If the technology is only as good as the information it learns from, then state censorship is not a recipe for success.
Are you a Myers-Briggs person, an Enneagram person, or something else? The Atlantic made a quiz to help you find out.
What is the sound of quiet quitting?
Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work.
A personal history of anxiety
I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night.
The artist discusses artistry, artificial intelligence, and the human experience.
Chatbots and image generators, newly on the rise, have sparked our imaginations—and our fears. As artificial-intelligence machines sharpen their ability to translate written prompts into images that accurately capture both style and substance, some visual artists worry that their specialized skills might be rendered irrelevant.
“Drawing Hands,” M. C. Escher, 1948.
A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction.
In 2016, two Japanese reproductive biologists, Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou, made an announcement in the journal Nature that read like a science-fiction novel. The researchers had taken skin cells from the tip of a mouse’s tail, reprogrammed them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into egg cells.
Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong—big time.
Many criminals have been convicted as a result of encrypted-phone stings—more than four hundred in the U.K. alone.Illustration by Max Löffler
The New York Times Magazine – April 16, 2023:
A niche group of consultants is trying to get you back to the office. It’s not going too well.
Being the boss doesn’t mean you get exactly what you wish for. That’s what Craig Knoblock discovered when he tried to get his employees to come back to the office in the fall of 2021.
Labor fought for a long time to draw a bright line between work and home. It took almost no time at all to erase it.
Gig work has been silently taking over new industries, but not in the way many expected.
For most Americans, the concept of “gig work” has been synonymous with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — companies like Uber and DoorDash, Instacart and TaskRabbit. There was a moment in the 2010s when pundits told us to expect the “Uberization of everything”: a future in which the typical worker would move from job to job or task to task, finding either independence and flexibility in freelancing or, more realistically, the precarity of working for platforms that may be light on benefits and aggressively exploitative of labor.
The world’s biggest economy is leaving its peers ever further in the dust
In a more transactional world the price of influence is going up
The French leader has made a dangerous situation worse
April 10, 2023: A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the case for hugging pylons, not trees. Also, the transatlantic divide on gender-medicine (10:30) and why do Democrats keep helping Donald Trump? (17:55)
Economic growth should help, not hinder, the fight against climate change
The sheer majesty of a five-megawatt wind turbine, its central support the height of a skyscraper, its airliner-wingspan rotors tilling the sky, is hard to deny.
The New York Times Magazine – April 9, 2023: In this issue, Jim Rutenberg on how giving its audience what it wanted pushed Fox into a $1.6 billion bind; Elisabeth Zerofsky on Poland’s new political realities due to the war in Ukraine; Lydia Kiesling on the TV show “Yellowjackets”; Meg Bernhard on an L.A. school where the pandemic never ended; and more.
Rupert Murdoch built an empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted. But what they wanted — election lies and insurrection — put that empire (and the country) in peril.
Long at odds with the E.U. over its domestic policies, the right-wing government is winning allies with its staunch defense of Ukraine. Which battle matters most?
On set with the hit mystery series, which, amid all the gore, presents one of the most sensitive portraits of women on TV.
Notes on Donald Trump’s day in court.
By the time Donald Trump marched out from behind a phalanx of American flags and emerged into the gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom to speak to cheering supporters on Tuesday night, America’s first indicted ex-President hardly seemed chastened by his historic day as a defendant in a Manhattan courtroom.
Following the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation, the former President was arraigned on felony charges stemming from hush-money payments.
Economic growth should help, not hinder, the fight against climate change
The sheer majesty of a five-megawatt wind turbine, its central support the height of a skyscraper, its airliner-wingspan rotors tilling the sky, is hard to deny.
Too many doctors have suspended their professional judgment
For many Americans, the great tragedy of trans rights is the story of how Republican governors and state legislatures are stigmatising some of society’s most put-upon people—all too often in a cynical search for votes. This newspaper shares their dismay at these vicious tactics. In a free society it is not the government’s place to tell adults how to live and dress, which pronouns to use, or what to do with their bodies.
April 3, 2023: A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the China-US contest is entering a new and more dangerous phase, how the tech giants are going all in on artificial intelligence (10:26) and why rice is fuelling climate change and diabetes (25:03).
Chinese officials rage at what they see as American bullying
The tech giants are going all in on artificial intelligence. Each is doing it its own way
Rice feeds more than half the world—but also fuels diabetes and climate change
Boomers Daily 