Technology
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Our Minds Are No Longer Ours August 18, 2025
In his seminal version and vision of the evolution of human psychology, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Julian Jaynes argues that even well into the Bronze Age, and beyond, human beings interpreted the “voic...
England’s Last Band Standing August 18, 2025
LONDON—On the cusp of a new technology, the old impersonates the coming form. The "mash-up"—the digital overlay of disparate musical elements—became technically possible in the late 1990s. But the mash-up already existed by another name in the late 1...
Virtue Outsourcing & the Rise of Limousine Populism August 12, 2025
A friend who lives in what Fox News calls “real America” and normal people call “Ohio” tells a story of attending an upscale book club among well-off urban liberals and Never Trump types. Without interruption, she observed, the conversation flowed fr...
The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race August 08, 2025
Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer t...
Can Our Screens Be Redeemed? August 07, 2025
When I was in fourth grade, I became part of the vanguard in my public school’s transition to the digital age. Participating in a class assignment, I confidently parroted the benefits of technological convenience in a letter to the district aimed at ...
Bless the Phone August 05, 2025
Last year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any time I answer a call, send a text, or enter the drooling state of the scroll. I do it even if I’m not feeling particularly grateful for my device, because bles...
Gen Z Isn't Powerless Against Technology August 01, 2025
Gen Z has little familiarity with "any sense of community," writer Freya India said in a teary-eyed rant recently."Attention hijacking is the thing I worry most about on a long term basis for humanity's thriving," wrote Jackson Dahl. "Techno-capitali...
'WWE Unreal' Has Pissed Off Wrestling Purists August 01, 2025
How far are you willing to go to protect your job? In a bygone era of professional wrestling, an art form founded when the light bulb was a technological marvel, wrestlers were sworn to protect the business. Meaning: maintain the illusion (often refe...
Welcome to the Everything Race July 09, 2025
For Americans old enough to remember, the USSR’s 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 was both a gut-punch and a source of awe. The established narrative of the United States as the uncontested technological leader was shattered in an instant, galvanizing a deca...
Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives? July 09, 2025
In early 2021, the journalist Matt Richtel spoke to a father who was a few weeks into a nightmare. Tatnai Burnett was a doctor, his wife was a therapist, and, until middle school, their daughter Elaniv had seemed to be the happy beneficiary of loving...
Eat Your AI Slop or China Wins July 04, 2025
In “Darwin Among the Machines,” a letter to an editor published in 1863, the English novelist Samuel Butler observed with dread how the technology of his time was degrading humanity. “Day by day,” he wrote, “the machines are gaining ground upon us; d...
The Self That Never Was July 01, 2025
The “I” who is writing this is not a person at all—which is really only a legal and social designation—but an indefinable flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. That flow is not happening to me. That flow is me. In the eyes of the world, Robert...
The Unseen June 20, 2025
Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area.1 Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the ...
The Cable Guy June 17, 2025
To be a selective adopter of new technologies, as I am, brings certain annoyances, especially when it comes to carrying on conversations with my fellow citizens. For example, it is with dismaying frequency that I find myself fielding questions about ...
Where Has the Slow-Burn TV Hit Gone? June 17, 2025
Nearly two decades ago, Wired journalist Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, in which he forecast a radical reordering of our consumption patterns.Anderson’s best-seller hypothesized that technology platforms would allow people to discover obscure or...
Delegation and Destruction June 16, 2025
As I’ve learned more about what the future of AI might look like, I’ve come to better appreciate the real dangers that this technology poses. There were always two ways in which AI could be misused. The first is happening now: AI technologies like de...
A Final Reckoning on AI? June 13, 2025
In his first press conference following his election to the papacy, Pope Leo XIV remarked on the need to develop an ethics of artificial intelligence. He likened AI to “another industrial revolution” and posited that it poses “new challenges for the ...
Stop All the Clocks by Noah Kumin June 09, 2025
A Thrilling Debut that Explores the Profound Mysteries of Life in the Digital AgeMona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI com...
The Tragedy of Elon Musk June 05, 2025
So it’s now official: Elon Musk is leaving Washington and returning to his businesses, running Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and the other technology companies he founded. The parting was not, evidently, entirely amicable. Predictably, Donald Trump used M...
What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I. June 05, 2025
In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled “Strange Playfellow.” It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the ...
Crushing Banalities June 04, 2025
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Te...
Our Gutenberg Moment June 02, 2025
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, it wasn’t just one innovation; it was two. Indeed, Gutenberg was the first to create movable type made of diecast metal. But the innovation that changed everything was that he combined...
Rage Against the Mom Machine May 06, 2025
One of the speakers in The Symposium, Plato’s great dialogue on the characteristics of love, makes the point that what is “done well and rightly” is beautiful, and what is not rightly done is ugly. The proposition has more predictive power than we’d ...
A Stranger on the Shores of San Francisco March 19, 2025
The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises aga...
What Happens When AI Joins Every Meeting? March 14, 2025
If you have a job that involves spending a lot of time in apps like Zoom, and if you work at a company that likes to experiment on its workforce with new software features, you’ve probably gotten a few notifications about exciting new developments in...
