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There’s not much overlap between the America that President Obama described on stage at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night and the one Donald Trump outlined in Cleveland last week. The country Trump painted during his turn in the spotlight is clouded in corruption, crime, and ever-present threats. In that version, America is a place where terrorists are always at the doorstep, where you’ll never find a job, where immigrants pose a threat to public safety, where the whole world is the enemy. This America has never endured such darkness. It’s little wonder, then, that Trump promises to restore America to what it once was—some better past when it was strong, proud, safe, and great. In his slogan “Make America Great Again,” the most important word is “again.” The America that Obama depicted was the emotional, spiritual, and directional opposite. Where Trump described a national nightmare, President Obama articulated the American Dream. Where Trump’s wo...

Tim Bryant and Brian Knudson spent two years preparing for the Cyber Grand Challenge, a $55 million hacking contest cooked up by Darpa , the visionary research operation inside the U.S. Defense Department. But when the contest begins next Thursday evening in a ballroom at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, Darpa won’t let them participate. That’s because the contest pits code against code. It’s a battle of autonomous systems designed to identify security holes in software programs they’ve never encountered—and patch those holes on the fly. Working with others at defense contractor Raytheon, Bryant and Knudson spent those two years building such a system. Today, contest organizers will roll a supercomputer into the Paris Hotel that includes the latest version of Raytheon’s creation, and once that happens, Bryant, Knudson, and the rest of the ten-person team, dubbed Deep Red, can’t guide their system or change it in any way. They become bystanders...

To overcome its fear of the future as a big dumb pipe, Verizon continues to look to the past. Last year, it spent $4.4 billion for AOL and its surprisingly advanced ad tech. Today, it’s spending another $4.8 billion on Yahoo, a surprisingly popular content company. That’s a lot of money for companies that have devolved into punchlines over the last several years. But it’s also Verizon’s best shot at staying relevant. Today’s Yahoo acquisition isn’t any kind of pivot. It’s not even really a surprise; Verizon has reportedly been eyeing the crown jewel of ’90s Internet for months. It’s a continuation of an ongoing strategy to become more than just a shuttler of bits and bytes from one place to another. In a world of increasing (and increasingly warranted) regulation of Internet service providers, content and ad companies like AOL and Yahoo are more than nostalgia plays. They’re a way forward. A Smart Pipe Telecom companies today are grippeded by the fear of being reduc...

When I was twelve years old, I was fascinated by psychic powers. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a provocative notion, to be able to reach out and push things around, hear what other people are thinking, or tell the future, all just by using your mind. I read everything I could find about ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition—the whole gamut of mental abilities that stretched beyond the ordinary. I was a big fan of comic books, where all the heroes were endowed with superpowers, but also of science-fiction and fantasy stories, not to mention straightforwardly “scientific” accounts of what purported to be evidence for human capabilities beyond the normal. I wanted to penetrate the mystery, figure out how this kind of thing could really work. So eventually I decided on the obvious course of action—I would perform my own experiments. I started with small things like dice and coins, placed carefully on a smooth tabletop. Then I just … thought at them. I conce...

The late afternoon sun was beginning to settle into a one of those early spring New York City chills when I heard it behind me: Woooo! Wooooohaaahoooo! Wooooo! A brief pause, and then, alarmingly, another Wooo-woooo! The sound, a kind of cross between a yodel and a scream, was coming from Michael DeLuca, a 21-year old New York University student standing with his arms flung high in the air. He had a camera slung around his neck and a Bernie Sanders sticker on his chest. DeLuca and his friend Cristina Gnecco, also 21, were flush up against a metal barricade, surrounded by some 27,000 people who gathered in Washington Square Park last week to support Sanders before tomorrow’s New York primary. In a city that's home to the bright lights of Broadway, arguably the hottest tickets in town (ok, with the exception of Hamilton ) have been Sanders' rallies. But it wasn’t the Vermont senator that DeLuca was positively losing his shit over at that very moment. It was ...

Donald Trump’s plan to kick 11 million undocumented immigrants out of the United States over the course of two years sounds impractical. How impractical? Well, for starters, it would eviscerate the economy and reduce the country’s GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars. So: pretty impractical! That’s the conclusion of a report released today by the center-right think tank American Action Forum, which quantified just how much labor and productivity would be lost if Trump’s plans became reality. The group’s conclusions are terrifying—and they’re supposed to be. This week, Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, leaving #NeverTrump moderate GOPers with the unenviable task of convincing their more conservative colleagues that a Trump presidency would be a disaster for their own pro-business agenda. Relying on data rather than morality, the AAF paints a picture of a dystopian future under President Trump in which deported immigrants would leave a gaping hole ...

Billionaire investor and Facebook board member Peter Thiel has never shied away from contrarian ideas. He thinks kids should drop out of college to launch a startup. He’s backed efforts to build floating cities in international waters. But in the liberal bastion that is San Francisco, Thiel’s latest move may be the most daring yet: Thiel is going to be a California delegate for Donald Trump. On Monday, Trump filed his slate of delegates for California, and right there on the list for Trump’s 12th Congressional District picks is Peter Thiel. That Thiel would support any Republican candidate is not all that surprising. In 2012, he was a major backer for Ron Paul, and last summer, he donated $2 million to Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC. In the techtopia of Silicon Valley, Thiel is certainly not alone in his libertarian beliefs. And yet, Trump is a different kind of candidate. He has become a particularly divisive figure among tech elites, particularly for his stance on ...

Donald Trump has proven a lot of people wrong, and not just because a year ago today none of us—perhaps not even Trump—would have imagined in our wildest fever dreams that he would wake up May 4, 2016 as the presumptive Republican nominee. It’s also because his win in Indiana last night, which prompted Ted Cruz to drop out of the race, suggests that data—the kind Cruz fastidiously gathered—might not matter all that much to a presidential campaign. After the 2012 election, the prevailing theory was that data had been President Obama’s secret weapon against Mitt Romney. The campaign’s number crunchers sat in a separate space called The Cave, rubbing elbows with the likes of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and identifying key voters using an internal database named Narwhal. After Obama’s win, the occupants of the Cave got a lot of the credit, and strategists predicted that no candidate could ever win again without ample data on their side. But those people were wron...

Facebook may be the latest Silicon Valley company to be accused of political bias this election cycle. But it’s not the first. And it most certainly won’t be the last. The US Senate Commerce Committee is asking Facebook for answers after a Gizmodo report alleged that the company’s news curators have been deliberately suppressing conservative news from surfacing in its Trending Topics. In a letter sent to CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the committee asks for a thorough explanation of how Trending Topics work, what the guidelines are for determining which topics to include or remove, under what circumstances a curator might inject a story into Trending Topics, and more. Tom Stocky, Facebook’s head of Trending Topics, has already responded to the original report, writing that reviewers are trained to “disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.” Still, questions abound about just what exactly constitutes “junk.” The fact is...

Bernie Sanders On the Panama Papers: Told You So   Back in 2011, Bernie Sanders told the Senate that Panama was “a world leader when it comes to allowing large corporations and wealthy Americans to evade US taxes.” This week, those words are sounding eerily prophetic, and the Sanders campaign, for one, would like to remind you of that fact. As the world reels from the so-called Panama Papers leak , which exposed the offshore tax havens of world leaders from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Icelandic Prime Minister Davíð Gunnlaugsson, Sanders is calling attention to his opposition to the 2011 Panama Trade Agreement. “I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one,” Sanders said in a statement today. “I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.” As president, Sanders says he would terminate the agreement within his first six months in office an...

I Cultivate the Brand Early last December, two days after Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, the married couple’s landlord invited the media to tour their home. Inside the sparsely furnished town house, news crews trained their cameras on the dirty dishes that filled the kitchen sink and the Arabic-language books that were stacked in a closet. But each journalist inevitably gravitated to the blue-carpeted room that belonged to the killers’ 6-month-old daughter, now an orphan since her parents had elected to die in a shoot-out with police. The image of the baby’s crib, piled high with stuffed animals and fuzzy blankets, became an instant symbol of the unfathomability of Farook and Malik’s crime. The crib’s emotional resonance with the American public was not lost on the editors of Dabiq , the English-language magazine that the so-called Islamic State regularly publishes...