In July 1990, President George H. W. Bush issued a presidential proclamation to mark the dawn of a new and exciting era of neuroscience. The ’90s, Bush said, would be the “decade of the brain”—a 10-year scientific blitz that promised to render the human brain, “one of the most magnificent—and mysterious—wonders of creation,” a bit less mysterious.
Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets.
You’ve heard the dramatic weight loss stories. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, can help people lose 15 percent of their body weight. Tirzepatide, sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound, may be even more effective at shedding pounds.
Off the southwest tip of Iceland, you’ll find what’s often called a “marginal” body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere.
Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands.
The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the ideas, the insights, and the sublime style that distinguish their art.
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage...
What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me?
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification.
The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698.
In 2015, Josh Sisk, a freelance photographer in Baltimore, picked up a new Fujifilm X100S digital camera for thirteen hundred dollars. He wanted to use it on vacations and road trips, when his full kit of professional cameras and lenses would be too bulky to bring along.
There are many measures of success for a film or TV series. The most easily understandable are viewership metrics. Slightly less quantifiable is the amount of cover stories, articles, think pieces, blogs, social media posts, and articles inspired by a movie or show.
“Where are you from?” For most people, this is a casual social question. For me, it’s an exceptionally loaded one, and demands either a lie or my glossing over facts, because the real answer goes something like this: “I grew up on compounds in Kansas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, often travelling in five-vehicle caravans across the country from one location to the next.
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI had evolved well before The Atlantic revealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020.
Imagine a place where you can taste some of the finest wines in the world, enjoy delicious gourmet meals, hike on sea-sprayed oceanfront trails, explore deep ancient caves, surf world class waves, and meet some of the friendliest people anywhere on earth.
