Features

• The Real-World AI Issue

Meet the scientists who are training AI to diagnose mental illness

What if a brain scan could tell you what medicine treats your depression?

Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

Prime and punishment

An academic reported sexual harassment. Her university allegedly retaliated

She claims her once-promising career was sidelined

How Google Earth led a team of scientists to discover an untouched mountaintop rainforest

Secret Garden

How the shared family computer protected us from our worst selves

Bad romance

To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm

• The Real-World AI Issue

Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

Skeptics say full autonomy could be farther away than the industry admits

The unlikely story of a meteorite hunter who became a fugitive from the law

The rock that fell to Earth

California’s largest lake is dying, leaving toxic dust behind

Dust rising

Investigation: Predatory behavior runs rampant in Facebook’s addiction support groups

Huge groups of vulnerable people looking for help are a rehab marketer’s dream

Meet the scientists keeping a global watch for nuclear explosions

If anyone blows up a nuke, this is how we’ll know

Inside Waymo’s strategy to grow the best brains for self-driving cars

The Google spinoff has a head start in AI, but can they maintain the lead?

The internet made sex work safer. Now Congress has forced it back into the shadows

Offline and back into the dark

In Egypt, dating apps are a refuge for the LGBTQ community, but they can also be a trap

As LGBTQ Egyptians flock to apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr, they face an unprecedented threat from police and blackmailers who use the same apps to find targets. The apps themselves have become both evidence of a crime and a means of resistance.

OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong

Meet the ‘Lady Gaga of Mathematics’ helming France’s AI task force

A spider brooch-wearing mathematician

Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

How the $36 billion video game industry burns out its best employees

The story of the internet, as told by Know Your Meme

Ten years of documenting memes will teach you more than you’d ever want to know about people, truth, beauty, death, and ‘tits or gtfo’

Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology

Even city council members don’t know about the program

When whisper networks let us down

How communities struggle — and sometimes fail — to stop sexual assault

If climate change wrecks your city, can it sue Exxon?

Scientists can now link disasters to climate change, opening the door to lawsuits against fossil fuel companies

China’s feminist movement braves a government crackdown on #MeToo

It’s the latest battle for equal rights in China, but it won’t be the last