The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta. One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose…
Good morning. It’s skinned-knuckle season, the time of the year that’s all about stuck bolts and crushed washers and hydraulic fluid and bottom paint, sacrificial zincs and ceramic wax — old boats coaxed back to health so they can run us to the fishing grounds, so we can cast flies to bass. I skinned my…
Many of the world’s most inventive, expensive and best-known watches are made in factories in Switzerland, where the view that watchmakers see when they raise their eyes from their workbenches is likely to be cows grazing on the slopes of snow-capped mountains. It’s the Vallée de Joux, home to factories or offices for Audemars Piguet,…
Only Watch, the charity watch auction that was canceled last fall after a social media storm over financial and research transparency, has been rescheduled for May 10. “Independent auditors have now audited and certified all our accounts for the last three years,” said Luc Pettavino, founder of the event that supports research into a cure…
As the Israeli military campaign to destroy Hamas pummeled his neighborhood in northern Gaza, reducing buildings to rubble and forcing residents to flee, the Palestinian laborer realized that he was running out of food. The shops had closed, the markets had emptied and fighting prevented supplies from reaching them. So he and his remaining neighbors…
Large health insurers are working with a little-known data company to boost their profits, often at the expense of patients and doctors, a New York Times investigation found. A private-equity-backed firm called MultiPlan has helped drive down payments to medical providers and drive up patients’ bills, while earning billions of dollars in fees for itself…
Insurance companies have long blamed private-equity-owned hospitals and physician groups for exorbitant billing that drives up health care costs. But a tool backed by private equity is helping insurers make billions of dollars and shift costs to patients. The tool, Data iSight, is the premier offering of a cost-containment firm called MultiPlan that has attracted…
Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Netflix and Spotify have used it to recommend more movies and music. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months,…
About once a week, I find myself eating miso butter off a spoon like a deer with a salt lick. (In case you’ve ever wondered what the glamorous life of a Cooking editor looks like, that’s mostly it.) For me, it started with Sam Sifton’s recipe for miso chicken, a really lovely way to cook…
A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis. The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the…
