The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was captured on video, not once but half a dozen times. As we try to understand why a police officer continued compressing a man’s neck and spine for minutes after he’d lost consciousness, we have footage from security cameras at Cup Foods, where Floyd allegedly paid for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. As we wrestle with the...

President Donald Trump’s threat last week to overturn Section 230—the free speech law that shields social-media platforms from liability for what their users post—may have been empty and unworkable. But the uproar about it, sparked by Twitter’s decision to label two of the president’s tweets as misinformation, immediately tapped into two of the left’s and the right’s favorite...

Today our country crumbles under the weight of two pandemics: coronavirus and police brutality.  Both wreak physical and psychological violence. Both disproportionately kill and debilitate black and brown people. And both are animated by technology that we design, repurpose, and deploy—whether it’s contact tracing, facial recognition, or social media. We often call on technology to help...

Ask Zhu Kaiyu about his factory, and he can rattle off a series of statistics meant to impress: 15,000 square meters, 800 employees, 300 machines, 5 million articles of clothing sold per year. Zhu opened his factory for knitted apparel in Dongguan, Guangdong province, China in 2002. He’s proud to be the trusted manufacturing partner for foreign companies like Full Beauty Brands, the owner of...

SpaceX achieved something historic this past weekend with its Demo-2 launch. The company’s Crew Dragon vehicle became the first private spacecraft to take humans into orbit—a milestone for NASA, the American space industry, and the company itself. Afterwards, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters that the mission had helped establish the success of a new business model, where NASA...

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. We’re making this episode—like much of the rest of our coronavirus coverage—free to everyone. “The reality is that there are two ways to look at responding” to a…