Alissa is the urbanism editor at Gizmodo.
No doubt you’re wanting to plan a fireworks display this weekend to honor the most amazing country in North America and its awesome political leaders. Here’s where you can celebrate Happy Canada Day the way it was meant to be celebrated!
An American woman was arrested this week for flooding Stephen Hawking’s email with death threats, then stalking him at an astronomy festival in the Canary Islands.
Like any person scared shitless about the prospect of keeping a fragile new human alive, as soon as I found out I was pregnant I started googling the important questions. Among them: “What is the best baby monitor?”
The investigation into a death that occurred while a Tesla Model S driver was using Autopilot has filled the internet with dystopian-sounding headlines. Self-driving car driver died for the first time after crash in Florida. Self-driving Tesla was involved in fatal crash. But this was not a “self-driving car” that…
Baby products have always been part of a predatory industry that feasts on the paranoia of new parents. But it’s gotten worse in the last few years with the wave of baby-tracking tech. Now Nest—which makes a camera which is one of the top-rated baby monitors—is proposing a smart crib, according to patent documents…
You might have noticed an uptick of stories about the Bay Area’s homeless crisis in your social media feeds recently. Dozens of news organizations worked together to coordinate the publication of stories on homelessness today—all of which are mean to specifically focus on solutions for housing the region’s homeless…
Just the presence of streetlights can deter criminal behavior. A South Philadelphia neighborhood is trying something a little more innovative than that—using neon-lit murals to brighten the sidewalk and turn the area into a destination.
About six months ago, just as Flint began to acknowledge its lead crisis, a water testing expert from an EPA task force predicted that “every major city east of the Mississippi” was underestimating lead levels in their water. A big report from the NRDC now confirms that about 18 million Americans are living with lead…
Cities are so trendy right now that every big tech company wants to build its own. Zappos did it in Downtown Vegas. Amazon is kind of doing it in a Seattle. Alphabet is probably doing it somewhere soon. And now Y Combinator wants in on the fun, too, with a plan to build some kind of alt-Silicon Valley... somewhere.
Saying “I don’t own a TV” is a good way to let people know that you’re a pretentious asshole. But even though more and more people are eager to tell you they don’t “have TV,” don’t be fooled! You better believe that they are still “watching TV.”
For three years I’ve been writing at least once a week about self-driving cars and I’ve recently noticed a shift in popular opinion. The wide-eyed optimism of seeing Google’s cute-as-a-button robot bopping unassisted around a parking lot has been replaced by some ambiguous, malicious, unknowable entity, a…
After a prolonged battle with San Francisco’s NIMBY empire, George Lucas announced two years ago that he would take his giant filmmaking museum project to the friendlier shores of Chicago. Now, after yet another vicious battle with Chicago’s NIMBYs, he’s abandoning his plans there, too. You’d think he was trying to…
In 2012, Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg posed for a series of photos that sealed their intertwined fates: Gehry, arguably the world’s most famous architect, would design a new campus for Zuckerberg, arguably the world’s most powerful not-lizard person. Surely with all this money and talent coalescing like a hunk of…
What would convince transit riders to pay attention to an oncoming train instead of Instagram? Apparently, a graphic depiction of certain dismemberment.
Of the seven cities chosen as finalists for the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, Columbus, Ohio may have seemed like the underdog. (It was the only finalist that has no rail system whatsoever.) But today, USDOT announced Columbus as the winner of over $50 million in cash that will transform its…
One more horrific prediction has come to pass for California’s drought-ravaged forests. According to the US Forest Service, trees are dying at an even more astonishing rate than they were last summer, creating fuel for what will almost certainly be the worst wildfire season in memory.
Last night, a DC subway station turned into a surprise water park ride. It wasn’t a huge deal—the station was closed for a few hours, the water drained, and service went back to normal—but it certainly looked like it. Seeing a timelapse of the whole thing from the station’s entrance shows how this happened.
Washington DC’s subway is scheduled to be shut down for an extended period of time to deal with a slew of deferred maintenance. But after today’s service problem—literal waterfalls in one station—maybe DC’s Metro needs a vacation sooner than that.
Elon Musk is on the brink of acquiring the the next critical component in a solar-electric transportation future. Tesla Motors just made a $2.8 billion stock-to-stock offer to buy SolarCity, one of the largest solar energy companies in the country. It also happens to be a company founded by Musk’s cousins and one…
