Jessika Fernandez uses Peloton about two hours a day — maybe even four if she’s training for a marathon. In her house, you’ll find not one but two Peloton machines. There’s the bike that the company is known for, and in her garage, there’s the company’s smaller treadmill. A rack of running medals hangs on the wall right near it. On our video call, she shows up in a Peloton shirt, a little shy, but her enthusiasm practically buzzes through the screen. Many owners of Peloton bikes wind up using them as very expensive drying racks; Fernandez is not one of those people. Her love for the beleaguer ..read more

Illustrated by Hunter French for The Verge Vice was once promised to become the brash young voice of news. But wild expenses, shady deals, and greed turned it into ‘a fucking clown show.’ {props.credit ..read more

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Assets from Turbosquid Pitchfork exploded as the music industry changed, then was cut down to size by another wave of technological change. Was that it? {props.credit ..read more

Amazon’s new control panel makes using an Alexa-powered smart home as easy as flipping a light switch (only better, trust me). Amazon’s Echo Hub ($179.99) is the best solution yet for an affordable, intuitive way to control your smart home. I’ve lived with home automation for over a decade and one of my biggest challenges has been finding a simple method for managing connected devices in my home that anyone can use. Phone and voice control have their place, but with a tech-averse spouse, younger kids, and elderly grandparents who are often confounded by my living room lights, I’ve longed for a ..read more

Photo by Ryan Del Ponte While the event is known as one of the biggest motorsport events in the world, it’s also a place to showcase technology, land stewardship, and just a tiny bit of nightlife. Every year, tens of thousands of people gather here in the Mojave Desert with two goals: to see some incredible off-road racing and to lose their minds in the kind of unbridled debauchery their mothers always warned them about. King of the Hammers is often described as “Burning Man for rednecks,” and while the drug of choice is usually Coors Light and the cars are valued for performance rather than a ..read more

Illustration by Erik Carter For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.  For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’s not even particularly complicated. It represents a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody. It’s a mini constitution for the i ..read more

Marc Corfmat was a teenager when he began to compete for Lego’s ultimate prize: the chance to design an official set. He and his brother Nick had been building custom Lego creations ever since they were kids, sometimes in California, sometimes during vacations at their grandparents’ home in La Rochelle, France. They shared their models on YouTube and posted their creations to Lego’s website, but interest from the Lego world came slowly, if it came at all. Then, in 2020, the brothers started having some luck. The Lego Ideas program gives fans the chance to turn their designs into reality, offe ..read more

This is a preservation effort, attempting to capture the funniest, weirdest, and most memorable posts before Twitter completely burns down. Buttons break, functions disappear, power users flee, site errors abound: Twitter fell apart faster than even the pessimists anticipated. By the time we arrived on the scene, the damage was already irreversible: many of the tweets that made Twitter so iconic were already deleted, removed, or made private. It happened so quickly, we could barely comprehend what it was that we actually lost. Not all of this information decay is the result of the Twitter acq ..read more

Twitter was so many things. Elon Musk killed Twitter. First, he did it figuratively: firing most employees, destabilizing it as a technology and a business, leaving the platform virtually unusable for those who remained. Then, he killed it literally: renaming it X, giving Twitter a final ending after 15 years of chaotic existence. But in death, there is understanding — now that it’s over, we can reckon with what Twitter really was: a news cycle accelerator, a tool of mass harassment, an idealistic money-losing workplace, and an infinite joke machine. 2023 will go down as… THE YEAR TWITTER DIE ..read more

Illustration by Erik Carter for The Verge Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter. The sense that Twitter was a real-time news ..read more