Most people credit me with the birth of the Brat Pack. That’s flattering, but not really true. What happened was, I destroyed the Brat Pack. The Brat Pack was left for dead on the night I named them in 1985.
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When Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2002, I was twenty-two and deep in one of those unfortunate periods during which a young writer wants to be serious but doesn’t quite know what that means.
In fact, this is perhaps the most insidious thing that people tell us—or that we tell ourselves—when we feel sad or insecure. It provokes enormous cognitive dissonance: “This is perfect?” you think (after the brief glow of the compliment wears off). And that suggests one of two logical conclusions: Either you face a bleak status quo with no hope of self-improvement, or the outside world must be to blame for your unhappiness. The first conclusion leads to utter darkness; the second to angry rebellion against a malevolent universe.
The truth is that you are not perfect, and neither is anyone else. And this is incredibly good news: If you can accept this reality, you will have hope of improving yourself and your life. Then you will be happier.
For centuries, Burg Ockenfels was home to medieval knights angling to control traffic along the Rhine River. Today the stone castle flaunts two round towers, a row of Renaissance-style statues and a courtyard that looks out over hills and farms.
The melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are climate change’s most dangerous Big Bad, capable of altering the very face of the planet. All the adaptation we could muster can’t hold back the 25 feet or so of sea level rise that Greenland alone could unleash, not to mention the couple hundred more locked up at the planet’s southern extreme.
For most of advertising history, “red” or “blue” as partisan loyalty signaled more your taste for Coke or Pepsi than your identity as Republican or Democrat. Mass markets, by definition, necessitated selling to both sides of the aisle.
When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.
Humans are compelled to review. The five-star and 10-point rating systems just make implicit sense to us, each number having its own gravity and texture that can be transposed on to a gut-feeling or opinion.
If you attended the 2019 Venice Biennale, you might have waited in a long line to see the prize-winning piece “Sun & Sea (Marina),” an opera performance staged by three Lithuanian artists on a sandy faux beach that had been installed in a warehouse.
A year ago, Google said that it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world.
There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying...
Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke.
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.
In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four.
Electricity supply is becoming the latest chokepoint to threaten the growth of artificial intelligence, according to leading tech industry chiefs, as power-hungry data centers add to the strain on grids around the world.














