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As graduation approached, Niu and her colleagues found themselves gravitating toward for-profit companies. [...] At Microsoft, Chopra is focused on using technology to address poverty. Murata told me, “If we can get people at big tech companies—including within branches that are not social-good-re…

When Google makes money, Stanford makes money. Like most research universities, it holds patents for inventions conceived on campus; the university has brought in more than $300 million in royalties from Google’s PageRank tool, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin patented at the engineering school in …

[...] More generally, post-Fordist capitalism and the neoliberal policies shaping it reflect and have generated a more competitive world economy in which various fractions of organized labor have been gutted. [...]

[...] By promising people that it is possible to buy their way out of trouble with purchasable solutions to personal and social problems, the animating ideology of consumerism cancels the collective responsibilities traditionally embedded in the identities of the worker and the citizen. Understandi…

In the cut-throat competition for the scarcest of scarce resources--the attention of would-be consumers--the suppliers of would-be consumer goods, including purveyors of information, desperately search for the scrap of the consumers' time still lying fallow, for the tiniest gaps between moments of …