Does "Wuthering Heights" Herald the Revival of the Film Romance? Emerald Fennell's new movie may be mediocre, but its popularity demonstrates the strength of a genre that Hollywood has all but abandoned. The important thing about adaptations isn't what's taken out but what's put in. Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"--or, as she'd have it, " 'Wuthering Heights,' " complete with scare quotes--is the season's second Frankenstein movie, because Fennell takes bits and pieces from Emily Brontë's novel and, adding much of her own imagining, reassembles them into a misbegotten thing that wants only to be loved. And paying audiences seem to love it, even if many critics don't.

Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as possible? In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called "Virtual Futures." It was ten o'clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk--titled "Meltdown"--was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the time one of the top philosophy programs in the U.K. Land had gained a cult following for his radical anti-humanism, his wild predictions about the future of technology, and his erratic teaching style. Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly "experimental"; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a "demon voice" while jungle music played in the background.

Sign up to receive it in your inbox. The event has a storied history among mystery buffs; some of its first scripts were written by the celebrated author Donald E. Westlake, along with his wife Abby, and they often collaborated with notable writer friends, including Stephen King, Edward Gorey, and Isaac Asimov, on everything from performing to graphic design. A half century ago, few, if any, hotels offered "immersive theatre" as an amenity, and the Mystery Weekend became a hot ticket for city dwellers--the first weekend, in 1977, drew more than two hundred participants. Soon, mystery-solving events were de rigueur at many rural hotels, whose owners found that staging crime scenes was a surefire way to lure cosmopolitans to the country during the off-season. In 1992, the reporter Alessandra Stanley noted that the swelling glut of mystery parties came in three categories: serious, "in which participants form teams and spend two to three days"; semi-serious, which "take place in large hotels, over meals, and are meant to be more entertaining than challenging"; and those on cruise ships, which are fully unserious.

Is the Rat War Over? In New York, a rat czar and new methods have brought down complaints. We may even be ready to appreciate the creatures. Rats were leaving Manhattan, hurrying across the bridges in single-file lines. Some went to Westchester, some to Brooklyn. It was the pandemic, and the rats, which had been living off the nourishing trash of New York's densest borough for generations, were as panicked about the closure of restaurants as we were. People were eating three meals a day at home, and the rats were hungry. At least that was the story going around.

Inside the company behind Claude, researchers are trying to understand systems that may have already exceeded their grasp. The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his reporting on Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company behind the large language model Claude. They talk about Lewis-Kraus's visits to the company's San Francisco headquarters, what drew him to its research on interpretability and model behavior, and how its founding by former OpenAI leaders reflects deeper fissures within the A.I. industry. They also examine what "A.I. safety" looks like in theory and in practice, the range of views among rank-and-file employees about the technology's future, and whether the company's commitment to building safe and ethical systems can endure amid the pressures to scale and compete. Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either," by Gideon Lewis-Kraus " Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?

Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system's mind--examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch. It has become increasingly clear that Claude's selfhood, much like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives. A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words. Similar piles are part of the furniture of everyday life. Meteorologists use them to predict the weather. Epidemiologists use them to predict the paths of diseases. Among regular people, they do not usually inspire intense feelings. But when these A.I. systems began to predict the path of a sentence--that is, to talk--the reaction was widespread delirium. As a cognitive scientist wrote recently, "For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind." It's hard to blame them. Language is, or rather was, our special thing. We weren't prepared for the arrival of talking machines. Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, has drawn up a taxonomy of our most common responses. There are the "fanboys," who man the hype wires. They believe that large language models are intelligent, maybe even conscious, and prophesy that, before long, they will become superintelligent. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described A.I. as "our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone--we are literally making sand think." The fanboys' deflationary counterparts are the "curmudgeons," who claim that there's no there, and that only a blockhead would mistake a parlor trick for the soul of the new machine. In the recent book " The AI Con," the linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna belittle L.L.M.s as "mathy maths," "stochastic parrots," and "a racist pile of linear algebra." But, Pavlick writes, "there is another way to react." It is O.K., she offers, "to not know." What Pavlick means, on the most basic level, is that large language models are black boxes. We don't really understand how they work. We don't know if it makes sense to call them intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious. The existence of talking machines--entities that can do many of the things that only we have ever been able to do--throws a lot of other things into question. We refer to our own minds as if they weren't also black boxes.

Pierre Huyghe's A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin In "Liminals," a terrifying, overwhelming new installation, the artist erases the boundary between humans and the void. At the heart of the new piece is a fifty-five-minute film looped on an enormous screen. My preparation for "Liminals," an art work by Pierre Huyghe showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain, involved a small suitcase of books and articles about quantum physics, the science of sound, post-1968 France, relational aesthetics, and the sociology of techno. In the end, none of them proved useful. Among the heady possibilities dangled by the press release was an environment that would feature video, sound, light, and dust; exist outside of space and time; and operate in a state of quantum flux where "every moment is a maybe."

How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire--and a political force. Trust in American mass media has plummeted; more than three thousand newspapers have disappeared in the past two decades, and many people get their news from social platforms. In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a figure of singular influence. For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives--for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon. On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."

Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Your story in this week's issue, " Predictions and Presentiments," is drawn from your forthcoming book, " Beginning Middle End," which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening? Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now.

Is Good Taste a Trap? The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in. In Belle Burden's memoir, " Strangers," she describes the end of her marriage. It happened suddenly: until learning of her husband's infidelity, through a voice mail from a stranger, she had no idea anything was wrong. Burden and her husband shared an apartment in Tribeca and a house on Martha's Vineyard.