Calling JoyBubbles
As a blind kid growing up in the 1950s, Joe Engressia spent hours listening to the telephone. Then one day, he whistled into the receiver… and the telephone did something strange. Learn about your ad...
14 Jul 19min
Forecast, interrupted
Artificial intelligence is making weather forecasts faster and more precise. But the technology depends on something decidedly less futuristic: a vast government system for collecting data. We return ...
10 Jul 19min
Internet kids go to war
Olaf Hichwa spent his teenage years doing something that did not seem especially important: racing drones through cornfields. He got very good at it. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and suddenly people c...
7 Jul 21min
Watching the next war
Emil Kastehelmi has spent years studying Ukraine’s battlefield from hundreds of miles away, using satellite imagery and public data to track a war in constant motion. What he’s seeing isn’t just the s...
3 Jul 15min
The soundtrack of a new war
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Eugene Lesin was a poet. Today, he commands a unit that intercepts Russian drones. At first, this sounds like the story of one man whose life w...
30 Jun 25min
When ransomware went corporate
This week, we’re revisiting one of the stories that changed how we think about ransomware. It starts with an attack on a group of small towns in Texas and ends with the realization that cybercrime had...
26 Jun 16min
The leak
Most ransomware gangs are known only by what they leave behind. Conti was different. Thanks to one extraordinary leak, we can see the conversations that usually stay hidden: arguments, anxieties, plan...
23 Jun 21min
Alternate realities
For decades, we've treated the open internet as a fact of life. But what if it was just a phase? As governments, platforms, and algorithms carve the web into smaller and smaller realities, we ask inte...
19 Jun 17min
