After a decade writing about tech startups at publications like Recode, Liz Gannes joined 60dB in January 2017. At 60dB she got to be a reporter AND learn what engineers talk about all day (mostly Star Trek). She served as 60dB managing editor and made some stories, too. They’re archived here.
October 7, 2017
Timi Wusu is about to finish his residency in orthopedic surgery at Harvard University. He played football in the NFL and graduated from Stanford. But without DACA he never would have been allowed to stay in the United States.
August 16, 2017
Axios’ Sara Fischer breaks down the new, splintered world of television offerings.
August 10, 2017
Think Congress will stop arguing about healthcare and getting nothing done about it? Not likely. Axios healthcare reporter Caitlin Owens lays out where we should be paying attention heading into the fall.
August 4, 2017
President Trump regularly boasts about the stock market’s strong performance since his inauguration, including how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at a record high. What Trump hasn’t noted, however, is that Barack Obama and George H.W. Bush oversaw greater stock market expansion during their first six months in office, as judged by percentage growth of the S&P 500.
August 3, 2017
Axios’ Jonathan Swan has the scoop on a changed tone at the White House this week.
August 2, 2017
Quartz’ Dave Gershgorn profiles the seminal work of Fei-Fei Li.
July 28, 2017
Axios’ Dan Primack on how Congressional Democrats decided that bashing big business is their path back to power.
July 19, 2017
(This story aired on NPR’s Morning Edition.) We humans are bad at getting our machines to tell us what’s wrong with them — even though, they kind of can…if only we could understand. OtoSense is a Palo Alto-based startup trying to make sense of the thunks, clunks, and other informative sounds of the world.
July 18, 2017
(This story aired on KQED News.) There are no permanent homeless shelters in Palo Alto. In 2013 the city, where median home prices are above $2.5 million, blocked a move to create affordable housing. Now the city is warning working people parking RVs on public streets to move along.
June 28, 2017
So, how and when would we die in a cyberwar? Security researcher Don A. Bailey breaks it down, in the introduction to 60dB’s doomsday audio collection. Short answer: He’s not too freaked out…yet.
June 21, 2017
Carol Shih of The Washington Post’s new project The Lily talked to women who are climbing the ranks and making serious money on the male-dominated live-streaming site Twitch.
June 13, 2017
Aaron Glantz of Reveal profiled corporate landlord Tom Barrack, whose company Colony Homes amassed tens of thousands of homes after the housing crisis, rented them out, and then leveraged them into hundreds of millions of dollars of profit. Shortly after Glantz’ story was published, Barrack divested from Colony Homes and left its board.
June 5, 2017
Max Ehrenfreund reports that wealthy Americans are delaying financial moves, since they expect Trump to cut their taxes soon. But the government needs the money — or permission to raise the debt ceiling — very soon.
June 1, 2017
Etsy, the online crafts marketplace, is shaking up its values and practices under pressure from public market investors. Max Chafkin of Bloomberg Businessweek explains.
May 31, 2017
Former Ford CEO Mark Fields aimed to please Wall Street with an autonomous car project with Google, but the deal fell apart, and opened the door for his replacement last week, reports Sharon Silke Carty.
May 26, 2017
STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.
May 25, 2017
A paraglider who became a paraplegic says it was worth the risk. Eric Brymer, who studies the psychology of extreme sports, explains why. This is the introduction to a 60dB collection of great stories about sports.
May 11, 2017
Inverse’s Jordan Zakarin on a neighborhood dispute with broad real- and augmented- world implications.
May 10, 2017
Quartz’ Alison Griswold gets the scoop on Maple, the three-year-old celebrity chef-backed food delivery startup that raised some $30 million and closed operations this week.
May 4, 2017
ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell exposed how one of the most dangerous companies in the U.S. took advantage of immigrant workers and then, when they got hurt or fought back, it used America’s laws against them.
April 28, 2017
Recode’s Tony Romm decodes FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s new announcements on net neutrality.
April 27, 2017
In a piece for GQ, Sarah Jeong uncovers her personal vulnerabilities to hacking.
April 26, 2017
James Somers wrote for the Atlantic about the tantalizing promise of Google Books, and the wacky deal that would have saved it — if only the major beneficiary weren’t a powerful corporation.
April 21, 2017
Wouldn’t it be crazy if we could send a fleet of drones in the sky to release special dust particles that help stave off global warming? It’s crazy, but not impossible. As MIT Technology Review’s James Temple explains, the case for “geoengineering” is growing, but along with it rising concerns that the dangers of it may be too great.Part of our collection, “When Science Gets Political”
April 19, 2017
A clash between the far-right and the far-left on a sunny Saturday turned violent…while the police conspicuously kept their distance.
April 17, 2017
Amazon had largely declined to engage with ongoing customer and social media protests urging it and other companies to stop advertising on Breitbart. That is, until hundreds of Amazon employees got involved, reports Charlie Warzel for BuzzFeed.
April 14, 2017
Autonomous vehicles are at the apex of all the terrible things that can go wrong,” says Charlie Miller, an elite hacker working on securing self-driving cars, via Wired’s Andy Greenberg.
April 13, 2017
As Natt Garun of the Verge says, “No, you shall not have it your way.”
April 12, 2017
As the threat of a major national cybersecurity threat looms, we really have no idea what it might cost, reports Mike Orcutt for the MIT Technology Review.
April 11, 2017
More than a quarter of North Koreans now have mobile phones — but they are heavily modified and restricted — as Axios’ Shannon Vavra reports.
April 6, 2017
(This story aired on KQED News.) Some Silicon Valley companies are seriously rethinking their travel policies in the Trump era.
April 4, 2017
Noam Sheiber of the New York Times dives into the tricks of video gaming and behavioral science that entice Uber drivers to stay out on the road longer.
April 3, 2017
In a suburb of Cincinnati, a 68,000-employee subsidiary of Northrop Grumman creates tools to infiltrate Cisco routers and Windows software on behalf of three-letter American agencies, as Jenna McLaughlin of the Intercept reports.
March 30, 2017
Get ready to say good-bye to your online privacy. Not that you ever really had it anyway, writes Klint Finley at Wired.com.
March 29, 2017
Rolfe Winkler uncovers Neuralink, the new company from Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, which hopes to save humanity from the fate of becoming our future AI overlords’ house cats.
March 28, 2017
Wilbur Ross did not divest from his billion-dollar stake in a global shipping company that does business in Iran and Russia and sails under Chinese flags, reports Carrie Levine of the Center for Public Integrity.
March 24, 2017
Broadband providers shouldn’t be prohibited from making money off sharing customers’ browsing history without their permission, says the Senate. Axios’ David McCabe explains the Washington procedural dynamics in play.
March 22, 2017
Axios’ Ina Fried analyzes a media call by Uber in the wake of its recent corporate culture controversies.
March 21, 2017
Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson says the UK government has confirmed it will ban laptops and other devices such as iPads from being transported on certain flights to Britain, following a similar ban implemented by the US government.
