Clive Thompson

Stretchy seaweed, reverse vending machines, QR-coded take-out boxes: They’re how we can break society’s absurd addiction to single-use plastics.

Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.

Five years ago, the city of Queens, New York, announced that it would be putting bike lanes onto a stretch of Skillman Ave—and removing 116 parking spots. Cyclists loved the plan, but local business owners went ballistic. Taking out those parking…

In 1950, Alan Turing famously created what’s now known as the Turing Test, a way of deciding whether a computer is intelligent. If the computer could converse so fluently that it passed as a human? Presto: That’s artificial intelligence. Turing’s…

I used to worry about using too much electricity. If one of my family members left their bedroom and forgot to turn off the air conditioning? I’d snap at them: “What, you want the planet to cook extra fast?” If I found lights left on overnight, I’d…

Ever since he was a kid in Sweden, Peter Ternström wanted to make a sci-fi-style flying machine. In 1983 he saw Return of the Jedi five times and dreamed of zooming through the forest of Endor on a levitating speeder. But as a smart young nerd he…

For decades, the spreadsheet has been the least sexy form of consumer software. Necessary? Sure. Critical to the drudgery of running a business, doing your banking, or figuring out a financial plan? 100 percent. But an exciting, innovative piece of…

Code pours from Feross Aboukhadijeh’s fingers. As a devotee of the open source software movement, he has written immensely popular web apps, peer-to-peer file exchanges, and more than 100 other pieces of code that he has given away, all in the 10…

Back in 2010, Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman had a weird idea: a website where you write down the stuff you accomplished that day, and which then emails you a summary. It would be a productivity tool that worked by a neat psychological hack,…

Sometimes I’m really wrong. In 2008 I heard about a funky new search engine called DuckDuckGo, took one glance, and predicted it would die a quick death. After all, back then Google was on the rise and the fields of tech were littered with the…

White-collar drones complain about going to meetings. But they also complain about not going to them: If you miss a crucial discussion, you’re out of the loop. Nobody takes good notes, people forget what was said or remember selectively. Information…

One year into our all-remote existence, executives at white-collar companies are realizing two things. One is that they’re pleased (stunned, even) by how productive employees have been. They’d worried that “work from home” would turn into “Netflix…

In the dismal early days of the pandemic, a vaccine seemed depressingly far off. Historically, the average time to develop a new vaccine was 10 years—far too long for our current emergency. But then something happened to shift things into overdrive:…

While you're surfing the web, you ought to thank Jacob Thornton for making it so pretty. He's a programmer who, along with web designer Mark Otto, created Bootstrap, free software that the pros use to make their sites look spiffy. If you've ever…

When Haley, a sophomore at Indiana University, took a test for an accounting class in September, she—like many college students during this pandemic—was sitting not in a classroom but in her bedroom. And instead of a teacher watching for signs of…

When QAnon emerged in 2017, the game designer Adrian Hon felt a shock of recognition. QAnon, as you very likely know, is the right-wing conspiracy theory that revolves around a figure named Q. This supposedly high-ranking insider claims that the deep…

Mark Sargent saw instantly that his situation had changed for the worse. A voluble, white-haired 52-year-old, Sargent is a flat-earth evangelist who lives on Whidbey Island in Washington state and drives a Chrysler with the vanity plate “ITSFLAT.”…

Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and dreamed of creating a tech startup. “I had a zillion ideas,” he tells me. But he'd been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties you to your employer. A green card that…

Danny van Kooten is a Dutch programmer who decided to reduce his carbon output by no longer eating beef or flying. Then, five months ago, he made a change that had an even bigger impact—and it took only a few keystrokes. Van Kooten is the author of a…

Dani Bell was a British copywriter who hankered for her own marketing startup. Like many founders today, though, she faced a roadblock. She couldn't code. Normally, an entrepreneur in that situation would need to spend money, and maybe even raise it,…