Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. On Aug. 30, my heart broke a tiny bit. That day, the Guardian published a remarkable interview with Frank Oz, Jim Henson's longtime collaborator and the puppeteer behind Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and other classic Muppets. Oz hasn't been involved with the Muppets since 2007, three years after Disney purchased the franchise. He tells the Guardian: "I'd love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn't want me, and Sesame Street hasn't asked me for 10 years. They don't want me because I won't follow orders and I won't do the kind of Muppets they believe in. He added of the post-Disney Muppet movies and TV shows: "The soul's not there.

Sometimes, like a total eclipse, my two great passions--technology and reality TV--become one. It happened in November 2017, when, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I cajoled then-Future Tense contributor Jacob Brogan into writing about the previous night's Teen Mom 2 episode. It grappled with a critical question: Is it OK to shoot down a drone flying above private property? The segment in question begins as (former) teen mom Jenelle prepares for her wedding to David, a very cool and normal dude who we will return to in a moment. David, stalking the property like an ornery bison, calls Jenelle, informing her that "some girls" were attempting to take pictures of the event before it began.

While I was making dinner, I yelled at Alexa. But the recipe was a little complicated, and I kept having to repeat myself to get the damn Amazon Echo to turn off the timer. And when I used my computer communication voice to ask it to play NPR One so I could catch up on the news--it had been a whole eight or nine minutes since I had checked in with the world--it tried three times to instead play "The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix From NPR Music." I feel a little bad about it, remembering Rachel Withers' (very persuasive!) 2018 piece for Future Tense about why she won't date men who are rude to Alexa: It matters how you interact with your virtual assistant, not because it has feelings or will one day murder you in your sleep for disrespecting it, but because of how it reflects on you. Alexa is not human, but we engage with her like one.

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about the late, great 30 Rock--in particular, an episode from Season 1. Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters), the marvelously terrible boyfriend of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), is a bit of a technology entrepreneur--by which I mean he is the Beeper King, the last beeper salesman on Manhattan. "Which is cool," his then-girlfriend Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) tells a skeptical friend. But when he tries to sell beepers to her staff of TV writers, she loses it and tells him to leave. "You work in a business. Businesspeople need beepers," he insists.

I reach out to you still contemplating the profundity of what Mark Zuckerberg told his congressional inquisitors on Wednesday: "The space of people connecting with other people is a very large space." So large, it even includes newsletters in your inbox. Three clear winners and one loser emerged from Wednesday's Big Tech hearing in Washington. The winners were Rep. Pramila Jayapal, our new "eviscerator in chief"; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai's future career as an anger-management therapist; and Tim Wu. When the going gets tough in coming weeks, I will close my eyes and picture the Google CEO soothingly saying "congressman" with infinite patience, as he did at the beginning of all his answers. The more irate the congressional questioner, the more patient, measured, and empathetic his "congressman" sounded.

This past week, we witnessed wrenching debates over speech--involving protesters on the street, our Twitterer-in-chief, and aspiring New York Times op-ed writers. Some of the best tools we have to inspire and contextualize social movements are books and film, and in the next week, we will host conversations with some of the most interesting leaders in the book industry and Hollywood. We hope you'll join us: After a man is injured in a forklift accident, he takes on a lucrative offer to "raise" a robot. After a jarring first impression (imagine a toddler in the body of a massive robot), the relationship makes the protagonist rethink much of his life. In the response essay, John Frank Weaver, author of Robots Are People Too warns about the manipulative capabilities of all-too-human robots: "A company that records all your interactions raising a child--the stress, the exhaustion, the jubilation, the love--has a treasure trove of information about what makes you tick as a person, even when the child is a robot."

We love Money Heist, too, but it's probably time for a break from Netflix. So, join us for our upcoming web events on bats' (undeserved?) Wednesday, May 27, 4 p.m. Eastern: Are Bats Really to Blame for the COVID-19 Pandemic? Tuesday, June 2, 4 p.m. Eastern: Free Speech Project: Should We Think Twice Before Limiting Political Advocacy? Earlier this month, Singapore unveiled Spot, a social distancing-enforcing robotic dog that is now "patrolling" a park.

From here on Earth to up in space, the next two weeks of our Social-Distancing Socials are covering it all. Thursday, May 21: Will We Ever Fly Again? This pandemic is making armchair epidemiologists out of us all. Every morning we roll out of bed to yet another science-adjacent article shared by everyone and their great-aunt. But premature reporting on scientific studies can threaten public health.

While it may not lead to the next Cold War, the growing rivalry between the United States and China has certainly led to some frosty competition between the great powers. This is especially true of the tech sector, where some analysts liken the U.S. and China's heavy strategic investments in cybersecurity, quantum computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence to a digital arms race, one that, because of China's long-term positioning and access to vast amounts of data to train on, that country will win. But Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that when it comes to the world-shifting technology of artificial intelligence, the narrative isn't so simple. She explains why she is putting her money on the United States. Great power conflict isn't the only thing we at Future Tense have been fretting about this week.

Last week, we published "Mpendulo: The Answer," the latest installment of our Future Tense Fiction series. In it, author Nosipho Dumisa imagines what life and humanity might mean to a "synthetic person"--in this fictional world, someone born out of artificially created stem cells--and what their experience of their own humanity might be like while living in a society fraught with discrimination. In a response essay to the story, tech journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards looks at the major global debates we've already seen over real advances in reproductive technology, and what public fears over things like "playing God" with in vitro fertilization or "designer babies" with progress in genetics say about how we think about being human. Elsewhere on Future Tense, we've been exploring the wild world of tech enforcement. Charles Duan argues that the move to change the rules for patenting laws of nature seems eerily similar to a related attempt to do so in 1923.