“I was responsible for the dancing baby meme,” Rob Sheridan laughs over a video call. Now better known as an accomplished graphic designer and the former creative director of Nine Inch Nails, Sheridan’s list of accolades date back to 1997, when he created a website dedicated to the low-resolution…

Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The…

Nikita Zimov’s nickname for the vehicle seemed odd at first. It didn’t look like a baby mammoth. It looked like a small tank, with armored wheels and a pit bull’s center of gravity. Only after he smas

Two nights ago, I deleted everything. Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever…

Of all the media exchanges that unfolded in the wake of a deranged gunman’s attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the most telling by far was the one between CNN’s Dana Bash and Representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday. Bash suggested Democrats bore some blame for the shooting, asking…

Inside the control room of the IFA1 Interconnector connecting British and French national grids. Published inMagnetic Notes · 8 min read· Dec 2, 2019 -- This year I edited another book, worked on fasc

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future,…

Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961 1. When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” We have to “pay”1 attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and…

Annals of Communications How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline. February 4, 2026 Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff…

This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar…

In late November, I spent several hours talking with a member of the DC National Guard. I’d met him at an event—one unrelated to the Army—and when I found out what he did, I had questions. Was he among the soldiers stationed on street corners since the summer? Did he think he was helping the city?…

One of Google’s Nest surveillance cameras, whose recordings can be accessed by Google even if users don’t subscribe to the security firm’s services. CC Photo Lab / Shutterstock That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by…

The Weekend Essay To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence. August 31, 2024 Illustration by Jackie Carlise In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who…

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people…

Guest Essay Dec. 14, 2025 Credit...Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos Listen to this article · 13:41 min Learn more By Mr. Block is a novelist and the author of the memoir “Homeschooled.” By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was…

Blackbird Spyplane exists thanks to our readers. We don’t run any ads, we don’t use affiliate links on new clothes, we don’t do any spon. You’re the only people we owe anything, so we keep some of our best material for Classified Tier Subscribers. Upgrade today if you haven’t yet, support greatness…

“Developing superintelligence is now in sight,” says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Powerful AI “may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields,” says Dario Amodei, offering the…

👋 Welcome to Climate Drift: your cheat-sheet to climate. Each edition breaks down real solutions, hard numbers, and career moves for operators, founders, and investors who want impact. For more: Hey there! 👋 Skander here. You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said…

There’s a theory about housing that has taken hold with a kind of religious fervor: If you want to make housing more affordable, just build more of it. Supply and demand. Simple economics. This narrative is now dominating housing policy discussion across the political spectrum. Deregulate, upzone,…

Not you guys—you guys are great. (Photo: Getty) They say god never gives you a burden you cannot carry. I suspect this is overstated—what if the burden is an avalanche on your head?—but true, at least, in spirit. For example, everyone who cares about things like “rights” and “justice” and…

Hello! This is Hank Green, general internet guy and cofounder of Complexly. This is my last time in the Decoder guest host chair unfortunately, unless Nilay decides to have another kid someday, but we’re making the best of it. Today, I’m talking with my friend Sam Reich, who is the CEO and, I at…

August 7, 2025 This is No Gods No Masters, 2024, painted by me, in wax. 65x78” Join the $2 Lunch Club! This week’s question comes to us from Will Hopkins: When your job and healthcare depends on building the Torment Nexus, but you actually learned the lesson from the popular book Don't Build the…

Blocking mobile internet for two weeks can improve mental health, feelings of well-being, and attention spans Based on the research of Adrian Ward Today, nearly every American — 91% — owns a cellphone that can access the internet, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2011, only about one-third…

Rebecca Solnit Photograph: Supplied for Byline I know progressives are supposed to be technophobes, but there is one technology we probably love more than anyone else (except the engineers who created it): renewable energy. It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved…

The Dimension 20 cast at Madison Square Garden. Photo: Ashley Markle Welcome to the Unsleeping City, a magical New York overrun with the ghosts of crooked cops and members of a fairy mafia. Seven actors had gathered onstage at Madison Square Garden to occupy the fantasy world designed by Brennan Lee…

Innovation from the democracy-is-actually-important-for-innovation dept Thu, Jul 17th 2025 10:53am - Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train.…

For years, whenever I invited people over for a meal, it was a Big Production. I favored showstopping dishes, such as bo ssam or sides of poached salmon with elaborate mousseline sauces. Even regular dinner parties sometimes had themes. I sweated the small stuff. Once, I found myself scraping a…

I’ve lived in this city for decades, but I’m noticing more and more problems. There’s crowding, congestion, changing people, tall buildings, and the biggest problem: This city is a literal city. I love living in a city, but I hate dealing with other people. I shouldn’t be subject to the whims of my…

Plantation or slave labor camp? Let’s face it: a new generation of scholarship has changed the way we understand American history, particularly slavery, capitalism, and the Civil War. Our language should change as well. The old labels and terms handed down to us from the conservative scholars of the…

Venture capital is screwed. A bubble in AI is their last hope, and they’re betting everything on Sam Altman. It’s heartwarming. Today, we have the Pitchbook-NVCA Venture Monitor for Q1 2025. This is the National Venture Capital Association telling its members how things are going. It’s the view of…

skaldish Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances. skaldish I'm pretty quiet about the fact I'm a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I'm going through…

Politics from the your-mandate-is-lies dept Mon, Feb 10th 2025 05:21am - A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we’re in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They’re right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority —…

Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.Credit...Chris Maggio for The New York Times A strange journey to the glitter factory. Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.Credit...Chris Maggio for The New York Times By Dec. 21, 2018 Each December,…

Photos: Everett Collection ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps When Ke Huy Quan appeared in the most hotly anticipated film of my sixth grade existence, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I was horrified

Illustrations by Yoshi Sodeoka Listen to an audio version of this article. I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its…

Search The Lede What the death of a health-insurance C.E.O. means to America. December 7, 2024 Photograph by Anthony Behar / Sipa USA / Reuters As you know, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, fifty-year-

By Philip Moscovitch This item originally appeared as VIEWS in Morning File, September 17, 2024 By now, it feels like we have heard most of the arguments and theories about the decline of journalism:

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. This is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the fourth

Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Powe