AI-Powered Dating Is All Hype. Dating apps and AI companies have been touting bot wingmen for months. But the future might just be good old-fashioned meet-cutes. I am, admittedly, a big flirt. I love everything about the exchange of getting to know another person.

US support for nuclear energy is soaring. Meanwhile, coal plants are on their way out and electricity-sucking data centers are meeting huge pushback. Welcome to the next front in the energy battle. Take yourself back to 2017. Get Out and The Shape of Water were playing in theaters, Zohran Mamdani was still known as rapper Young Cardamom, and the Trump administration, freshly in power, was eager to prop up its favored energy sources. That year, the administration introduced a series of subsidies for struggling coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants, which were facing increasing price pressures from gas and cheap renewables.

The battle for AI dominance has left a large footprint--and it's only getting bigger and more expensive. When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI's Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn't kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth's circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia--not agricultural estates, but AI data centers . Tech executives like Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison are fully bought in to the idea that the future of the American (and possibly global) economy are these new warehouses stocked with IT infrastructure. In the earliest days of computing there were giant power-sucking mainframes in climate-controlled rooms, with co-ax cables moving information from the mainframe to a terminal computer.

In the AI boom, chatbots and GPTs come and go quickly. On a drizzly and windswept afternoon this summer, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a startup developing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their words were swiftly translated from Mandarin to English, and then transcribed onto a tiny translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company's new prototype devices. Rokid's high-tech spectacles use Qwen, an open-weight large language model developed by the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. OpenAI's GPT-5, Google's Gemini 3, and Anthropic's Claude often score higher on benchmarks designed to gauge different dimensions of machine cleverness.

This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from--surprisingly--big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. It has been a big year for the right to repair, the movement of advocates pushing for people to be able to fix their own electronics and equipment without manufacturer approval. The issue has gathered broad support from technologists, farmers, military leaders, and politicians on both sides of the aisle. It is popular with just about everyone--except the companies who stand to gain if the parts, instructions, and tools necessary to fix their products remain under lock and key. Three US states passed right-to-repair laws this year, including in heavily Republican states like Texas where the measure received a unanimous vote in both the House and Senate.

Big AI companies courted controversy by scraping wide swaths of the public internet. With the rise of AI agents, the next data grab is far more private. For years, the cost of using "free" services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before. Over the past two years, generative AI tools--such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini--have moved beyond the relatively straightforward, text-only chatbots that the companies initially released.

From Zohran Mamdani's campaign to the US government's memes, fandom has become the defining language of US politics. Zohran Mamdani never auditioned for, but one of his campaign's final television ads placed him in the middle of the show's infamous Tribal Council. For roughly 30 seconds, a handful of former contestants addressed the camera while explaining their decisions to vote Mamdani's top opponent, Andrew Cuomo, off the "island" of Manhattan. "Didn't we already vote you out?" asks one former contestant. The spot is just one of a handful of fandom-influenced ads that Mamdani's campaign put out in the final weeks of the New York City mayoral race .

The billionaire's involvement with the Trump administration and DOGE had deep impacts on Tesla's bottom line. But Elon Musk was still able to turn his attention to SpaceX. What a weird time to be Elon Musk. This year opened with the businessman turned political operator throwing what appeared, to Nazis at least, to be a . This spring, activists frequently congregated outside the showrooms of his automaker, Tesla, to protest his foray into the US federal government and cozy relationship with President Trump.

Smartwatches are cool and all, but have you considered wearable neurotech? Ten years ago, a Fitbit was about as sophisticated a wearable as you could get. Then came the sleeker, more unassuming Oura ring . Now there's a new breed of wearables--built for your head. Instead of tracking your step count, heart rate, and skin temperature, these devices are designed to read your brain waves.

Two decades ago, social media promised to connect people with pals far and wide. Twenty years online has left us turning to AI for kinship. IRL companionship is the future. Anyone looking for a vibe check on the populace's current feelings about AI would do well to check out the walls of the New York City subway system. This fall, alongside posters for everything from dating apps to Skechers, a newcomer made its debut: Friend .