Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I once witnessed a friend going through a severe midlife crisis. Basically overnight, this formerly serious and well-adjusted middle-aged man dumped his wife for a much younger girlfriend, got a face tattoo, and built a full-sized halfpipe in his house. Soon, we were barraged with music recommendations (all stuff he'd listened to in high school and college) and life updates laden with "hip" "slang" ("Despite the age gap, my situationship with Triniteigh is lowkey lit"). It was a transparent--and, from a certain perspective, even sympathetic--response to a universal anxiety: He'd seen that the good times were over, and that only decline lay ahead. But, like all nostalgists, he didn't realize that you can't ever truly go back; you can only go backward. The United States, under President Donald Trump, seems to be undergoing a similar midlife crisis, as this reactionary administration attempts to brute-force the country back to a golden age that many people are realizing either didn't exist in the first place or has been permanently lost to the mists of time and modernization.

Amid much hoopla at the Palais Brongniart--the former home of the Paris stock exchange--sports giant Nike launched an exhaustive lineup of footwear and apparel innovation ahead of the Paris Summer Olympic games. During the three-day gala event, dubbed Nike On Air, the company debuted new kits for almost every sport. Highlights included new shoes for runners, basketball players, and soccer players; optimized performance apparel for newer sports such as skateboarding and breakdancing; and Project A.I.R., a platform that leverages generative AI to design and print personalized prototypes for athletes in mere minutes. As the event's name suggests, the company has leaned into its legacy proprietary technology. Forty years ago, Nike debuted Air: a tiny pressurized airbag in the sole of the shoe that gives athletes an energy return as their foot hits the ground. Today, the technology still forms a core part of the Nike shoe.

The Mac, formerly the more austere Macintosh, turns 40 today, putting Apple's longest-running product squarely in middle age. But like someone who sees the back half of their life approaching and gets in marathon-runner shape, the Mac is in the strongest place it's been for decades. From a revenue perspective, Mac sales declined precipitously in 2023, but that came on the heels of four years of growth that was likely the product of pent-up demand for an improved Mac lineup. In 2020, Apple finally started delivering on that, thanks in large part to Apple Silicon arriving in the Mac, ushering in the era we're in now. While the Mac was on shaky ground prior to Apple Silicon, it would now be pretty silly to suggest the Mac won't make it to its 50th birthday.

A sci-fi management sim from the team behind climate crisis fable Frostpunk, The Alters turns the classic video game concept of the "extra life" into a source of manpower. Protagonist(s) Jan Dolski is the sole survivor of a crash-landed mining mission, trapped on an airless planet in a mobile base that resembles an East End boxpark strung to the inside of the London Eye. To run the facility, Dolski must spawn and collaborate with alternate versions of himself. These aren't just doppelgangers, but independent characters with diverging personalities and skills (and haircuts) born of different life choices: one is a dreamy guitar player, another seems to have anger issues, a third is the boffin type, a fourth carries himself like Captain Kirk. Teamwork is crucial, but despite – or perhaps, thanks to – being genetically identical, Jan's parallel selves may not get along.

Abstractive summarization systems aim to produce more coherent and concise summaries than their extractive counterparts. Popular neural models have achieved impressive results for single-document summarization, yet their outputs are often incoherent and unfaithful to the input. In this paper, we introduce SENECA, a novel System for ENtity-drivEn Coherent Abstractive summarization framework that leverages entity information to generate informative and coherent abstracts. Our framework takes a two-step approach: (1) an entity-aware content selection module first identifies salient sentences from the input, then (2) an abstract generation module conducts cross-sentence information compression and abstraction to generate the final summary, which is trained with rewards to promote coherence, conciseness, and clarity. The two components are further connected using reinforcement learning. Automatic evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art on ROUGE and our proposed coherence measures on New York Times and CNN/Daily Mail datasets. Human judges further rate our system summaries as more informative and coherent than those by popular summarization models.