What's New

There are certain seminal moments in history, and July 9, 1981, should surely stand among them. That was the day Nintendo officially began selling Donkey Kong to arcades—and introduced the world to a mustachioed little fellow named Jumpman. Jumpman was a simple soul with a simple talent: jumping. He jumped over barrels thrown at him by the game’s eponymous gorilla villain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every once in awhile a new science show comes on TV. I find some of them pretty good and others not that great. I was pleasantly surprised to find Outrageous Acts of Danger on the Science channel features a reasonable amount of science and makes it interesting. It does this by making otherwise common science demonstration absurdly dangerous. One recent episode riffed on the classic physics demo in which you hang a heavy ball (bowling balls are common) on a wire and release it near someone's head. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What has befallen the New York City subway in the past few years—climbing ridership and plummeting on-time performance—is like a bad stomach bug. It is nigh impossible to track down the exact culprit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech IPOs have been known to soar. Exponentially so. That fabled hockey-stick curve is the thing that every early investor and company founder hopes will appear on a stock chart after going public. Anything short of it, and the narrative around the company can be a resounding “meh. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this week, the New York Times posted a comprehensive accounting of President Donald Trump’s lies. It is, among other things, a triumph of web design. Orange, san-serif dates turn each falsehood into bricks in a vast wall. Scrolling turns the wall into a wave, a tsunami of mendacity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Happy long weekend, friends. How’s it going? Feeling rested? After last week, you deserve a break. And that's not even because everything that happened last week was bad—Jay-Z did drop a new album to apologize to Beyoncé and Germany did legalize same-sex marriage, after all—it was all just kind of a lot. In other words, it was another seven days on the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smartphones are amazing. And smartphones are terrible. It's a central paradox of modern life: The devices that help us find rides and friends and food and sex and adorable puppies are the same ones that disconnect us from the life in front of our eyes, kill our attention span, give us FOMO, and turn the world into a series of torrential feeds we can't stop trying and failing to keep up with. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I don’t have many pet peeves in the kitchen but washing plastic storage bags might just top that tiny list. As the guy who started his high school’s recycling program, I just can’t bring myself to throw them away, but damn, those bags are no fun to clean. Take your pick: washing them in the sink leaves the back of your had covered in cooking juices and oil while sticking them in the dishwasher turns them into crumpled bags with pools of cloudy water. Yuck. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smartwatches have outshipped Swiss watches for several years. Before an uptick in March, the Federation of Swiss Watches had posted a 20-month-straight decline in exports, part of a disastrous downward sales trend. If the numbers continue on their current trajectory, these digitally enabled wearable computers may take the lead in actual sales dollars by 2020. The mechanical watch world has been slow to respond to this pressure, despite plenty of prodding from consumers and industry retailers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here's a sentence I never expected to write: Drag and drop changes everything. Today, Apple releases the public beta of iOS 11, the latest version of the operating system driving the world's iPhones and iPads. These early releases are SOP and help Cupertino ensure its software is fully baked before launch. Anyone with a taste for risk and patience for bugginess can install iOS 11 now, ahead of its actual release this fall. I've been using iOS 11 on a new 10.5-inch iPads for the better part of a week. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices