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When news of natural disasters or man-made ones break in the U.S., Julie Bloom taps a variety of tools to communicate with reporters, edit stories and get them published. As a deputy editor on the national desk, you oversee a lot of breaking news. What tech tools do you use to help? Hurricanes. Shootings. Wildfires. Elections and earthquakes. I didn’t think anything could be as crazy as the fall of 2017 in this country, but 2018 came pretty close. I primarily oversee California and parts of the West, but also handle a lot of our coverage of major breaking news. With my colleagues on the desk and our boss, Marc Lacey, the national editor, we’ve developed a tool kit of sorts to handle these stories that are fast-moving and intense. I feel like each day is a little like being caught in a batter’s box without knowing when or where the balls are coming from, and that can be both exhilarating and exhausting. Technology certainly helps. My phone is pretty much everything. It’s k...

I was waiting for a subway last month in Mexico City when I figured out what’s wrong with the Queen movie. I mean, I knew what was wrong. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is scared of tapping into the imagination that made the band so innovative and powerfully, addictively strange. But that’s not what hit me waiting for the subway. The platform entertainment system was playing a concert video of “Another One Bites the Dust.” I don’t know what year the clip was from or what city Queen was in. I just know that the lighting is warm, the groove is skintight (you could feel it on the platform), and that Freddie Mercury is wearing — is packed into — white short-shorts and almost nothing else. No shoes, no shirt yet all service. The towel he’s whipping around gets an almost immediate, theatrical toss into the crowd. The red wristband and red bandanna tied round his neck bring out the red in his Montreal Canadiens trucker’s cap. The real Freddie Mercury, mesmerizing French fans in 1984. The r...

The classics can take you back in time — and are probably easier to recapture than you think. Video games hit their 60th birthday in October, if you start counting (as many do) with Tennis for Two, a rudimentary Pong ancestor cobbled together by the physicist William A. Higinbotham at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory . Games have evolved a lot since then, of course, becoming far more complicated and visual, as well as multiplayer. Yet sometimes you just want to play an old favorite. Why seek out an ancient game with rudimentary graphics and only basic actions? For some, it’s pure nostalgia, like reading a beloved picture book again. For others, old games are a way to share a link to their childhood with a child of their own. Video game companies have caught on to the urge. Nintendo sells throwback consoles preloaded with its vintage games, as do Atari, Sony and others.  But if you don’t want to invest in new hardware, here are ways to relive your gaming past ...

Netflix has blocked an episode of its show “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj” from streaming in Saudi Arabia after the Saudi government complained that the episode — which is critical of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman — violated its cybercrime laws. In the episode, first shown in October, Mr. Minhaj critiques the United States’ longstanding relationship with Saudi Arabia after the murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi . “Now would be a good time to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Minhaj said, “and I mean that as a Muslim and an American.” After receiving a takedown request last month from the Saudi government’s Communications and Information Technology Commission, Netflix removed the episode from viewing in Saudi Arabia last week. The news was first reported by The Financial Times . In a statement, Netflix defended its decision: “We strongly support artistic freedom worldwide and only removed this episode in Saudi Arabia after w...

  Facebook has had a turbulent two years. But almost no one in tech thinks Mr. Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, should step down from the company he built. A few weeks ago, after Facebook revealed that tens of millions of its users’ accounts had been exposed in a security breach, I began asking people in and around the tech industry a simple question: Should Mark Zuckerberg still be running Facebook? I’ll spare you the suspense. Just about everyone thought Mr. Zuckerberg was still the right man for the job, if not the only man for the job. This included people who currently work at Facebook, people who used to work at Facebook, financial analysts, venture capitalists, tech-skeptic activists, ardent critics of the company and its giddiest supporters. The consensus went like this: Even if Mr. Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s founder, chief executive, chairman and most powerful shareholder — bore most of the responsibility for the company’s cataclysmic recent h...

Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica , a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network. Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier F.T.C. consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared. But the enforcement official, James A. Kohm, took a different view. In a previously undisclosed memo in March, Mr. Kohm — echoing Facebook’s own argument — cautioned that Facebook was not responsible for the consulting firm’s reported abuses. The social network seemed to have taken reasonable steps to address the problem, he wrote, according to someone who read the memo, and most likely had not broken its promises to the F.T...

The transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks, known as 5G, will affect how you use smartphones and many other devices. Let’s talk about the essentials. In 2019, a big technology shift will finally begin. It’s a once-in-a-decade upgrade to our wireless systems that will start reaching mobile phone users in a matter of months. But this is not just about faster smartphones. The transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks — known as 5G for short — will also affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones and cars that send traffic data to one another. This new era will leap ahead of current wireless technology , known as 4G, by offering mobile internet speeds that will let people download entire movies within seconds and most likely bring big changes to video games, sports and shopping. Officials in the United States and China see 5G networks as a competitive edge. The faster networks could help spread the use of...

The hottest toy of the year was a glittering, baby-pink plastic suitcase that we buy without knowing what’s inside. According to our e-commerce and big-box retail overlords, the hottest toy this holiday season was the L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise. It didn’t reach fist-fighting-in-store-aisles levels of frenzy; it’s no Tickle Me Elmo, and it’s not 1996. But, according to NPD Group, a market research firm, L.O.L. Surprise! was the best-selling toy brand of the year (excepting December, for which sales numbers haven’t been released), and L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise was the top-selling toy in November. So, what is the L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise? It is a glittering, baby-pink plastic suitcase that one buys without knowing what’s inside. It is filled with doe-eyed plastic dolls and many sparkly accessories (including wigs, handbags and green tennis rackets) and each item is individually wrapped in enough plastic packaging to occupy a doll-size landfill. It is als...