Alex Cranz

Senior Consumer Tech Editor. Trained her dog to do fist bumps. Once wrote for Lifetime. Tips encouraged via Secure Drop, Proton Mail, or DM for Signal.
  • The Coolest Gadgets of 2020

    The Coolest Gadgets of 2020

    It didn’t feel like it, what with a major pandemic and massive financial crisis, but 2020 was actually an incredible year for gadgets. For companies like Apple and Microsoft, this could have been a landmark year were it not for everything else going on. While the competition for our attention this year was steep, there…


  • Playing Mario Kart IRL Is a Shockingly Good Time

    Playing Mario Kart IRL Is a Shockingly Good Time

    While there are plenty of places where you can pay to put on a Mario cap and tool around in a go-kart making like it’s the Rainbow Road, real-life Mario Kart lacks the fun power-ups and gentle mayhem of the video game. I assumed Nintendo’s Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which lets you drive a…


  • I Miss Videodiscs, the Fragile Garbage That Shaped My Childhood

    I Miss Videodiscs, the Fragile Garbage That Shaped My Childhood

    When I talk about the discs I watched videos on as a kid people assume I mean laser discs, or maybe I’ve confused my decades and mean DVDs, or even video CDs. There’s an assumption that I’ve just misremembered things, but that’s because the capacitance electronic disc, or videodisc (or in my house just “disc”),…