Journal

Microsoft’s classic operating system turns 20 today. To celebrate, a nostalgic trip back to the ’90s via some deeply weird videos.

It might be news to many of today’s selfie-snapping, hashtag-happy millennials, but Windows 95 was a huge deal. I’ll never forget the day my dad came home from CompUSA with that blue, cloud-covered box and we cracked open the CD-ROM for the first time. The installation felt like it took took all night, but once the disc drive stopped whirring, we were in. This totally new interface—it introduced radical new concepts like the Windows “Start” menu and the taskbar—would be our gateway to so many new and wonderful computer things. It even came with a full-length AVI file of Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” music video, for some reason.

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After Monday’s stock market decline, CEO Tim Cook personally assured an investor that Apple was doing just fine.

With the stock market in free fall Monday morning as a result of financial turmoil in China, investors may have been worried about their stakes in leading tech companies like Apple. To assuage such concerns, CEO Tim Cook wrote a note to CNBC analyst Jim Cramer, informing him that the company was still seeing “strong growth” in China through July and August.

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The Embassy Gardens’ sky pool is made of aquarium glass to look like an overpass of water that stretches between two towers.

Infinity pools are lame. Sky pools that stretch between buildings like transparent overpasses of water? Infinitely cooler.

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Created for the London Design Festival, the Curiosity Cloud is made up of 250 hand-fabricated insects that fly around in glass bulbs when visitors approach.

The Austrian designers mischer’traxler are masters at marrying craft and technology in enchanting ways, as we’ve seen with their self-weaving, attention-craving basket and machine-weaved furniture that records the passing time. Now, the duo has hand made 250 tiny fabric insects and equipped them with motors and sensors for Curiosity Cloud, a new installation for London’s Design Festival.

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The comedian talks about her path to the playful, glib, and ultimately life-affirming HBO special everyone will be talking about.

“I’m just a person,” comedian Tig Notaro says multiple times during her new HBO special. It’s both a deflection of incoming applause and a direct rebuke to peers who clearly relish soaking up those standing-Os. But here’s the thing: Tig Notaro is more than just a person. She’s both a living legend and someone advanced enough to hate that designation and seek to explode it.

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Apple Music pitches personality, Foot Locker gets awkward for NFL season, the Manning brothers regulate Gatorade sales.

Back in 2006, Xbox dropped a big ol’ emo ad bomb on the gaming world with the launch of Gears of War. Instead of the usual, testosterone-soaked soundtrack, the music backdropping scenes from the sci-fi shooter game was Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” It was considered a milestone in video game marketing and ushered in the now-familiar trend of pairing game action with music that tugs the heartstrings over the trigger finger.

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Every moment of too-hot, late-making, subway frustration is actually a love connection waiting to happen in this sweet, surreal video.

The New York subway is a magical steel caterpillar that takes riders anywhere they want to go in the city. Except when it doesn’t, which is gallingly often. (Or maybe it just seems that way in Co.Create’s memory. Hard to remember every instance it runs perfectly.) Adrift in the immediacy that is the city’s stock in trade, New Yorkers have a tendency to laser-focus on the frustration of the moment—to the exclusion of all else. A whimsical new video suggests that by doing so we may be just missing our soulmates on every commute.

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