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In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Sheila Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chat bots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and

“Democracy is a very old institution, ” explains the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election, belatedly released in May. “And yet what

Each of Iran’s recent wars has been quick to acquire a name. On the day Israel stopped bombing Iran in June 2025, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to

On July 13 Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court. Calling the ICC “a global tribunal staffed by

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t all that impressed by Odysseus’s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship

With Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg promised an encounter and delivered one. Disclosure Day announces a precisely scheduled

I’ve been listening to Chana Joffe-Walt for a long time now on This American Life, where she often takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on

In the never-ending debate about freedom of speech on college campuses, conservatives have long condemned “cancel culture, ” an attitude of intolerance

“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might

In mid-February I found myself stuck for two days at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport, stranded by a winter freeze. It had been a month since Iran’s security

The thirteen paintings in Altoon Sultan’s exhibition at Hoffman Donahue take up little of the gallery’s wall space. Hung low, with varying distances

Close to midnight on Tuesday, April 7, a loud explosion rattled my family’s house in a suburb of Baghdad. A column of white smoke shadowed the alleys

The bar is no more than a narrow hall. There is barely enough space between the stools and the wall to walk through to a larger room at the back. Beyond

The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the