Sign up to receive it in your inbox. The event has a storied history among mystery buffs; some of its first scripts were written by the celebrated author Donald E. Westlake, along with his wife Abby, and they often collaborated with notable writer friends, including Stephen King, Edward Gorey, and Isaac Asimov, on everything from performing to graphic design. A half century ago, few, if any, hotels offered "immersive theatre" as an amenity, and the Mystery Weekend became a hot ticket for city dwellers--the first weekend, in 1977, drew more than two hundred participants. Soon, mystery-solving events were de rigueur at many rural hotels, whose owners found that staging crime scenes was a surefire way to lure cosmopolitans to the country during the off-season. In 1992, the reporter Alessandra Stanley noted that the swelling glut of mystery parties came in three categories: serious, "in which participants form teams and spend two to three days"; semi-serious, which "take place in large hotels, over meals, and are meant to be more entertaining than challenging"; and those on cruise ships, which are fully unserious.

Cryptic crosswords, the dominant crossword variety in the UK, are a promising target for advancing NLP systems that seek to process semantically complex, highly compositional language. Cryptic clues read like fluent natural language but are adversarially composed of two parts: a definition and a wordplay cipher requiring character-level manipulations. Expert humans use creative intelligence to solve cryptics, flexibly combining linguistic, world, and domain knowledge. In this paper, we make two main contributions. First, we present a dataset of cryptic clues as a challenging new benchmark for NLP systems that seek to process compositional language in more creative, human-like ways. After showing that three non-neural approaches and T5, a state-of-the-art neural language model, do not achieve good performance, we make our second main contribution: a novel curriculum approach, in which the model is first fine-tuned on related tasks such as unscrambling words. We also introduce a challenging data split, examine the meta-linguistic capabilities of subword-tokenized models, and investigate model systematicity by perturbing the wordplay part of clues, showing that T5 exhibits behavior partially consistent with human solving strategies. Although our curricular approach considerably improves on the T5 baseline, our best-performing model still fails to generalize to the extent that humans can. Thus, cryptic crosswords remain an unsolved challenge for NLP systems and a potential source of future innovation.

Which of These Updated Health-Care Plans Is Right for You? Thrilling news: it's time to decide what health-care plan you'll be opting in to for the coming year. Given the feedback we've received about how limited and expensive health care has become in this country, we've made some updates to our available offerings. Please choose from the following options. This is our most popular plan. It covers things like breathing (allowed, no co-pay), sleeping (hint: you must pretend to sleep in order to fall asleep), and eating (you pay for your own food).

The gloomy arguments in favor of solar geoengineering are compelling; so are the even gloomier counter-arguments. Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere.

Toys, crafts, lab kits, and more for the young loved ones in your life. In theory, buying gifts for children is a snap. If they're old enough to talk, but not old enough to ignore you completely, they will likely tell you what they want. And, if your kids run in the same kinds of circles as mine, they all seem to want the same things: fidget rings, slime, a Labubu key chain, a Squishmallow, a Sephora gift card, a digital wad of Robux, a hoverboard, and maybe a puppy. The adult who strives for a more bespoke level of gift-giving--or simply to find something with no connection to screens, mirrors, or fads--risks coming off as presumptuous and pretentious.

When President Donald Trump began his tariff rollout, the business world predicted that his unprecedented attempt to reshape the economy would lead to a major recession, if he went through with it all. But the markets stabilized and, in recent months, have continued to surge. That has some people worried about an even bigger threat: that overinvestment in artificial intelligence is creating a bubble . Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of today's preëminent financial journalists, is well versed in what's happening; his début book, " Too Big to Fail," was an account of the 2008 financial crash, and this year he released " 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation ." He tells David Remnick that the concern lies in the immense borrowing to build the infrastructure for a future A.I. economy, without the sufficient revenue, currently, to pay off the loans.

Did Women Really Ruin the Workplace? On Thursday, November 6, the New York published an op-ed video criticizing the effects of feminism on institutions and warning of the dangers of "toxic femininity." It briefly ran with the title "Did Women Ruin the Workplace?" I can answer that question: yes. Specifically, me--I'm the woman who ruined the workplace.

Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference.

Elaborate robberies are a Hollywood staple, and the real-life theft at the Louvre has become a phenomenon. Why are we riveted by this particular type of crime? On October 19th, a group of masked men broke into the Louvre in broad daylight and made off with some of France's crown jewels. Suspects are now in custody, but the online fervor is still going strong. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the sordid satisfaction of watching a heist play out, both onscreen and off.

Mamdani ran against New York City's political establishment. Do his early appointments suggest he's preparing to work within it? The staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral race, and what his time in office might look like. They talk about some of his early appointments to his administration and how his ambitious agenda may be at odds with other wings of the Democratic Party. They also look at how members of both parties are interpreting Mamdani's win, and how the new mayor might respond to President Donald Trump's threats to withhold federal funds from the city.