If you forgot your password to a very substantial bank account or a crucial work e-mail and have irrecoverably lost all written record of it, how do you break your very own byzantine code to its creation so you can recover it? Worse yet, what if you are the chief executive of the world’s largest financial company and a disastrous conflagration demolishes its main offices, wiping out the digital passwords to the hundreds of accounts and files of your clients? What in God’s name do you do to cope with such disasters?
ARTWORK FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE
In “The Secret Life of Passwords,” a full-length feature story that came out in the November 19, 2014 issue of
The New York Times Sunday Magazine, investigative reporter Ian Urbina takes an inside look into how the highly private strings of characters that people create to protect confidential information and personal fortunes at the same time make them highly vulnerable to the consequences of losing them. He then goes deeper by examining the psychology of the derivation and creation and recovery of passwords, talking to friends and family and strangers for a better understanding of why they are so crucial to modern life and yet are so universally despised.
Urbina observes that passwords annoy people because they strain their memory, make endless demands to be updated, and tend to grow too many for comfort. “But there is more to passwords than their annoyance,” he says. “In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar… Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.”
Read Ian Urbina’s “The Secret Life of Passwords” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine now!OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:“Uh” vs. “um.” In “Things That Make You Go ‘Um,’” an article that came out in the November 17, 2014 issue of
The Atlantic Magazine, American author, journalist, and linguist Michael Erard reports that according to a recent language study of 14,000 phone conversations and 600 million tweets in the United States, women say “um” more often than do men, who favor “uh,” and when people from the middle of the country begin a tweet with one of those words, it’s usually “uh,” while much of the rest of America opts for “um.” Erard comments about this finding: “In the era of Big Data, language researchers can produce insights like these in a flash. Ten years ago, when I was writing a book about the cultural and linguistic significance of “uh,” “um,” and other pause fillers, I’d have been thrilled to have such statistics at my disposal.”
Read Michael Erard’s “Things That Make You Go ‘Um’” in The Atlantic Magazine now!All-American thanksgiving. In “The Geography of Gratitude,” an article that came out in the November 26, 2014 issue of
The Atlantic Magazine, associate editor Robinson Meyer reports that the Facebook data science team has found that Americans are most thankful for three things: friends, family, and health. A caveat about this finding, though: The survey answers represent America’s women much better than they represent America’s men, for 90% of the participants in the status game were female (and all of the users analyzed were English-speaking Americans).
Read Robinson Meyer’s “What Americans are thankful for, according to Facebook” in The Atlantic Magazine now!
