Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily business news, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

For many parents, questions about children’s television begin and end with “Why do I have to argue about screen time so much with my kids?” On one hand, parents get worried by frightening headlines such as “Digital Heroin” (no, video games are nothing like heroin) and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” (no, they have not). On the other hand, parents must contend with kids eager to consume limitless hours of screen time.

Remember when your parents warned that sitting too close to the TV would hurt your eyes? I didn’t really believe it either, but now that I’m a parent to a 6-year-old who yearns to stare at an iPad all day, I can’t help but revisit the issue.

Welcome to Should This Thing Be Smart? Each month, Justin Peters examines a smart object and try to determine whether there is any good reason for its existence—and how likely it is to be used for nefarious reasons. Previously on Should This Thing Be Smart?: The $60 smart fork and the $199 smart socks. Item: Ember Ceramic Mug Price: $79.95 on the Ember website Function: The Ember Ceramic Mug is basically a coffee mug that is also a thermostat.

Since the dancing baby delighted our screens more than two decades ago, memes have taken various forms, their popularity aided as tools have made it easier to create memes of our own. Still photos and images, like the now ubiquitous text-overlaid image memes, can be easily created on the fly with some basic Photoshop skills. Giphy offers a whole trove of GIF-style memery. Internet discussion boards like Reddit are a constant source of new viral fodder, too.

Prosecutors got approval from a federal judge in Utah to sell more than 513 bitcoins and 512 bitcoin cash they had seized from a man allegedly running a counterfeit pharmaceuticals ring on the darknet, Ars Technica reports. The cryptocurreny was taken from Aaron Shamo, who was arrested a year ago. At current prices, the bitcoins would be worth more than $8 million, while the bitcoin cash would sell for almost $1 million. The U.S.

On Wednesday, Google released its annual "Year in Search," which tracks trending queries for the past year. But among the list of top memes, prominent people, and how-to questions for 2017, on both the global and United States lists, one normally inescapable topic was missing: Donald Trump. It’s nice to imagine a 2017 without Trump, but really: How did the 45th president not make it on Google’s list? It’s a matter of relativity.

One of the greatest pleasures of parenting is introducing things you love to your kids. Since the birth of my two girls, I’ve been anticipating the day I would gift them with the best show of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then my girls stopped watching TV. Once upon a time, we monitored TV time like hawks.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to repeal its net neutrality rules this week, opening the doors for internet service providers to charge companies that can afford it for faster-lane access to users—a potentially significant blow to the open internet. In this week’s episode of their podcast If Then, Slate’s April Glaser and Will Oremus spoke with Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who coined the term net neutrality.

Think back to six months or so ago when you first encountered the fidget spinner. (Yes, for anyone experiencing Trump-related time dilation, the fidget spinner craze happened this year.) At the time, did you think the toy was cool but that it could probably be more Jewish? Well then, today—the day of the first night of Hanukkah—is your day: The new miracle of Hanukkah has arrived in the form of the fidget dreidel.

On the scale between unbridled enthusiasm for smart speakers and technophobic paranoia, I fall in the ambivalent middle area. I’d read about the potential for these devices to be hacked or gamed by advertisers or to simply make expensive mistakes, and I’d heard others gush of the ways it had radically transformed their homes for the better. But I had never pictured myself having one, and so I didn’t do any real research or form any real opinions.

I started using the app Strava to track my rides before I’d even purchased my first road bike. I was competitive. After downloading it and getting my first taste of landing on the leaderboards, I was hooked. I never got on my bike without it. In a matter of months, my bike-riding addiction had become a bike-racing addiction. I started donning a heart-rate monitor to quantify my efforts and recovery and after my first year of racing added a power meter to my activity-tracking collection too.

In the real world, you can wave, hug, or high-five your friends hello, and soon you may have a similar range of nonverbal options on Facebook. The social network is testing a new “Greetings” feature that will let users send digital salutations in the form of a wave, high five, wink, hug, or—this will sound familiar—poke. The feature, which the Next Web spotted and appears to be rolling out to some users in the U.K.

In the good old days of 2009, when public figures felt (slightly) less shame about warmly embracing sexual predators, a number of filmmakers and celebrities came forth to say that Roman Polanski deserved lenience in part because of his artistic contributions. Apparently revolted by this obscene logic, the comedian and radio host Sam Seder tweeted, “Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene.

Is Twitter now such a rough-and-tumble place that even a man as manly as Armie Hammer can’t survive there? On Monday, after calling a BuzzFeed piece about him “bitter AF,” Hammer peaced out of the social network. He’s hardly the first person to have fled the platform—the Twitter hiatus has been a certifiable Thing this year, the online equivalent of a juice cleanse—but his reasons for fleeing seem a little less admirable than the usual ones.

For a lot of us, Instagram is there to prove that celebrities aren’t so different after all. They too take mirror selfies of their OOTDs. They too share photos of brunch tables that look haphazardly set but are actually entirely staged. And when we follow a celebrity’s feed, their ’grams are seamlessly shuffled in with the posts of our friends, making “them” feel a little bit more like “us.” I am not convinced this is a good thing.

In Tony Earley’s remarkable memoir “Somehow Form a Family,” he interweaves stories from his childhood in small-town North Carolina with stories from the TV shows he and his sister Shelly watched at the time: All in the Family, The Wonderful World of Disney, The Three Stooges, and above all The Brady Bunch. And by “interweaves” I don’t mean that he tells a story from his childhood and then tells a story from the TV.

I grew up without a TV at a time when it was still possible for parents to raise kids screen-free without acting like insufferable prigs about it. Although Jerry Mander published his sweeping anti-TV polemic Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television the same year I was born, my parents don’t remember their decision to raise us without TV as being much of a political one.