AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti. He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press). Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
Results 41-50 of 62

Helping intelligence agencies better predict the future

December 12, 2012 We would like to know what the future is going to be like, so we can prepare for it. I'm not talking about building a time machine to secure the winning Powerball number ahead of time, but rather creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen. Supposedly, this ...

The year in tech, 2012

December 11, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow Technology changes year to year, phone to phone, quarter to quarter. Here at The Atlantic, we like to focus on how those changes happen, the ideas that animate them, the people that execute them, the users who transform them. The last year saw massive change in this broad definition of ...

The next niche market for solar? Drones—yes, drones

November 21, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow The idea that solar is a nice, soft technology that only liberals could love reaches back into the 1970s. It was there that the counterculture adopted solar energy as an alternative to the fossil fuels that dominated (and still dominate) the American energy mix. Solar became a symbol that Reaganites ...

When the nerds go marching in

November 16, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data ...

Data doesn't belong to the Democrats

November 7, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow One of the leading narratives of the 2012 campaign is that data trumped all. Nate Silver! The polling was dead on! The blowhard pundits were wrong! The Obama campaign's Internet money machine got people to give lots of money over the summer with George Clooney-dinner enticements tailor made for West ...

Google's Street View sherpas tackle the Grand Canyon

October 24, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow We're all familiar with the Google Street View cars at this point (and their Nokia cousins). They go buzzing around cities capturing data from the physical world. But there are places they cannot go, places that Google would really like to have imagery of, for example, say, the Grand Canyon. ...

The forgotten mapmaker: Nokia has better maps than Apple and maybe even Google

October 4, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow Apple's maps are bad. Even Tim Cook knows this and apologized for them. Google's maps are good, thanks to years of work, massive computing resources, and thousands of people handcorrecting map data. But there are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. ...

Happy birthday, NASA! Here's what might have happened if you were never born

October 1, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow It is a truth universally acknowledged that a popular new technology in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a government agency. And this was the problem with space travel. On this day in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for business a mere two ...

'We're literally watching the Internet be rebuilt'

September 20, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow What is the Internet? It used to be simple. If you were a regular Internet user, you used a modem to commandeer your telephone line and you called into a service provider. Once connected, you'd enter the Netscape address and Netscape's servers would send you information over the network of ...

iPhone 5? Yawn. What will the 'phone' of 2022 look like?

September 14, 2012 FROM NEXTGOV arrow The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. The iPhone 5 was released yesterday and its similarity to every Apple phone since 2007 serves as a reminder that our current mobile devices have been sitting on the same plateau for years. Reflecting on Apple's recent product launches, author and professor ...