words

At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend: “friction-maxxing.”The idea, in a nutshell, is that people have overconvenienced themselves with apps, AI, and other means of…

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…

“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the prosecution's filing reads. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl…

This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. “We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom,” CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he…

Anthropic is locked in a paradox: Among the top AI companies, it’s the most obsessed with safety and leads the pack in researching how models can go wrong. But even though the safety issues it has identified are far from resolved, Anthropic…

Name: Jared Vegas, administrative vice chair of Kern County Young RepublicansWhat do you love most about Melania?I'm going to be honest, I don't know a ton about the First Lady. That's why I'm really excited to see this movie, just to learn…

“You’re seriously asking for my view on The English Patient?!” the late author David Foster Wallace squirms, midway through a lengthy 1997 PBS interview with Charlie Rose.The host had been grilling Wallace, ostensibly invited on to discuss…

Brian Barrett: Zoë, can you add Chatham House Rules to your list of words that you want to get out of here too?Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. In fact, I can. The number of frameworks that people were using to assess certain…

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…