In any given year, the exercise of assembling a definitive list of the best places to travel is both exciting and daunting. After all, we’re never short on inspiring places and experiences we hope to cross off. And so, every fall, when we convene to start the process of creating this list, we do so with great care, enlisting our extensively traveled network of writers from around the world—and for the first time this year, editors from other Condé Nast Traveler markets—to pitch, endorse, defend, and eventually align on the places we believe that you, as our readers, will most want to travel to over the next 12 months.
During one of my more desperate phases as a young novelist, I began to question whether I should actually be writing my own stories. I was deeply uninterested at the time in anything that resembled a plot, but I acknowledged that if I wanted to attain any sort of literary success I would need to tell a story that had a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
THE RARE BEAUTY Blush. A Stanley Travel Tumbler. Olaplex shampoo. The Diesel Belt Skirt. Dior Lip Oil. L’Oreal Telescopic Lift Mascara. Any of the Skims Sets. While this might seem like a nonsensical list of products, on TikTok, each of these items has been the focus of a viral spending frenzy. Once known for dance videos, TikTok’s growing user rate has promoted the app from social media site to thriving marketplace — where a product can go from new offering to cult favorite in days, and drive thousands of dollars in sales.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, with zero fanfare, in late November 2022, the San Francisco–based artificial-intelligence company had few expectations. Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since.
IT’S BEEN HAILED as a cultural phenomenon and at the moment, it’s all anyone can talk about. It’s ChatGPT, the language model created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence company. We touched on the subject briefly before, but will take a more in-depth look today at the fastest-growing internet service ever (it reached 100 million users in January, just two months after its launch at the end of November 2022).
Last week, both Microsoft and Google gave demos of their new artificial intelligence–powered search assistants. Microsoft’s Bing Chat sits inside its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, while Google’s Bard chatbot will do its thing on the same page where Google’s standard search results appear.
It was when I was researching a story on that I realized there truly was no escape from the influencer industry. If business bros with corporate jobs in tech and finance — stable, high-paying careers with cushy benefits! — felt the need to supplement their status (and possibly their income) by becoming influencers, what hope was there for the rest of us?
In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis. I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.
In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal, and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died.
Wind was the first thing I heard in the morning, along with a door opening and closing as someone got up first and went out to use the outhouse. Sounds reached into my awareness through the fog of sleep. Then: the lighter button of the propane heater pressed, a metallic clang sounding at least twice until it caught. I heard the kettle being lit and muted footsteps on plywood. Someone was brewing coffee. The old, damp smell of socks and mold faded into the earthy scent of coffee.
The brain-powered individual, which is variously called the self, the ego, the mind, or “me,” lies at the center of Western thought. In the worldview of the West, we herald the greatest thinkers as world-changers. There is no more concise example of this than philosopher René Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “I think, therefore I am.” But who is this? Let’s take a closer look at the thinker, or the “me,” we all take for granted.
Time is not to be trusted. This should come as news to no one. Yet recent times have left people feeling betrayed that the reliable metronome laying down the beat of their lives has, in a word, gone bonkers. Time sulked and slipped away, or slogged to a stop, rushing ahead or hanging back unaccountably; it no longer came in tidy lumps clearly clustered in well-defined categories: past, present, future.
During a reading project I undertook to better understand the “third wave of democracy” — the remarkable and rapid rise of democracies in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa in the 1970s and 80s — I came to realize that this ascendency of democratic polities was not the result of some force propelling history toward its natural, final state, as some scholars have argued.
A little more than a year ago, the world seemed to wake up to the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence when OpenAI released ChatGPT, an application that enables users to converse with a computer in a singularly human way.
I spent the daytime during the summer of 2009 at an unpaid internship at a literary magazine, and I spent the nighttime, paid, behind the counter of the gelato stand at the Times Square location of Madame Tussauds wax museum.
