Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Oremus.

And I'm April Glazer.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then, coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 19.

On today's show, I'll take a quick look at the fallout from Amazon's announcement last week

that they're abandoning plans for a new headquarters in New York City.

Some celebrated that as a victory.

Others mourned a missed opportunity. Still others were

mad that Amazon took its ball and went home rather than negotiating a fairer deal. Then April

will talk with Fain Greenwood from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she focuses on the role of

drones and data-intensive technology in foreign aid projects. Greenwood's latest piece for

Slate is headlined, Why Humanitarians are worried about Palantir's new partnership with the UN.

And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best things we saw on the web this

week. That's all coming up on if then. Remember when local leaders across the country spent 14 months fighting to lure Amazon to put its second headquarters in their city?

People were placing bets on which city would win.

Well, now we can finally congratulate everybody out there whose bet was.

Actually, Amazon will pick two cities, New York and D.C., but New Yorkers will push back on the terms of the deal.

Amazon will suddenly pull out, but it's still going to hire lots of people there, and oh, also, it's putting new offices in Nashville. Not anyone's intended outcome, but here we are. It's also possible, of course, that we still haven't seen the last twists and turns in this fiasco, but let's take a look at where it leaves us for now.

To some, Amazon's pullout was a loss for New York City.

It was a

loss for New York City. It was a loss not only of tax revenues and economic fatality, but of a

...