Many people have put forth theories about why, exactly, the internet is bad. The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty, snap reactions, and the spreading of disinformation, and they allow for all of this to take place without accountability, instantaneously and at scale.
SIX OR SEVEN years ago, I realized I should learn about artificial intelligence. I’m a journalist, but in my spare time I’d been writing a speculative novel set in a world ruled by a corporate, AI-run government. The problem was, I didn’t really understand what a system like that would look like.
WHEN A MOVIE becomes a mass culture phenomenon, like Barbie, any negative criticism of it runs the risk of coming off hysterical. Any meanness toward it becomes the mirror version of the reactions of fans who see the movie in the theater again and again, who cry during certain scenes each time, and who tell the world about it on social media with a great sense of pride and purpose, or even with a certain amount of shock about its power over them.
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...
I still love software as much today as I did when Paul Allen and I started Microsoft. But—even though it has improved a lot in the decades since then—in many ways, software is still pretty dumb.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade.
I recently completed the road trip of a lifetime. I struck out from Napanee, Ontario, to Los Angeles, California – a 2,800-mile trip that I had been planning since before Covid times. I wanted to take this time to think deeply about our overreliance on cars and our love affair with the open road.
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature.
For the 10 years they were together, Kristen de Marco and her terrier Gracie were inseparable. De Marco brought her dog to work each day, and routinely left dinners and parties early to rush home to her; she skipped her 20th high-school reunion because Gracie was sick and none of the available hotels could accommodate a dog.
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.
It’s a grey November day; rain gently pocks the surface of the tidal pools. There is not much to see in this East Sussex nature reserve – a few gulls, a little grebe, a solitary wader on the shore – but already my breathing has slowed to the rhythm of the water lapping the shingle, my shoulders have dropped and I feel imbued with a sense of calm.
Are you flourishing? Not “just getting by” or “making it through,” but truly thriving? In the last two decades, the field of positive psychology has embraced the concept of flourishing, the pinnacle of well-being. Distinct from subjective happiness or physical health, flourishing is the aggregate of all life experiences when every aspect of your life is going well.
They are ravenous and roving. Newly emerged from a six-month state of suspended animation, over a dozen larvae scale the crumpled paper towel inside a plastic cup. One determined individual undulates past the others to the top of the paper peak.
I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
Aqua blue, acid lime and grape purple. Electric orange interspersed with neon pink. Gray suede and cheetah print mixed with white and gold. These are not descriptions of a minimalist’s worst nightmare, but rather new color combinations from Adidas, Reebok and New Balance. And they are jarring by design.