longreads

The Blake Lemoine incident is remembered today as a high‑water mark of AI hype. It thrust the whole idea of conscious AI into public awareness for a news cycle or two, but it also launched a conversation, among both computer scientists and…

Sharks are innocent. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network…

No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats,…

THE symbolism was clear last June when Emmanuel Macron, surrounded by factory workers, held up a sleek lithium battery in his right hand and a mining lamp in his left. He was in Douai, a northern French city with a coal mining history…

Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The town of Xuchang, for instance, capitalized on its legacy of making hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails—and…

A girl is found on a street in Ma’Anshan, China, in May 1993. Her paternal grandfather, the story goes, set her down and walked away. No explanation. It’s unclear how long she’s been outside when somebody arrives and takes her to the…

When DeepSeek burst onto the global stage in January 2025, it seemed to appear out of nowhere. But the large language model was just one of the thousands of generative AI tools that have been released in China since 2023—and there’s a…

But language models can only do so much, and what robots need most urgently is a new kind of model that understands the physical world the way an LLM understands the written word. And to build that model, engineers need way more data. While…

Ma’s moment arrived in 2011. On July 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The accident traumatized the nation for what it seemed to reveal about the costs of China’s breakneck pace of development. A prominent…

Jade Gu met her boyfriend online. Gu, who’s 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, was playing on her phone when she saw Charlie. She was deep in an otome game, a romance-driven video game where women are the protagonists. Charlie was a…