I lack both the qualifications and the words to comment in general geopolitical terms on the horrifying explosion of violence in Palestine and Israel this month. Other than that there is never any justification for intentionally killing civilians, no matter how good an excuse you say you have for doing it, I do have some […]
Author: Faine Greenwood
Why I Care About Drones – Part One
The white object paused for a moment in the late-fall sky over Palo Alto, buzzing in place like an electric white hummingbird. Then, as I watched, it floated with eerie, perfect stability in the direction of the Stanford soccer fields, red and green lights blinking UFO-style on its undercarriage. I’d never seen anything man made, […]
Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 3
When Covid arrived, I was, like most reasonable people, terrified of the virus. I was also absolutely terrified by the glittering, data-hoovering opportunity that a global pandemic represented for the always-hungry likes of Facebook and Google. My fears about how Big Tech might take advantage of this planet-sized tragedy only solidified after it came out […]
Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 2
It was April 2016, and Mark Zuckerberg, clad in his usual incredibly expensive cotton t-shirt, told the world that his website – and thus, the entire Internet – was headed to a video-filled future, where live broadcasts and snappy, “snackable” content would push out the old, boring world of words. Mark told the world that […]
Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 1
I want to tell you a real bummer of a story about Facebook. The kind of no-fun, downer tale that Alex Mosseri, the head of Threads, Meta’s new social media service, said he doesn’t want his website to support. I arrived in Myanmar for the first time in November 2012, the same week that the […]
The World is Dependent on Drones Made by Just One Chinese Company – And That’s a Problem (And More)
What’s the Deal With All These Chinese Drones? I’ve been watching the rise of China’s DJI consumer drone company for over a decade, ever since DJI launched the cheap drone epoch we’re living in today with the release of the original Phantom back in 2013. The Phantom was revolutionary, the first drone that pretty much […]
Why People Are Afraid of Drones, Part One: Drones are Inscrutable
I have long been fascinated by why people are so disquieted by drones. While pretty much every one alive in 2019 experiences some degree of acute tech anxiety, drones, as a category of objects, still inspire an unusual amount of disquiet – much more so than, say, an iPhone. This distrust extends to both consumer […]
Patriotic Lobsters: An American Mystery
We regularly drive from Boston to Southern Vermont to visit my partner’s family, up through the Green Mountains. The little two-lane road is deeply atmospheric, in that creepy Ichabod-Crane sort of way: it passes through a few little villages with economies that appear to be largely dependent on flea markets and small-batch artisan pottery. It […]
Japan Blog Post: Narisawa
I found out about Narisawa a while ago on one of those Best Restaurants in The World For Terrible Snobs websites. I’d been looking for high-end restaurants in Tokyo for our upcoming family trip, and was struck by a picture that appeared to show people eating a mossy chunk of bracken in the forest. It […]
Tokyo Day 2: 7-11, the Meiji Shrine, and Harajuku
When I can’t sleep because I’m jet-lagged, I like to go for a walk, particularly in those early-morning hours before the streets fill with people. By 6:00 in the morning in Tokyo, I was wandering around the Shiodome area trying to figure out where the 7-11 was. I had two reasons for this: one, 7-11 […]