Inside the boring-by-design U.S. fact-checking machine. A few years into my Foreign Service career, a colleague leaked a falsehood to the press. I couldn’t figure out why they’d done it. A more experienced colleague explained the situation
Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying. Fear of AI disruption spreads in concentric circles. Outright frenzy inside the labs becomes intense distress in San Francisco becomes palpable anxiety on
Anthropic should learn from those cotton-picking socialists. The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible. It could do the work of dozens of men, at a fraction of the cost. It would not be
If you're literate — a safe assumption, since you're reading this magazine — you have almost certainly come across the claim that AI will take your job. We won't go so far as to say that the automation of work is the story of 2026, but it's…
Everyone knows RCTs are the gold standard of evidence. ….Right? In 1710, Scottish doctor John Arbuthnot presented a new proof for the existence of God.1 He had observed that for 82 years in a row, London counted more christenings of baby bo…
The development community treats war as inevitable. We’re learning how to pay to prevent it. Global development has a war problem. The world overall is seeing more conflict every year, and the majority of the damage is in developing countri…
For health hackers, the risk is not experimenting. “Unfounded and reckless” is how Dr. Eric Topol described the use of gray market peptides in a recent New York Times article. In some cases, I have to agree. (“You’re taking a drug without k…
What global financial markets have in common with necromancers. Everything has a price. It’s a warning you might receive from a hedge fund trader, along with your “welcome to the firm” fleece vest. Or you might hear it from a skeleton, with…
China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside. Americans — left, right, and everywhere in between — seem to be afraid of AI. Th…
China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside. Americans — left, right, and everywhere in between — seem to be afraid of AI. Th…
Gen Z are a bunch of cowards…or are they risking it all on crypto? The editors of The New Critic report on their generation’s Risk-geist. A schism has emerged among members of the commentariat: Some pronounce Gen Z the biggest bunch of dege…
Why do manure spreaders have life cycles? I met Norm two decades ago. I recall him clothed in slacks and a button-down — I think it was the sort of shirt that featured a breast pocket expressly for carrying mechanical pencils. Norm wore gla…