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When Snapchat launched in 2011, the app seemed like a flash-in-the-pan teen messaging fad. Its signature function—sending photo and video messages that would self-destruct after viewed—echoed the fugitive thrill of passing notes. Correspondences vanish before meddling grown-ups have time to intervene. That's changed in the past few years.

When @sweden began its grand experiment in 2011, Twitter had never seemed more full of possibilities. In New York, Twitter served as a digital bulletin board to organize protesters at Occupy Wall Street. In the Middle East, tweets served as the roots of the Arab Spring. Companies signed on to engage with customers; celebrities made accounts to grow their fanbases.

The first novel by YouTube star Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, is about a young woman named April who becomes an internet celebrity after posting video of a mysterious alien robot. She quickly discovers that being famous has a lot of downsides—something Green and his friends have learned the hard way.

There aren’t many ways to make traffic jams productive. You can make phone calls, listen to audio books, or practice your calming breathing exercises. But none of them help you escape the reality of being trapped in a metal box, surrounded by thousands of other metal boxes, all performing a dance forwards, slowly, foot by foot, across the asphalt. A Saudi Arabian inventor, Nasser Al Shawaf, decided he wanted the ability to do something useful with his hours in the car every day: exercise.

In early August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a fateful tweet: “Am considering taking Tesla public at $420. Funding secured.” On Saturday, two days after the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Tesla CEO Elon Musk for “false and misleading” statements made on Twitter, Musk, Tesla, and the feds reached a compromise—a settlement.

The irony of Elon Musk’s latest legal drama is grim. He wanted to take the car maker Tesla private, because he hates the bureaucracy, red tape, and regulation that comes with being a company owned by shareholders, traded on the stock market.

When Amazon’s Forever debuted earlier this month, it announced itself with a kernel of discord hidden within. Viewers reaching the show’s sixth episode found it stripped of its main characters—June (Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen), a married couple trapped in unchanging circumstances—and instead angling its view in a different direction.

What would it take for you to give up your car? An all-access pass to a bicycle, maybe, plus some safe lanes to ride it in? A smartphone, stocked with apps for cheap ride-hail services? A competent public transit system? A chauffeur, willing to drive you around instead? Lyft, the ride-hail company that has always said that its goal is to get more Americans out of their personal cars, would like to find out.

In a white and grey laboratory, where neat runs of orange cables on the walls provide a relief of color, a three-bladed propeller spins on the front of a Cessna “Iron Bird” test frame. It’s eerily quiet, free of the buzz you expect from a propeller-propelled aircraft. Just the whoosh of air, like a ceiling fan spinning at full speed.

In the early ’00s, few web endeavors seemed less bound for long-term glory than CollegeHumor.com. The site launched in 1999 as a video and sight-gag repository “dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt.” Early on, that meant lots of bro-friendly distractions, like photos of students passed out on lawns/), naughtily titled JPEGs, and video series like “Husky Dave the Fat Guy”.