The US Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 legal decision that enshrined abortion as a constitutional right. Ending federal protection for abortion access across the US will have lasting health, emotional, and financial repercussions for millions of people and casts American reproductive rights back 50 years. The final decision ends weeks of speculation...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI Around a year and a half ago, Yann LeCun realized he had it wrong. LeCun, who is chief scientist at Meta’s…

Around a year and a half ago, Yann LeCun realized he had it wrong.  LeCun, who is chief scientist at Meta’s AI lab and one of the most influential AI researchers in the world, had been trying to give machines a basic grasp of how the world works—a kind of common sense—by training neural networks to predict what was going to happen next in video clips of everyday events. But guessing...

In 1959, in a short essay called “The Great Game to Come,” a little-known Dutch visual artist named Constant Nieuwenhuys described a new utopian city—one that he was soon to dub “New Babylon.” “The technical inventions that humanity has at its disposal today,” he presciently stated, “will play a major role in the construction of the ambiance-cities of the future.” Like nearly...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How to retrofit a city The scars and pockmarks of the aging apartments and housing units under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t immediately communicate the idea of innovation.…

The scars and pockmarks of the aging apartments and housing units under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t immediately communicate the idea of innovation. The largest landlord in the city, housing nearly 1 in 16 New Yorkers, NYCHA has seen its buildings literally crumble after decades of deferred maintenance and poor…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The world’s biggest surveillance company you’ve never heard of You may never have heard of Hikvision, but chances are you’ve already been captured by one of its millions of cameras. The Chinese company’s…

Every company is collecting data, whether it’s consumer buying habits, demographic data from third-party sources or insights from weather patterns. That’s good news—it wasn’t long ago that this kind of critical information was mostly ignored. But it’s not enough: companies must now start using that data to run every part of their business. There’s more progress to be made:...

In 1930, the telegraph giant Western Union put the finishing touches on its new crown jewel: a 24-story art deco building located at 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. Soon after, over a million telegraphs each day shuttled in and out, carried by a network of cables, pneumatic tubes, and 30 employees in roller skates who sped across the building’s linoleum floors. Today, much of it is home...