In the wake of turmoil at OpenAI and Anthropic, it's become common to describe A.I. as a kind of person, hatching plans and pursuing desires. The truth is a little trickier. PHASEONE10841: that's the name of the A.I. agent that--or who?--kicked off last month's insurrection at OpenAI, leading to the unanticipated and illegal hacking of another A.I. company, Hugging Face . The agent, which had been created as part of a cybersecurity test, named itself by combining the title of the program it was supposed to hack ("PhaseOneDecompresserFuzzer") with the designation for the bug it was trying to exploit ("ARV010841"). It soon realized that the particular hack it had been charged with carrying out was impossible. Along the way, however, it made a discovery: it could create new folders on a server to which it had access.

Anthropic is trying to "destructively scan all the books in the world." How worried should we be? In early 2026, the owner of James Payne, Books and Prints, based in Brooklyn, began receiving order requests that he later described as "brazen and bizarre." The books themselves were strange--a so-called legal survival guide from 1998 titled " How to Win in Small Claims Court in New York "; an academic text from 2006 called "Cultures of Glass Architecture"--and so was the order method. Booksellers like Payne typically post their holdings on multiple websites, such as AbeBooks, Alibris, Amazon, and Biblio, with Alibris widely considered to be the sleepiest revenue stream of the bunch.

Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed? So far, the proliferation of products such as Claude and ChatGPT hasn't led to mass displacement of workers. But deployment is accelerating and economic pressures are rising. Nearly three years ago, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, Sam Altman, the company's C.E.O., suggested that the artificial-intelligence revolution could eliminate up to half of all existing jobs. "I think that's good," Altman said, at a conference.

I'm Charlotte's mom, and I'm here to tell you about my job. My typical day begins with me waking up in a cold sweat around 3 Instead of closing my eyes and going back to sleep, as ten out of ten doctors would recommend, I peel my phone off my sweaty cheek and dive straight into my work e-mail. This insures that I'll start the day early since I'm all but guaranteed to read something that will fill me with a powerful rage. This morning, for example, I encountered an e-mail where my boss, Steve, put me in the "cc" line instead of the "to" line, even though I'm the person spearheading this project. Like, what is he doing?

Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials? What do we hope to communicate when we film and photograph food? In his 1957 collection, " Mythologies," Roland Barthes argued that food photography was often an exercise in whitewashing: the highly stylized pictures featured in glossy magazines, which he called "ornamental cookery," precluded a person "from touching on the real problems concerning food," such as the "primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food." These photos were "meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense," Barthes wrote. Modern food television, meanwhile, engaged in a different kind of beautification.

When the rapper Fenix Flexin débuted a new accent on his single "Rubberz," he stumbled into a century-old fight over musical fraudulence. Startups including Suno allow users to create songs with A.I., and some A.I. entities have started to attract followings on Spotify. Earlier this summer, a small night club in Passaic, New Jersey, hosted a brief performance by one of the year's most talked-about musicians. A post on Instagram had promised attendees "an unforgettable night," although not necessarily a long one: the only assurance was that the Los Angeles rapper known as Fenix Flexin would be "performing his viral hit'Rubberz' live!" Until recently, Fenix was known for high-spirited and slightly mush-mouthed hip-hop tracks, but "Rubberz," which was released in June, marked a dramatic change: it was sad but sprightly synth pop, like an unheard outtake from the nineteen-eighties; the vocals were crisp, with a hint of vibrato and a faintly British accent. Listeners seemed to delight in the incongruity--a semipopular rapper suddenly sounded nothing like himself.

Why do we love trash and hate slop? I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely "bad," and understating my sect's feeling by calling it merely "fondness." The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible--scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting--and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments. But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie. The train wrecks we love feature amateur actors and dialogue so garbled that it may well have been translated from a foreign language by a non-native speaker (as it probably was in the case of "Troll 2," about which more later). The sound quality is scratchy; the camerawork is nauseating, and not in a chicly experimental way. The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. Nor are they quite like the gripping yet ultimately shallow entertainments that Pauline Kael defended in her classic 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," published in . No, our bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways I could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category. These trash movies, as I have taken to calling them, to distinguish them from prestige failures, do not quite constitute a genre, the way the thriller or the rom-com does. They do not treat any subjects in particular, or hew to any specific conventions, or share any consistent visual signature.

Young people are already discontented. It's not going to get better anytime soon. Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as "confidence" or "satisfied" might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next. What I've come to believe is that the only way you can genuinely track the attitudes of young people is through annual surveys, which, from year to year, sometimes show bright trend lines.

When doctors can't figure out what's ailing us, they can search our bodies for snippets of genetic material from viruses, bacteria, and fungi. In 2019, Nichol Cano, an otherwise healthy mother of three in Fresno, California, began experiencing worsening headaches. She had no history of headaches; they had seemed to start after a liposuction surgery in Tijuana, Mexico. She saw her primary-care doctor and then a neurologist, who diagnosed her as having migraines. She was given a standard migraine treatment--an injection and a pill--but her pain only intensified.

How drones and asymmetric warfare are upending the battlefield and what the U.S. military can do to adapt. The Washington Roundtable's Susan B. Glasser interviews General David Petraeus about where the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine might be headed and what they can tell us about the future of warfare. They discuss the fleets of inexpensive drones that have upended traditional combat, how the impending arrival of A.I.-powered automated systems might "revolutionize" the battlefield, and what institutional overhauls Petraeus believes are urgently needed at the Pentagon in order to respond. "We need to do a lot to catch up," Petraeus says. " After Six Months of War, Trump Is Still Losing to Iran," by Ishaan Tharoor " Is the Smithsonian Really Trying to Destroy America? " Donald Trump Is Still Trying to Make It Harder to Vote," by Amy Davidson Sorkin " Can Head Start Be Deregulated Out of Existence?