...

A Monitoring System on Top of a Hawaiian Volcano

November 4, 2015

In today's edition: the Tetris effect, the fragile web, what might happen to the Space Station, climate science history, and the smell of lactones. ***The...

The Position of Obstacles Seen in the Past

November 3, 2015

In today's edition: health and wealth, drones avoiding crashes, Pantone, Octavio Butler, and the thing you didn't know you'd been wondering about giraffes....

In Effect, Drinkable Nostalgia

November 2, 2015

In today's edition: the supply side, bug collectors, record media consumption, Kraftwerk's first show, and an AI pioneer's disappointment. ***The Real Future...

Impressive Concrete Spans

October 30, 2015

In today's edition: taste beyond the tongue, bacterial second-skins, trashlessness, hero dentists, and failed architecture. ***The Real Future Fair is coming...

Step 1: Create a Body Apparatus

October 28, 2015

In today's edition: a moon's plume, genesis, the value of weather data, the audio recordings of the Yahi, and embryonic spaces. ***The Real Future Fair is...

Cyborg-Looking Welded Sculptures of Flowering Plants

October 27, 2015

In today's edition: the sports machine, blockchain art, the machines' cell network, a mummy, and a parable of post-industrial life. ***The Real Future Fair...

The Egg Subsumes the Sperm

October 26, 2015

In today's edition: Google's RankBrain, a futures market as art, the Chinese Titanic, "life-style," and fertilization verbs. ***The Real Future Fair is...

Traced Back to Compromised CCTV Cameras

October 23, 2015

***The awesome New Hive working with us on art for the Real Future Fair, and they're looking for submissions. Alllssooo, from now until the Fair, I'll be...

Haunted by the Utopia It Never Quite Became

October 21, 2015

***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. The event is literally this newsletter incarnate! Cop tickets.*** 1. Why and how are...

Double the Amount of Muscle Mass by Deleting a Gene

October 19, 2015

***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. Go get some tickets.*** 1. Clay Shirky looks into Xiaomi and the state of the Chinese...

Bring Together Iconic and Lesser-Known Works

October 15, 2015

It's happening! The Real Future Fair, our biggest event of the year, is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. When I took this gig at Fusion, this is the...

Where Nobody Cares About Gender

October 6, 2015

1. The submarine fleet could be seen as underwater spaceships. "'We have a shared interest with the Navy in team resilience,' Brandon Vessey, a scientist...

Seamless, Efficient Plumbing for Digital Books

October 1, 2015

1. A believer in digital books loses the faith. "As a consumer of digital books I feel delighted, but as a reader, I feel crestfallen. All of the consumption...

Even Buildings Will Behave in the Same Vaguely Suspicious Way

September 28, 2015

1. A fascinating look at what the VW scandal really portends. "So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our...

It Doesn't Know What You Want Until You Teach It

September 16, 2015

1. An economist looks at the efficiency of the dark-web drug market. "The facilitator rents a carefully vetted Airbnb and arranges for a naive student to be...

Woken From His Nap by the Noise of the Drone

August 27, 2015

1. A fascinating anecdote about the discovery of a new edge-case for Google's self-driving cars: fixie riders. "[The Google car] apparently detected my...

A Mashup of Superheroes, Sci-fi, and Sometimes Romance

August 24, 2015

Don't forget: we're coming to New York with a brand-new live show called The Real Future of Deceit. Come meet me and the rest of my crew. 1. Energy headlines...

We Couldn't Believe Anything Was Ever Designed This Way

August 20, 2015

Remember how I told you about our first live show in Los Angeles last month? Well, we're coming to New York on Monday, September 14 with a brand-new live...

Like Branding, Chaos Magic Is Mostly Concerned with Inception

August 19, 2015

1. K-Hole, the (weird/fascinating/shingy) trend-forecasting firm that brought you the term "normcore," has released a new issue. This one is about magic,...

Their Own Strange Personalities, Different from Any Human

August 14, 2015

1. If you subscribe to this newsletter, you will almost certainly like the new USA show Mr. Robot. "Creator Sam Esmail, who is Egyptian, has said in...

Such a Network Is Potentially More Survivable

August 11, 2015

1. How cheap can solar electricity get? "What this graph shows is that, if solar electricity continues its current learning rate, by the time solar capacity...

I Prefer a Complete Captain

July 23, 2015

1. First-draft-of-history type story about Crispr, the gene-editing technology we've been talking about a lot. "These problems don't end with mosquitoes. One...

Bees as Efficient and Effective Homeland Security

July 21, 2015

1. A disability-themed anthology of speculative fiction. "The fifteen authors and nine artists in this volume bring us beautiful, speculative stories of...

Doppler Passbys & Moves at Various Speeds

July 15, 2015

1. Drone footage is a visual medium, but it doesn't have to be that way. "From a sound designers perspective I LOVE the idea I can control & perform...

The Island Had to be Completely Self-Sufficient

July 14, 2015

1. It's going to take the New Horizons spacecraft until late 2016 finish sending us all the Pluto data. "A major challenge for the New Horizons mission is...

Everything West of Interstate 5 Will Be Toast

July 13, 2015

1. The biggest of big ones—earthquakes, that is—is unthinkable and yet... "When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from...

The Abortion Pills That Were Delivered to Them by the Drones

June 30, 2015

Los Angeles friends: we're excited to announce that Peabody Award winner and former Director of The Moth Lea Thau will join our Real Future of Romance event...

The Emerging World of Teledildonics

June 17, 2015

Hey friends, I want to tell you about something awesome: I'm hosting a live journalism event about the Real Future of Romance in Los Angeles on July 8th,...

Among Quantum Physicists and Philosophers as a Kind of Underground Manuscript

June 15, 2015

1. Can you engineer the circadian rhythm? "Non-scientists generally think of “circadian clock” as a metaphoric term. There’s nothing literally ticking away...

The Future Is a Season

June 10, 2015

If you're keeping tabs on the literary technosatire mystery I sent out earlier this week, I've got a couple of updates and new clues for you. My request for...