Elise Hu

There isn't much hipster culture that doesn't get lampooned by the IFC program Portlandia. (Public radio's not immune.) And one of the big cultural shifts of the moment is the move away from ownership and toward access. Younger generations say they care less about owning a home, for ...

For something that's become so ubiquitous in our lives, the World Wide Web is just a youngster. It was only 25 years ago that Tim Berners-Lee first created a rudimentary information retrieval system that relied on the Internet. It's since exploded into a primary means by which we learn, work ...

Facebook's foray into email ended Monday, when the social media giant quietly retired the email service that many users didn't even know existed. Users received a notice saying the @facebook.com email addresses they deployed are going away.

"We're making this change because most people haven't been using their Facebook email ...

If you are in the middle of a House of Cards binge, the news from Netflix over the weekend is good — video streaming quality will improve. After reports of declining performance in recent months, Netflix — which accounts for 30 percent of broadband traffic — cut a deal ...

A new wearable camera called Narrative is designed to snap a photo every 30 seconds — automatically — so you don't miss a thing. But does everything and everyone in your day need to be photographed?

Our latest themed-coverage week focused on how our relationships have changed as a result of the technology and digital communities available to us. Whether it's niche online dating, mobile apps to check out potential hookups or larger communities on the Web that have helped young people better understand their sexuality, ...

No rest for weary tech reporters this President's Day week, as the news on this beat tumbled forth fast and furiously. A look back at some of the topics dominating conversation follows, with NPR coverage in the "in case you missed it" section, and largely curated coverage from elsewhere in ...

Facebook's purchase of messaging service WhatsApp — at a price tag of up to $19 billion — is its largest acquisition yet. To put things in perspective, the social giant tried to purchase Snapchat for a fraction of that cost — $3 billion. And it successfully bought Instagram ...

Happy Valentine's Day to you and your sweethearts. Since we saw that the holiday was falling on a Friday this year, our tech reporting team spent the week exploring love in the digital age. To go along with the theme week, our weekly innovation pick was Nothing. Emily Siner

The numbers on women in the tech industry are so out of whack that ladies register in the single digits: Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And a ...

Apparently, just imagining what's happening on the written page isn't enough. A new wearable device uses temperature controls and lighting to mimic the experiences of a story's protagonist.

While it's never been considered a "cool" company, Microsoft is still a force — worth $300 billion, and Windows operating systems still run on a big chunk of the world's computers. While the profile of founder and former CEO Bill Gates still looms large, outgoing leader Steve Ballmer took the ...

In our "Weekly Innovation" blog series, we explore an interesting idea, design or product that you may not have heard of yet. Do you have an innovation to share? Use this quick form.

Airports are probably the closest real-life example of purgatory. Everyone's "in between" places, waiting to go ...

Viewership is declining. Washington seems increasingly dysfunctional and irrelevant to the daily lives of Americans. The presidency isn't the bully pulpit it used to be.

In an age of social media and divided audiences, the annual, constitutionally mandated State of the Union speech is beginning to look like a stuffy ...

HealthCare.gov's infamous failure to launch has inspired some fresh legislation that aims to organize and streamline the currently scattered — and expensive — approach to multimillion-dollar technology projects built by the government and its contractors.

Specifically, the measure, which is co-sponsored by Reps Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Gerry ...

Multi-millionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins tried to apologize — kind of — for comparing the protests against the techno-affluent to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi rampage that led to 91 killings and 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps.

Perkins' feelings about a "progressive war" against the top one ...

Class tensions in the San Francisco Bay Area got even hotter this weekend, over the public musings of Tom Perkins, a prominent venture capitalist and co-founder of the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The billionaire wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal comparing the class tensions between ...

As I type this, I'm also reading a blog post on Richard Sherman's Stanford days, emailing back-and-forth with a colleague about an upcoming interview and Google-chatting with my friend Reeve about Sunday's episode of HBO's True Detective. This is probably not unlike your regular media multitasking experience, which I assume ...

The holiday season data breach at Target that hit more than 70 million consumers was part of a wide and highly skilled international hacking campaign that's "almost certainly" based in Russia. That's according to a report prepared for federal and private investigators by Dallas-based cybersecurity firm iSight Partners.

And the ...

The thing about the Internet of Things, which describes the near future in which all our devices and appliances are connected to the Internet — and one another — is that suddenly they're vulnerable to the dark side of constant connectivity, too. Cybersecurity folks point out it "opens a ...