Clive Thompson

A surprisingly great way to pull your brain away from your keyboard See that car above? I just made that. With my new Lego set. Which I now carry around town. I am in my mid-50s, by the way. I should maybe unpack this a bit. The other day I was in a…

I wasn’t careful with how I rode, and my body rebelled In the summer of 2022 my teenage son and I cycled from Brooklyn to Montreal. It was a sort of a capstone project. For almost a decade, we’d been going on rides of increasingly epic lengths. When…

Recently, my six-year-old MacBook Pro was staggering on its last legs. One of the chief symptoms of its impending demise? The battery would croak with barely two hours of use. I’d replaced that battery two years before, and already it was collapsing…

Do large language-models help people do better work? Many employees in white-collar cubicle-land think so. In a recent Fishbowl study, 30% of officefolk said they used ChatGPT to help do their work. But does one actually see a real benefit from using…

I’ve been trying to write climate stories for 30 years. Now editors are getting on board I was a teenager in 1988 when James Hansen gave his congressional testimony on climate change. It was the first time I’d seen the dangers of greenhouse gases…

Four bottom-of-the-barrel tools I love Are Apple Airpods worth the cash? A set of the cheapest second-gen Airpods are $130, and the third-gen ones are $180; a “pro” set, $249. One can buy knockoff brands for much less! But it’s clear that Apple’s…

The “Dutch Cycling Lifestyle” app replaces cars with plants, bikes and pedestrians That picture above? It’s a before-and-after image of a road near where I live. The picture was modified by “Dutch Cycling Lifestyle”, a fun new web app where you…

My $200, 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks That laptop above? It’s the most indestructible, nonstop, won’t-die computer I’ve ever owned. Full. Stop. I’m going to write a whole damn post about it but the tl;dr is … If you want a…

The meditative art of describing images in words See that image above? When I posted it, I wrote some alt-text for it — i.e. a description of what’s in the image. Here’s what I wrote: A group of alphabetic dice spelling out the words “ALT TEXT”. They…

Maybe we should just start sticking icons on this stuff So, there’s a ton of AI-generated text in our lives. Back in January, a Fishbowl survey of 4,500 professionals found that 30% were using ChatGPT at work; ten months on, I’d imagine that number…

Cassette tapes have a weirdly Internet-like vibe. By which I mean: Back in the 70s and 80s — when they were the hot new form of media — cassettes brought a quality to everyday life that presaged the creative spirit of the early web. I was around back…

Trees aren’t the only thing can help reduce atmospheric CO2 Trees are charismatic. They’re gorgeous, right? Particularly the old ones. Towering majestically into the sky, encanopying our roads, each tree is a self-replicating fractal pattern — with…

Anyone with a screwdriver can upgrade a Framework laptop — tossing in a faster processor Two years ago, I published a blog post entitled “A Gloriously Fixable Laptop”. It was in praise of the recently-released laptops by the new tech firm Framework.…

Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few laments for the state of social media. Several long-term users have busted out essays concluding that today’s social sites have become, for them, deeply depressing affairs. Over at The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel…

In which I worry that I’m letting my guard down while cycling Back in the spring, I wrote about getting hit by a car while riding my bike. The accident happened back in 1992, when I’d just gotten my first job out of college and was riding to work. I…

It looked fast — but it took six decades I love a good story about a scientific breakthrough. One of the best I’ve ever read came out this week. It’s by Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller in the New York Times, where they wrote a long feature…

“Ozymandias” has been called “the most metal poem ever”, and I can find no way to disagree. It’s a magnificent riff on the vanity of extreme ambition, and how quickly humanity’s brief accomplishments are destroyed by the march of time. You’ve…

Hollywood and tech firms want to reduce culture to a slurry of interchangeable bits. Let’s not help them out I remember the first time I started hearing the word “content”. It was back in the late 1990s, during the delirious height of the “dot com”…

The advent of AI deepfakes means we’ll waste endless hours arguing about what’s real Back in 2019, the legal scholars Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney defined a useful concept: The “liar’s dividend”. They were worried about how deepfakes could…

They boost literacy, kickstart foreign film, and improve comprehension So: Subtitles are hot now! You likely knew this already; you may well use them yourself. But this is a big shift from TV- and movie-viewing when I was young. Back in the 80s,…