Journal

Say goodbye to Skype calls. Here are four ways VR technology is already shaping up to change the future of work.

The scene: An empty conference room, five years from now. You sit down at the table with your tablet and put on a pair of lightweight glasses. Suddenly the room comes to life. To your left, you see your colleague Jessica, who’s joining from New York. To the right, the company CEO, Beth, who’s currently in Atlanta. Across the table from you is Hassan, who’s joining from his home office in London.

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Award-winning photojournalist Paula Bronstein shares what’s in her camera bag, from SLR to software.

Anyone can take a photo: just point your camera and fire away. Taking a photo that transcends language to communicate dread, happiness, or heartache is, however, a singular talent. It requires compassion, a patient eye, and a lifetime of practice.

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Meet Magento, the biggest e-commerce company you’ve never heard of and the CEO who navigated its sale.

Magento is the archetype of the company whose products you use but you’ve never heard of: Their open-source platform is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce sites and corporate clients around the world, ranging from the biggest of the big box stores to corporate titans like Nike to small mom-and-pop retail stores. Magento works quietly in the background, making sure that when you order a product, the workflow of finding it in the warehouse and shipping it to you begins. Over $50 billion in gross merchandise sales goes through Magento’s platforms each year, the company says.

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Pitching free ideas may seem like the cost of doing business nowadays, but there are better ways to land coveted projects.

Unpaid pitching: a controversial topic in the creative industry. For some, unpaid pitching is simply part of the business — a necessary evil to win new clients and projects. For others, it’s seen as an exploitative practice, and the movement against it has gained significant momentum in the industry.

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Couture gets (even more) competitive: Fashion labels want to win your style support at the Rio Games.

The strength, the majesty, the glory of the Olympic Games. Even the most hardened of cynics melt at the spectacle. And the fashion industry is no exception.

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Flying over volcanoes, buzzing off cliffs, and floating over sunbathers—these are some of the best photos taken by drone this year.

Anyone who’s seen a drone buzzing around a park or public event has probably felt a bit violated—what is this robot doing taking photos of me? But as I look at the winners the 2016 Dronestagram contest, I’m feeling more patient with our new photographic overlords.

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Even the scientists who make our most complicated software are sometimes baffled by how it works—and, more frighteningly, by how it breaks.

Remember a few months ago when Microsoft produced a friendly AI chatbot named Tay, designed to interact like a 19-year-old? It was a social and marketing experiment that quickly morphed into a social nightmare. Within a day, bombarded by hateful Twitter trolls, Tay had turned into a white supremacist—tweeting racist and offensive statements—and Microsoft had to shut it down.

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Games that incorporate the physical world can short-circuit the dissociative aspect of online gaming: “You’re not just avatars on a screen.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, dozens of Pokémon Go players are swarming outside San Francisco’s Beach Chalet pub—rumored to be the best spot in the city to catch a Pikachu—and at least one-third of them are women and girls.

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With its massive catalog of images, Firehorse Films reveals a more human side of life in a tumultuous region.

Now more than ever, we need to better understand life in the Middle East. In the news, images of horror and desperation predominate: black flags, bombed-out buildings, shell-shocked refugees. But in the background and often out of view, there are reminders of hope—in art, in history, in the daily beauty of gathering over meals with friends and family.

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With a little mindfulness, success may not require the trade-offs you think it will.

Of all the narratives about work and life out there, this is the most persistent: Success at work requires harsh trade-offs in the rest of life.

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