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Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel

Editor-in-Chief

When Nilay Patel was four years old, he drove a Chrysler into a small pond because he was trying to learn how the gearshift worked. Years later, he became a technology journalist. He has thus far remained dry.

Nilay was a co-founder of The Verge and the site's first Managing Editor before taking over as Editor-in-Chief. He also was the acting Managing Editor for the launch of Vox.com. Before that, he spent four years as Managing Editor of Engadget, where he drew upon his background as a lawyer to report and explain complex legal situations in everyday terminology — a niche that led to SAY Media naming Nilay one of 10 "voices that matter" in technology journalism.

Nilay co-hosts the Webby Award-winning Vergecast podcast, and has appeared on CNN, CNN International, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, Sky News, NHK, G4TV, TWiT, and many others. Nilay received an AB in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003 and his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2006.

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External Link
Sports Illustrated gets a new lease on life.

Minute Media, which operates an even less dangerous version of Medium for pro athletes called The Players’ Tribune, is picking up the contract to run Sports Illustrated after the previous operators published AI-written content, fired the CEO, laid off the entire staff, and said it would close the print magazine. This all really happened!

Anyway, Minute Media specializes in “short form sports content creation,” and its CEO Asaf Peled says tells the New York Times that SI will somehow continue to do in-depth journalism even though it is “an exception to our core strategy.” Sure.


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TikTok
“I’m an old man. Get me that Lenovo.”

If we’re going to start banning software, let’s start banning software.


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The Verge
If Congress wants to ban TikTok it should probably show us the evidence of Chinese interference.

We’ve heard so much about the dangers of TikTok from both sides of the aisle, and even had Trump flip-flop his position ostensibly over the political calculations of banning an app 170 million Americans use. But what exactly did the House select committee see in its secure briefing that led them to vote 50-0 in favor of the bill that would ban the app? If this thing is going to move forward in the Senate it seems like we should at least know the basics.


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Youtube
“I’m just not going to go into the details about the data that was used.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern has a deep look at Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator — and with it, an interview with CTO Mira Murati, who steadfastly refuses to clarify what data was used to train the system. No wonder, since the explosion of copyright lawsuits against AI companies is quickly becoming an existential risk to them all. 4:25 in the video below:


How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka

The author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture discusses how we might be able to cultivate our own tastes once more.

Figma CEO Dylan Field will be on stage with me at SXSW on March 9th.

Lots to talk about — life after the Adobe deal went away, of course, but much more interestingly there’s a lot going on with the web, design, and AI, and Figma’s right in the middle of it. We’ll see you there! (And check out the rest of the Vox Media Podcast Stage schedule, it’ll be a party.)


A promo image showing Dylan Field and Nilay Patel with information about their SXSW Decoder interview on March 9th.

Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future

On this special episode of Decoder, Complexly co-founder and YouTuber Hank Green turns the tables on Nilay Patel.