Annals of Inquiry Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch. February 9, 2026 It has become increasingly clear that Claude’s selfhood, much like our own, is a…

A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella When I was Promoted to Technical Fellow, I was “invited to the room”, joining Microsoft’s other Senior Executives. It was really something. Achieving the Senior Executive status is often mistaken for a comfortable reward, a final destination with enhanced…

Notebooks February 3, 2026 Themes: Books, Culture In a post-literate world, reading is treated more like an assumed good than a skill to be actively practised. Vintage illustration of a man sitting on a pile of books. Credit: Walker Art Library Attention dilemmas focus on the dramatic loss of the…

Society made you think that having multiple interests was a weakness. Go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. Retire at some point. But there is so much wrong with that sequence of events. We don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore. Specializing in one skill is almost certain death. I feel like we…

Guest Essay Jan. 10, 2026 Credit...Vivian Dehning Listen to this article · 15:46 min Learn more By D. Graham BurnettAlyssa Loh and Mr. Burnett, Ms. Loh and Mr. Schmidt are members of the Friends of Attention coalition and co-editors of its forthcoming book, “Attensity!” In our anxious age,…

In the late spring of 2012, the cash from my advance for The Burning House photobook was running low and I was in no mood to return to anything resembling a traditional office. I was less than a year into living in my van, had just fallen in love with surfing empty point breaks in Baja and was…

Part Of From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet see all updates David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. If you want to win in AI — and I mean win in…

When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the…

In his essay ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges wrote that the Argentine writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary…

The last music festival I attended before COVID was Hopscotch in September 2019. The Stereogum staff rented a house together in Raleigh, and we spent a long weekend bouncing between the big outdoor stages and venues around town. We were supposed to catch one of the first ever Purple Mountains…

We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So,…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most…

Profesor de español en la Ferris State University, en el estado de Miehigan de Esta dos Unidos, es autor de varios libros y ar tículos sobre la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea, particularmente la mexi cana y la paraguaya. Así mismo ha residi do y enseñado en el Perú, en México y en España. En…

Life and Letters The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. December 8, 2025 Sacks, a celebrated neurologist, avoided love for nearly fifty years, displacing his psychic conflicts onto the lives of his patients.Photograph by…

The Woman in the Moon, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894. When one is born, one is fundamentally born separate. This is very unfortunate, however it is also, inevitably, a fact of life. We come into the world as infants who, around the time…

In the hands of a great performer, the classical guitar can mesmerise audiences with its beauty, emotional power and subtlety. The 20th century was dominated by the Spanish guitar legend Andrés Segovia, who took the instrument from the salon to the large concert halls of the world, aided in part by…

Reminder: Register for our next edition of TRB Live, our interactive conversation series where we dig into the mechanics of running sustainable media businesses. Next Wednesday, Nov.19, from 1pm-2pmET, Hearst Newspapers senior director of new content initiatives Alex Ptachick and Subtext CEO Mike…

At Aboard , we’re building a tool that helps you build business software very, very quickly. And lately we’re starting to have more meetings to pitch our approach—and I've been using AI to prep myself for those meetings. When I used to work at an agency, it was always hard to prep for meetings like…

Letter of recommendation Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal. Listen to this article · 5:26 min Learn more Credit...Illustration by David Huang By Nov. 18, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET Late last spring I went through a period of some personal troubles and felt I was in need of spiritual…

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee. It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency. It says there are 5 levels of work: Level 1: “There is a problem.” Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.” Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here…

Badlands National Park in South Dakota.Credit...Gregory Halpern/Magnum, for The New York Times A trip to the Badlands with my 8-year old offered lessons in boyhood — and manhood. Badlands National Park in South Dakota.Credit...Gregory Halpern/Magnum, for The New York Times By Sam Graham-Felsen is a…

The New Age author was drawn to an esoteric bible in the 1970s. It made her a self-help megastar. And now it has gone mainstream. Supporters of Marianne Williamson at a watch party of the Democratic debates, hosted by Sylvia Snow (left) and Shane Snow.Credit...Holly Pickett for The New York Times By…

Collages by Vartika Sharma. Source image © Judith Collins/Alamy Last spring, I flew across the continent to California and drove into the beautiful hills of Mill Valley to visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever…

Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz Building the culture we want requires a radical change in mindset, and action. The dream of a free and open Internet isn't dead—but in 2025, it's definitely more complicated. Published Oct. 15, 2025 Share this! We used to talk about the next era of the…

Gen Z does not have a great reputation. That’s not necessarily their fault, but it definitely doesn’t help that they’ve come of age during such a tumultuous moment in human history. With the world reeling from political and social strife, looming environmental catastrophe, seemingly endless wars,…

You’ve been in therapy for years—so why do you still feel anxious all the time? Maybe it’s because you’ve been targeting the wrong bottlenecks. Interpersonal anxiety is a learned behavior. As such, it can be unlearned. Instead of acquiring new coping mechanisms, you can remove the underlying…

A few weeks back, my colleague, Andrew, dropped a line I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Too much learning without an outlet to apply it can lead to overload.” I’ve been turning that over in my head ever since. Mostly because I recognize myself in it. I am a world‑class content hoarder. I’ll…

a book about love and literature

‘I’m going to throw that thing into a river!” my wife says as she comes down the stairs looking frazzled after putting our four-year-old daughter to bed. To be clear, “that thing” is not our daughter, Emma*. It’s Grem, an AI-powered stuffed alien toy that the musician Claire Boucher, better known as…

Credit: KITH Erewhon, the cult-favorite upscale Los Angeles grocery chain, is coming to New York City. But the market, known for celebrity-endorsed smoothies and $30 ice cubes, will be harder to access than the West Coast locations. As first spotted by Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me newsletter, Erewhon…

Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure. Life is as much undergone as done. We are constitutionally in the midst. —Robert MacFarlane, Is A River Alive? Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? asks what would it mean for our understanding of the natural world and…

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then…

Annals of Fashion The brand conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. Can it become the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer? September 15, 2025 Uniqlo, founded in Japan in 1984, is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any…

Being good isn’t enough 06 Sep, 2025 Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one could be rubbish for another. Or maybe it’s that “good advice” itself is fuzzy. It depends entirely on…

As children, we think things just exist. Buildings, parks, institutions. They’re just there, like mountains or rivers. Part of the landscape. Then we grow up and realize that, oh, someone built that. But that realization doesn’t do it justice. We equate “someone built that” with “someone made…

Ibiza coast. August 2025. I went through a phase where I Anki’d every useful-seeming Japanese word I came across as well as all of the standard 2,136 kanji. I was teaching English in Japan at the time, which meant I was thinking about language learning all day. I’d arrived with no knowledge of the…

1. Meditation is easy! Just patiently relax the invisible eyeball with infinite pupils in the center of your brain until is-ness softens. 2. Hum until your whole head is buzzing, then relax and let the tingles settle at the bottom of your feet like you are a snow globe. 3. Many animals use hair to…