Platinum

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

It's a one-of-a-kind geological artifact. What's it worth? $100 million—or nothing.

My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance.

It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.

The telegram was a breakthrough in communication technology, which Vannevar Bush imagined could evolve in unprecedented ways.

Looking for connections in 2018

One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than […]

If a Pulitzer-nominated 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.

On April 3, the day The Outline was shut down and its editorial staff let go, my coworkers and I received hundreds of messages in public and private that went a long way toward making me feel better about suddenly losing my job during a pandemic. Weirdly, one of the sentiments that made me feel […]

Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.

The internet’s quintessential, paradoxical message is “Only Connect.”

An analysis of 2,000 books and how body parts are described, by gender.

When J.F.K. ran for President, a team of data scientists with powerful computers set out to model and manipulate American voters. Sound familiar?

For now, Scroll has produced barely any revenue for its partners, a slow uptake that has made some media executives question how much to promote it on their sites

Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.

How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.

An annotated reading list about and with annotation

Today's newsletters look more and more like the early days of blogging - but with one missing ingredient.

After 15 years at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy wanted out of the ad business. And he thinks getting out of ads is exactly what search engines need.

Nostalgia is a powerful balm for difficult times – and replaying skate videos is the one thing lifting my spirits amidst our current reality.

When it comes to watching sports on TV, it’s live … or it’s totally dead.

Email newsletters may be ready for a comeback. The fact is that despite the communications mechanism being old-school, publishers can put in less effort to get more views in an inbox than on a blog. AOL exec Bob Pittman has bet big on email newsletters, funding a number of media startups built aro…

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my tech and media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button: The last year has been a good one for newsletter publishing platform Substack. After securing a $15.3 million funding round in July 2019, it went on to lure hundreds of high profile writers onto its service. In late 2019, a group of prominent never Trumpers from the National Review and Weekly Standard

I'm still haunted by the mystery of my hometown's banana peel pile. What strange things can you just not shake?

Out on PC next month.

Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.

A new email service by the folks at Basecamp. Tagged with email, privacy, productivity.

This is the question that tormented Søren Kierkegaard, perhaps the first great philosopher to process our modern world—and it comes to life in Clare Carlisle's unconventional new biography.

Twitter is asking users what features they might be willing to pay for.

The Times' resident white savior has his heart in the right place. But his work falls short over and over again.