In the spring of 2021, just months before Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act--heralded by the Biden administration as the largest-ever federal investment in public transit, bridge repair, and clean energy--I found myself playing a lot of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. This was a happy coincidence, because never in my life had the nation been so embroiled in wonky debates about infrastructure priorities and spending. And as it turns out, Mass Effect was the perfect 100-hour video game for that particular moment in history: It's absolutely obsessed with transportation technologies and their social, cultural, and political implications. Despite its revolutionary capacity, we often conceptualize transportation in mundane, frustrating terms: long commutes and congested highways, spotty bus service and increasingly crowded sidewalks littered with e-scooters. That's what makes fiction centered around these questions so important--especially when it comes to thinking through the big investments we want to make in infrastructure, what we hope to accomplish, and the challenges we should anticipate.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter. I've been thinking a lot about how crows talk. I've been intrigued by this idea ever since I heard Annalee Newitz explain the research they did for "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis," a Future Tense Fiction story published in 2018. Crows are a central part of the story, and they help a disease-detecting robot (once property of the story's now-defunct CDC) track an outbreak and transfer samples to a community vaccine developer.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. The U.N.'s COP27 climate summit kicks off on Nov. 6 in Egypt, inviting us, once again, to consider whether we're doing enough, fast enough, to stave off climate chaos and the suffering that will come with it. The scale of change required is head-spinningly drastic, so even unexpectedly rapid expansions in clean energy won't do much to curb malaise and doomsaying. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate investment in the nation's history, has been met, largely, with collective indifference, despite positive buzz about its potential effectiveness. The bill was, predictably, passed without any Republican votes, a grim reminder of the scale of climate denialism.

It will be foggy tonight; visibility will be bad tomorrow. The pollen count is high. You have given Galatea your old wool hat, and she looks soft and childlike, as if she has just returned from a long hiking trip and is about to fall asleep. "Do you think they'll remember you?"

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. As the editor of Future Tense, I have a few rules for writers. Chief among them: You're not allowed to open with a scary or utopian scenario and then write, "It sounds like science fiction, but …" And you need a very good reason to reference some of the biggest works of science fiction--1984, Brave New World, Gattaca, Minority Report, Terminator. Also, please avoid references to the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things." But if I don't, every article starts to sound the same: dystopian.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. When my husband asked me if I wanted to try the "cat trivia game" on Netflix, I thought it was going to be some sort of quiz about felines. I like cats, so I said sure. The "cat trivia game," it turns out, is Cat Burglar, which Netflix calls an "edgy, over-the-top, interactive trivia toon." It debuted in February and comes from the makers of Black Mirror.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. I showed up for my first "Flow sesh" feeling sluggish. It was 6 p.m. on a Monday, and I had promised myself I was going to use the time to try to make headway on a writing project I had been putting off all day. But I was also pretty skeptical. Flow Club, a platform for virtual coworking sessions, promises to allow members to "Feel good getting work done."

The race between technology and human beings has been a recurring theme in science fiction for more than a century. With human civilization witnessing phenomenal and unforeseen growth in high tech in the last few decades, the experiments of technology competing with the human agency have become much sharper and more frequent. There is no prize for guessing that much of it is occurring due to the exponential growth of AI. Recently, an artificial intelligence machine won the Paris Bridge Competition over human players and now the future in the gaming industry is dicey for humans. A very recent addition to such a stream of experimental exercises was found in Paris.

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.

This article is part of the Policing and Technology Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the relationship between law enforcement, police reform, and technology. It's the middle of the night, you are disoriented, and they want to know where you were earlier in the day. You have no idea at that moment that your ex-girlfriend was found dead, and some of your fingerprints were found at her house--but you do know you have the right to remain silent. Until the cops bring out the headset. One of the hallmarks of the U.S. Constitution is the enumerated right of citizens to not be coerced into self-incrimination or be allowed to "take the Fifth."