The wonder of the online world was built by a community of eccentric volunteers. Can it survive the A.I. models it helped train? In a world where state policy is shaped by A.I. hallucination, it's cute to remember that consulting Wikipedia was once seen as irresponsible. Schools banned its use, and journalists were shamed for credulously repeating its hoaxes. "Reads like Wikipedia" was a literary insult.

They power our phones, cars, dishwashers--and the A.I. systems that prop up the economy. "We don't have a rating scale for complexity, but rockets are maybe a five," an investor said. His partner added, "Semiconductors are an eleven." There are a handful of truly monumental collective achievements in our history: Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps, if we're being generous, the Roman aqueducts. Modern global civilization has made one contribution to this eternal pantheon. It is not the moon landing. It is the semiconductor supply chain. A microchip is a bauble of metal and refined sand. It doesn't appear to have epic proportions. Upon close examination, however, the epic proportions are there in miniature. Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg--each reduced to ...

The viral "Hotel Lobby" meme, which lets users inhabit the bodies of Quavo and Takeoff using A.I., resembles a kind of digital blackface, but also speaks to a technology that makes appropriation the default. When I first heard "Versace," the 2013 breakout single by the Atlanta trio Migos, it was like seeing a rainbow for the first time. The hook is just Quavo saying the word "Versace" over and over, saccadic and uninterrupted: "Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace!" It's not the repetition of the designer name itself that gives the song gravitas but how Quavo and his bandmates, Offset and Takeoff, accent and manipulate the word into eighth-note triplets. They didn't invent this style of vocal performance, but they did revolutionize its use in hip-hop and popular music, with everyone from Taylor Swift to Ariana Grande adopting iterations of what came to be known simply as the "Migos flow." In the years following "Versace," the group notched two No. 1 albums, tied a Beatles chart record, and set off multiple online trends.

Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand. Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, maintains that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. It was the Friday before Labor Day, a lowering sun, when James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, spilled off a train and turned to work. He had reached the end of the track in New Jersey. His destination, the Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, was three miles in from the shore. In the normal course of things, Daunt, who is tall and English and who often has the look of someone trying and failing to be invisible, would weave across the final stretch by bicycle--he has a folding Brompton--but the afternoon was muggy, and the traffic unkind, so he crammed into a rideshare car. On the map, Eatontown looked minuscule, but on the approach it unfurled: shopping mall ...

Removing human drivers isn't only a cost-cutting strategy; Waymo riders prefer the solitude, the staff writer Molly Fischer says. A Waymo offers a unique experience: you ride as a passenger behind or next to an empty driver's seat, the steering wheel turning as though handled by a ghost. The staff writer Molly Fischer has been reporting on Waymo, and she tells David Remnick that though the statistics are hard to parse, Waymos appear to be safer than cars driven by humans. Fans of Waymo prefer not putting themselves in the temporary custody of a stranger, but, Fischer says, this appeal is precisely what makes Waymos' glitches scariest. Now that her reporting is done, Remnick wants to know: Would she take one of the robot taxis by choice?

We fight our nervous energy--but maybe we misunderstand what it's telling us. Long ago, when I was a fledgling journalist, I learned from an eminent editor about the concept of . It was a German word, he explained, that referred to the ability to sit still for a long time. "If you want to be a professional writer, you need," he told me. Although it was important to "get out there" and "report," it was also inevitable that I'd have to plant myself at a desk for whole days and weeks, focussing unremittingly on the production of words; many talented writers, he suggested, had failed to progress because they wrote beautifully but not for long enough.

"Grandpa, whose side were you on during the Great War of Kelly Clarkson Magic Store Bird Robot?" Coyote takes the Acme Company to court . I am a woman in my thirties, and I am thriving . A performatively feminist male announces his international tour . That Tinder Guy holding a fish is a great provider. Enter the Cartoon Caption Contest for a chance to appear in the magazine.

Waymos are safer than human drivers. Why are people heckling them, egging them, and smashing in their windshields? The wheel turns: when one of Waymo's autonomous vehicles is in motion, its steering wheel moves, too--twitching out the car's maneuvers from the usual position, facing the front-left seat. Generally, on American roads, this is known as the driver's seat. In a Waymo, such a designation is arbitrary. The Waymo Driver, as the company calls its autonomous-driving system--a force guided by sensors, cameras, custom maps, and machine learning--is all around. No one is allowed to sit in that front-left seat. Before I'd ridden in a Waymo, I had wondered about the wheel. What was it doing up there? One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a legal mandate. Existing safety standards assume that cars have steering wheels, and, because Waymo's vehicles are regulated as cars, so do they. Besides, the company has spent much of its decade-long existence retrofitting normal cars with self-driving technology; the wheel is largely a vestigial inheritance. "We were very curious about whether people would react positively or negatively to the fact that the wheel turned," Megan Neese, Waymo's "Head of Insights," told me recently. We were sitting in her employer's San Francisco offices. Neese has been at the company since 2019, when it began offering fully driverless rides to the public; she was tasked with gauging passenger reactions. It was not hard to see how a wheel steering on its own might look spooky--the suggestion of a ghost in the machine. Yet, to Neese's surprise, riders reported that it reassured them. It seemed to convey that the car's actions were "recognizable; they're relatable; they're continuing to happen." The Driver doesn't need them.)

In the last Turkish town on the road to Aleppo, jihadis and spies mixed with reporters trying to prove themselves. At the Hotel Istanbul, I was to meet a Syrian activist who went by the code name Harvester. I was twenty-two and wanted to learn how journalists work in conflict zones. In the spring of 2013--when I was twenty-two and had little sense of the direction my life might take--I travelled to the Turkish-Syrian border, to learn how journalists work in war. During the previous two years, the security forces of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, had carried out a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, and the situation had spiralled into armed conflict, with thousands of civilians dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees spilling into neighboring countries. Rebels had captured half of Syria's largest city, Aleppo, and most of the territory north and west of it, including the official crossings into southern Turkey. In practice, that meant any freelancer, humanitarian, or ...

Test engineers stage reality, sometimes by extreme means, to make sure airplanes don't fall apart, children can't open pill bottles, and bears won't break into coolers. Even the best models are little match for the incomprehensibly dynamic complexity of the universe. A run-in with human snacks transformed Kobuk the Destroyer's mother into a "problem bear." A native of the Alaskan wilderness, the grizzly was possibly ruined by a dumpster or a cache of campsite refuse, teaching her that food was simply there for the taking--a rewarding hack for the perennial dinnertime problem. This never ends well, and it was only a matter of time before her taste for free-range chickens got her killed by a rancher. If she was the problem, the two cubs she left behind were recruited to help with the solution. The bear-resistant container was invented to arrest the inadvertent cultivation of problem bears. A new cooler or compost bin cannot be marketed as bear-resistant until bears have been given a fair chance to break into it and fail. The gold standard is set by a consortium called the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, or I.G.B.C.