The giving of gifts to mark life’s milestones is among the oldest of human customs, the cash tucked into a birthday card, the savings bond presented at a graduation, the check handed over at a wedding, and the gifts that family members give one another to express love, to celebrate occasions, and to help the…
Read MoreFor generations, the public library has rested on a simple and powerful arrangement, in which the library buys a book, owns it outright, and lends it freely to one reader after another for as long as the physical object survives, a practice so familiar that few people pause to consider the legal foundation that makes…
Read MoreFew experiences of modern life are as universally dreaded as the customer service ordeal, the long wait on hold listening to a loop of tinny music interrupted by reminders that the call is important, the navigation through a maze of automated menus that never quite offer the option needed, the explanation of a problem to…
Read MoreWhen a traveler books a hotel room or a vacation rental through one of the familiar booking websites, the price that appears on the screen feels like the cost of the room, a number set by the hotel and paid by the guest, with the website serving as a convenient place to find and reserve…
Read MoreAnyone who has ever deposited a check and watched the days tick by before the money became available, or sent a payment to a friend or a landlord and waited anxiously for it to arrive, has bumped against one of the strangest features of modern financial life, which is that in an age when information…
Read MoreLong before banks, credit scores, and digital payment apps, communities around the world developed an ingenious way to save money and access credit together, a practice in which a group of people agree to contribute a fixed sum at regular intervals into a common pot, and in each round one member takes the entire pot,…
Read MoreThe individual retirement account has long been one of the most powerful tools available to ordinary people for building wealth over a lifetime, a tax-advantaged container in which investments can grow with their gains sheltered from the annual taxation that erodes returns in ordinary accounts, and for most of its history it has held familiar…
Read MoreThe gift card has become one of the most familiar objects in modern commerce, a small rectangle of plastic or a string of digits in an email that represents a promise of value to be redeemed at some future date, and it has grown into an enormous business because it is so convenient a way…
Read MoreFor most of the short time that artificial intelligence has been a part of everyday life, the intelligence itself has lived somewhere else, on banks of powerful computers in distant data centers, and the phone in a person’s hand has served only as a window onto that remote machinery, sending each question away to be…
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