Is Jensen Huang's Affair a Crisis for the A.I. Boom? It's not yet clear what the Nvidia C.E.O.--or the Trump Administration--knew about the alleged Chinese spy he was involved with. Jensen Huang's affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. officials believe to be a spy could, as others have pointed out, turn out to be the costliest extramarital dalliance of all time. After the reported on Huang's relationship with the woman--Alice Huang, or Huang Le, an executive at a Singapore-based tech firm called Megaspeed International--he confessed over the weekend that he had been "unfaithful." By Tuesday afternoon, Nvidia's stock had tumbled by more than ten per cent, and Huang's stake in the chip company had lost more than seventeen billion dollars of its value.

Many of us are making individual efforts to use our phones less, or to avoid A.I. But we will need to work together. At noon, at six-thirty, and at ten at night, before I shuffle off to bed, my phone automatically shuts off access to all social-media sites. If I want to restore my ability to mindlessly scroll, I have to walk sheepishly to my kitchen and press my phone up against a little plastic square that sits on a high shelf. This humiliation device, called the Brick, limits my screen time to the apps that, in an earlier moment of clarity, I deemed essential: text messages and Apple Books, which, during these Bricked hours, I have been using to dutifully reread " The Brothers Karamazov," prompted more by a sense of shame than by a sincere interest in revisiting the great novels.

Can American Socialism Survive Its Success? The movement has often seen its ideas flourish as its organizations withered. Will today's resurgence follow the same course? In 1912, more than a thousand socialists held office in the United States. Their ambitions ranged from lowering trolley fares to abolishing the Senate. It was American socialism's best year ever. In 1912, the Socialist Party of America tallied a hundred and twenty thousand members, and newsstands groaned under the weight of some three hundred socialist papers and magazines, including the Kansas-based, which had three-quarters of a million subscribers and was committed to the belief that "socialism is not just a theory--it is a destiny."

Companies such as Google used to be our portals to the rest of the web. Can the internet as we know it survive when A.I. answers all of our questions? Lately, I've been having trouble finding stuff in my Gmail inbox. The Search function has become overzealous, jumping to summarize my conversations using artificial intelligence and skipping the actual addresses I'm attempting to search. It's not just e-mail accounts, though; search is in crisis everywhere.

The composer's song "On the Nature of Daylight" has popped up in countless sob fests including "Arrival" and "Hamnet." With billions of streams, he's become one of the most popular and successful composers of our time. If a character in a movie is sad, there's a good chance that Richter's on the soundtrack. If you've ever felt down, you may have found your way over to Spotify's "Sad Classical" playlist--a sixty-song, four-and-a-half-hour collection of such all-time emos as Frédéric Chopin, Samuel Barber, and Gustav Mahler. But at the very top is a track called "On the Nature of Daylight," by the composer Max Richter, from his 2004 album, "The Blue Notebooks." Any time a character in a film or a TV show experiences anything vaguely approaching melancholy, there's a good chance that Richter's brooding, cyclical strings are the soundtrack to their tears--and yours. "Daylight" was used in "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006), when Will Ferrell destroys a lamp after realizing that he'll soon be dead. In "Shutter Island" (2010), it plays when Leonardo DiCaprio struggles with visions of his wife, who, because of him, is dead. It bookends "Arrival" (2016), when Amy Adams talks aloud to her daughter, who is dead. You hear it in "The Last of Us" (2023), when a couple spends a final day together, before they kill themselves, and are dead. And in "Hamnet" (2025), when Hamnet is dead. "We recorded that album in three hours," Richter told me one drizzly afternoon, in a booth at Café Chelsea, in Manhattan. Slender and tall, with cropped hair and wearing a crisp black button-down, he went on, "When I'm working on something, I'm, like, 'Is anyone going to hear this?' I sort of don't expect anything. I'm just trying to put notes in the right places."

When Jontay Porter was ten, his father woke him up most mornings before dawn. He and his siblings piled into the family's Sprinter van and drove to an empty field house off the highway. Then, while their friends slept, they ran basketball drills with their father. "All I remember is it still being pitch-black outside, and the two dreaded double doors on the side of the building that would always be left open for us," Jontay told me recently. In the bleary moments just before one of his siblings tugged the field-house doors open, Jontay always secretly wished that they'd be locked. And, one morning, they were. Jontay smiled as he climbed back into the van and drifted off to sleep. But his brother Michael, Jr., who was seventeen months older, was furious. "Michael was the opposite," Jontay said. Jontay grew up in Columbia, Missouri, the fourth of eight children. His father, Michael, Sr., worked in Christian ministry, and his mother, Lisa, homeschooled the children. Both had played college basketball--Lisa, as a high-school senior, had averaged a nearly impossible fifty-eight points per game--and they saw the sport as their children's ticket to college. All eight of the kids eventually got basketball scholarships. By the time Jontay was sixteen, he was six feet ten. In most families, as a five-star high-school recruit, Jontay would have been the main attraction. In 2010, their father got a job on the coaching staff for the women's team at the University of Missouri. The men's coach spotted Michael shooting alone in the arena one night and offered him a full scholarship; he was still in seventh grade. When he accepted it, as a high-school senior, he was the top recruit in the country. His highlight reels had racked up millions of views on YouTube. N.B.A. scouts believed that he could be the next Kevin Durant. "He's a game-changer," a league executive told the New York . Big state schools turn their best athletes into local celebrities, but the hype that followed Michael to Missouri's campus on his recruiting visits was closer to Beatlemania. Fans asked for autographs and took selfies. Jontay, who came along, was seduced by the hysteria. "Frat houses are putting up posters, and he's literally treated like a king," he recalled. "I wanted to be a part of that circus." He skipped his senior year of high school to join the team, too. The brothers were best friends. Still, it was sometimes hard to be one of the top players in the country but just the second best in his family. "He got all the attention," Jontay said.

Nothing Is Stopping the Flood of A.I. Political Ads They're not real, but can voters tell the difference? In August, the reëlection campaign of the North Carolina state senator Michael Lee, a Republican, released an ad attacking his Democratic opponent, a yoga-studio owner named Jessica Bichler. The ad, titled "Bonkers Bichler," seems to show Bichler, a middle-aged woman with graying straight hair, doing yoga in a well-equipped, gently lit studio. The figure onscreen is not Bichler, though; it's a hyperrealistic, animated A.I. rendering of her. The next frame shows her body twisting into an impossible knot, even as she maintains a vacant-eyed grin.

With polls suggesting a bleak midterms for the G.O.P., Trumpworld in D.C. is girding itself for congressional subpoenas and preparing pardon requests. There are fourteen hundred and sixty-one days in a Presidency. When I met a former White House official for coffee last week, he kept mentioning this number. It had been drilled into his brain during a training he had attended, at a conservative think tank, sometime before joining the Administration. "In the early days, you go really hard, really fast--you know, get rid of U.S.A.I.D., stuff like that," he said. We were in a sitting room at the St. Regis Hotel, in downtown D.C. He'd recently returned to the private sector, and that afternoon he fell into reminiscing about the "halcyon days," as he put it, at the start of Donald Trump's second term: "Getting the January 6th prisoners out; the kids kicking in the doors at the Institute of Peace; withdrawing from all these globalist organizations." He reached out to try to kill a mosquito with his hand. "That was early energy," he said. "We've lost a little bit of our initial vibe. But not everyday can be a dramatic showdown." This stage of the Presidency, he went on, was for a different kind of work: "competent government officials" enacting "five hundred tweaks the conservative agenda has wanted for years."

Did the World Just Gain Hundreds of Millions of Alzheimer's Patients? A new definition of Alzheimer's includes people without symptoms. Experts are fiercely divided over whether that makes sense--and whether the new drugs really help. Many have heralded a golden age of Alzheimer's research, excited by the promise of new amyloid-targeting antibodies. Yet a large meta-study of such antibodies concluded that they probably result in "little to no difference" in the decline of memory and of cognitive ability. This July, some ten thousand people descended on London for the Alzheimer's Association International Conference. Another three thousand of us joined virtually. I'm an anthropologist, accustomed to conferences where croissants at coffee breaks count as a luxury. This one opened with six trumpeters dressed as Buckingham Palace guards, followed by dancers who discoed, vogued, and high-kicked through the history of British pop. After the first day's sessions, participants dispersed to parties; at one, singers in sequins belted out covers while someone played an illuminated, transparent violin. One night, the London Eye was lit purple to honor the people in attendance. The mood matched the spectacle. Joanne Pike, the Alzheimer's Association's president and C.E.O., announced that recent advances had brought the campaign against the disease to a "pivotal moment." Maria Carrillo, its chief science officer, hailed a groundswell of progress. That optimism followed decades of disappointment. Between 1974 and 2020, the U.S. government spent roughly twenty billion dollars on Alzheimer's research without seeing the approval of a single treatment designed to act on the disease's underlying biology, let alone stop or reverse its course. Today, Alzheimer's afflicts roughly one in nine Americans over sixty-five and, along with related dementias, has been estimated to cost the economy about three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year. In surveys, it ranks with cancer as the disease people fear most. It typically starts by robbing patients of recent memories--conversations they just had, where they put important objects--before corroding the basic functions of adult independence, from paying bills to managing medications. Eventually, it leaves patients unable to speak, move, swallow, or recognize close relatives.

A.I. is solving problems that stumped the field for decades. Mathematicians look to Terence Tao for guidance on their altered world. "I have had the strangest week ever in my life," Tao said, after OpenAI announced the solution to yet another problem. A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. This was a line often invoked by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was fuelled by coffee and amphetamines, slept little, travelled near-constantly, never married or had children, and published almost fifteen hundred papers in his lifetime, in collaboration with hundreds of other mathematicians. But Erdős was, in most ways, not machinelike. He called lecturing in mathematics "preaching," woke friends at odd hours by asking, "Is your brain open?," wore only silk underclothing on account of his sensitive skin, and claimed not to have learned how to butter toast until he was twenty-one. He gave away most of his earnings to charitable causes and to young mathematicians in need of funds for their education, and he offered bounties (sometimes ten dollars, sometimes a thousand) for solutions to mathematical problems he'd proposed. It has been said that, even above his remarkable contributions to the mathematical literature, he helped the discipline most profoundly by turning people who might otherwise have become hedge-fund managers or F.B.I. agents or lost souls into mathematicians. When he died, in 1996, at the age of eighty-three, he left behind about a thousand problems. Solving an Erdős problem is a great honor, as is having a low "Erdős number," a term that describes how many degrees of separation one is from having published work with him. Terence Tao was ten years old when Erdős visited his home town of Adelaide, Australia, in 1985. Erdős loved children and called them epsilons. Tao, a mathematics prodigy, had started taking college-level courses at age nine. Erdős posed a problem for him and Tao to work on together. A photograph of their meeting, taken by Tao's mother (who had been a math teacher before having kids), shows the young mathematician and the old one deep in thought, hands at chins, looking at the notepad before them.