For all we’re obsessed with wellness, we’re not well, are we? It’s not that we care too much; caring is good, and conviction is good, and discipline is good etc etc etc. Wanting to improve your life, your body, your work, your politics, your relationships, your finances, your mornings, your sleep,…

Welcome to What’s Helping Today, a newsletter about the everyday work of staying alive on earth — written by author and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen. Some reading this will not know what it feels like to be trans — others of course do not need to be explained the feeling. I myself have never known…

The European Union has unveiled a sweeping new “Tech Sovereignty Package” aimed at reducing its dependence on American technology companies and building more of its own digital infrastructure. The plan focuses on three areas where Europe believes it has become strategically vulnerable: cloud…

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…

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: Who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy—those who understand how AI works—who are most eager to adopt it. Surprisingly, our new…

Colby Groves, documenting Amazon’s Baldy Mesa solar project. This week in the Anthropocene The road is dusty and trash-strewn. My friend and collaborator Colby Groves is hanging out the car window as I drive, gazing at a patchwork of solar panels lined up behind a chain-link fence. “This has to be…

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks in Ottawa on June 3, 2026. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press Althia Raj is a national politics columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @althiaraj Perhaps, we’ll soon call it Mark Carney’s democratic deficit. The prime minister has a penchant for centralizing…

This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent — Spark — from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of…

For the past year or so I’ve been spending most of my time researching the use of language and diffusion models in software businesses. One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based…

In the summer of 2000, I could never have imagined becoming a father. I was 34, living in New York City, with a good job in social care, but still in a tiny apartment. I had been with my partner, Pete, for just over three years; we were serious, but we didn’t live together. Becoming a parent was not…

The momentum behind a social media ban for Canadian minors has been building for months. The federal Liberals voted at their April policy convention to back a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts and AI chatbots, the government’s expert panel on online safety is studying the issue, protesters…

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved. In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI…

Imagine I sent you back in time to July 2015 with the goal of saving liberal democracy in America. Donald Trump announced his candidacy a month ago, the polls are showing him with a narrow lead, and the media—while noting his extreme rhetoric—are mostly treating this as a fun diversion. You can’t…

Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe…

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Have you tuned out Elon Musk yet? The oligarch founder and richest man in the world — currently wealthier than the next three guys combined — has been on our screens daily for years. He is a rare kind of public figure: immensely powerful,…

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis." The Soviet armies advancing into…

I’ve always loved the idea of someone else making a mixtape for me. When I was in middle school and until the first year of high school, we didn’t have the Internet at home. My parents were against buying me a PC; they thought it was a waste of time. Unlike many of my friends, I depended on books…

"I was in a weird, dark place," the Clerks director tells PEOPLE of his mental health struggles One morning last January, film director Kevin Smith awoke in terror, convinced he was losing his mind. The next day Smith, 52, checked into Arizona's Sierra Tucson treatment center where he spent the next…

Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped that “God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale. Exhibit No. 4,000 in this litany of woe is the continued existence of open plan workplaces. For decades, research has found that open plan offices…

13 high-fives13 Send as email Ten years ago, leading conservatives came out “Against Trump” – but soon let their disdain for “the Left” override all else. It is the story of Modern Conservatism in a nutshell. By Thomas Zimmer, February 24, 2026 The first part of this piece is free for everyone. If…

Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study…

Press Escape to close the menu. Follow Us XInstagramFacebookLinkedIn My Account Culture ClubWhy they love Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and he loves them. Illustration by Claudine Hellmuth/POLITICO (source images via iStock) 12/06/2025 09:55 AM EST Catherine Kim is an assistant editor at POLITICO…

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time. I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And…

I admit, this is an innovation I did not see coming: Silicon Valley has invented the philosophical zombie from the classic thought experiment “lol how crazy would it be if there were a philosophical zombie.” Until recently, the philosophical zombie was a concept closely associated with Australian…

[Warning: The following essay includes disturbing descriptions of violence.] Agitation is the best way I can describe it: A kind of emotional itching beneath the skin that cannot be scratched, a feeling that something is terribly wrong and it cannot be made right. That’s how I feel when I come…

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid…

Canadian politics has always had its share of spin. What feels newer, and far more corrosive, is the growing comfort some politicians now have with simply abandoning the facts altogether, particularly when courts or public institutions are involved. Misrepresentation is no longer an occasional lapse…

In the last year, the United States has transitioned from flawed liberal democracy to competitive authoritarianism. In this new regime, institutions as diverse as universities, law firms and news outlets can be bullied into changing behaviour, or shaken down for bribes, by a lawless president. Legal…

“We have no idea what we’re doing,” declared Elon Musk, standing beside a yawning “test trench” in Southern California in 2017. A crowd of engineering students and tech reporters hooted and hollered, grinned and nodded, charmed that a man so brilliant could be so modest. It was a simpler time. The…

Signal president Meredith Whittaker.Illustration by Supplied Please log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free Account On Feb. 10, an 18-year-old opened fire at a high school in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., killing eight people before turning a gun on herself. In the weeks that followed, OpenAI…

Since the Enlightenment, Western society has nurtured and celebrated the ideal of the autonomous self—the self-determined individual whose rights, freedoms, and personal ambitions are paramount. This cultural orientation, commonly labelled individualism, has often been portrayed as a triumph of…

Graphic: John Brockman, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvard University, Massachusetts. Photos: Getty Images. It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The birthday-party invitation said “siblings welcome,” which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town. You arrive a little disheveled and a little late. Your 5-year-old…

Sophia Rosenfeld is a distinguished historian and the author of Common Sense: A Political History. She discusses how the idea of “common sense” has been used as a political weapon, from Thomas Paine to Donald Trump. Rosenfeld explains how appeals to common sense can both empower ordinary people and…

After a lot of turmoil and their most vocal user base protesting about how Mozilla keeps pushing “AI” into the browser in many weird ways they now released the “AI Killswitch” they have been talking about for a while. Which is good. Those features should have been “opt-in” from the start and it’s…

There is a very simple political narrative, repeated ad nauseum, that goes something like this: The average American does not like “extreme” politicians of the right or left. As the right becomes more extreme, Democrats should “occupy the center lane,” offering “moderate” solutions with broad…

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests against raping children are leading to overdue demands that people not rape children, along with wider calls for greater avoidance of raping children across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy,…

In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of “The Homeland.” The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term it is now applying to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom…

Why has liberalism failed? That seems to be the great question of our age. One day it was a secure hegemonic force, it is claimed. The next, it was gone, an ascendant fascism filling the void in a ‘post-liberal’ world. ‘Why do people find the new right so much more compelling than you?’ we liberals…