The Voice That Revealed a Planet
With Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday later this week, Danny Chau delivers an encomium for the father of modern nature documentaries. From his patience to his curiosity to his voice (that...
View ArticleOpposable Thumbs
Alan Michael Parker was a poet and teacher for four decades. Alan Michael Parker still teaches. But Alan Michael Parker is no longer a poet. Now, he’s a cartoonist. A single-panel cartoonist, to be...
View ArticleWish You Were Her
In her work for n+1, Mina Tavakoli has already written wildly entertaining dispatches from a ventriloquist convention and a dog show. Now she sets her sights on both grandparents of...
View ArticleThe Prehistory of A.I. Slop
In 2017, AI researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes. The results were what we’d call “slop” today, not just because they were nonsense but because they sounded so...
View ArticleThe Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)
As with any editor, reading is part of my job. But never have I been asked to do what’s expected of Clarke Speicher: read a novel in two days (or sometimes one), and prepare a lengthy memo detailing...
View ArticleGrate Expectations: The Troubled Quest for Tasty Vegan Cheese
By now, plant-based meat and milk alternatives are so common as to be unremarkable, but the same can’t be said for the third pillar of vegan faux-food engineering: cheese. Much of that, as Sam Colbert...
View ArticleLove Language
Esperanto has always been a bit of trivia in my brain, nothing more: It’s the rare constructed language that has a sizable footprint and speaking population. (Sorry, Klingon and Dothraki.) But Katie...
View ArticleHow Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives
Frank, Lincoln, and Paul met over a chess board more than a decade ago. They didn’t share much in the way of circumstances, just a love of the game. After one of them disappeared, though, another of...
View ArticleAre Memories Transferable — or Edible?
Six decades ago, behavioral psychologist James McConnell wanted to prove that worms could learn. He did, using a series of somewhat gruesome experiments that culminating in feeding worms other worms....
View ArticleSubmitting to the Beast
Todd Kliman’s son Theo loves cooking—not that much of a surprise when your father’s an acclaimed food critic and writer. Todd Kliman’s son Theo had never been to New Orleans. So Todd Kliman took Theo...
View ArticleThe Troubling Disappearance of ‘El Gallito’
In 2017, Ernesto Gonzales vanished from his office in Harlingen, Texas. His truck was there; he was not. Three years later, after finally discovering Gonzales’s remains, the Texas Rangers and local...
View ArticleSam Bankman-Fried’s Prison Experiment
Since 2023, disgraced crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been incarcerated; first in Brooklyn, then in two federal prisons in California as part of a 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy....
View ArticleHappy Fucking Birthday
Don’t look now, but a certain constitutional republic is turning 250 soon! To celebrate, Christopher Hooks goes to the nation’s capital (and elsewhere) to see what this extremely functional and...
View ArticleNobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History
Your computer screen might be where you interact with Claude or ChatGPT, but it’s not where those AI models do their work. For that, look to the massive data centers that house training and...
View ArticleMiddle of Somewhere
Nevada’s Highway 50 has plenty of miles. What it doesn’t have is a whole lot of people. Or amenities. Still, it continues to draw new residents along with road-trippers. For Deseret News, Natalia...
View ArticleOn Description
Alfred Jung Lee has been many things. A journalist. A horticulturist. A husband. He’s no longer any of these things. He’s now other things, though. Things that he wasn’t before. Most notably, a...
View ArticleTom Colicchio’s Final Service
Most people’s exposure to Tom Colicchio is through his long-running gig as head judge on Top Chef. Fewer have probably walked through the doors of his New York City restaurant Craft, which after 25...
View ArticleSilicon Valley Circuits
Hua Hsu grew up in Cupertino when Apple was just another company in an anonymous office park—which is to say, before Highway 85 transformed the southern reaches of Silicon Valley. Now, he uses the...
View ArticleThe Forgotten Bombing of LaGuardia Airport
Eleven people dead. Dozens more injured. When a bomb exploded in a public locker in LaGuardia on a December night in 1975, tearing a hole through eight-inch-thick concrete, it became the biggest act...
View ArticleThe Looting of Science Fiction
Since the resurgence of virtual-reality technology in the 2010s, much has been made of how tech companies evoked science-fiction novels to assert their products’ potential: Neuromancer, Ready Player...
View ArticleLittle Monsters
Parenting isn’t easy, especially when your kids don’t respond to conventional tactics. But Meghan Flaherty has a trick up her gauntlet: a lifelong love of fantasy and role-playing games. To the...
View ArticleElite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’
I have a vague eighth-grade memory of trying to run 400 meters in under a minute. The operative word here, of course, is “trying.” But what eluded me then is nothing for the middle- and high-school...
View ArticleThe Children Who Loved a Killer
When Steven Judy was executed for rape and murder in 1981, he was little more to the public than a monster. To Traci and Randy Carr, he was something else: a hero and a protector. After all, he was...
View Article“Spaceballs: The Clickbait”—Inside the Return of Rick Moranis at Comic-Con
First off: This isn’t a Rick Moranis profile. I know you want it to be—we all want it to be—but it’s not. Maybe one day we’ll get the deep, rich look at a man who’s beloved by millions of comedy fans...
View ArticleWhat Is It Like to Be a Cucumber?
I’d be lying if I said I understand everything Michael Levin believes. But I’m also not alone; sometimes his own colleagues can’t even follow his arguments. Elizabeth Weil’s profile of the renegade...
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