The last time we saw Imperator Furiosa, in the dystopian chase thriller "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015), she had just returned from the heat of battle, her face streaked with blood, one eye swollen shut, her body so fatigued and battered that she could hardly stand. Furiosa, played by a stupendous Charlize Theron, had spent several days and nights driving an enormous truck, the War Rig, across miles of open desert, withstanding fiery assaults, a lethal sandstorm, and the surly company of a reluctant ally named Max (Tom Hardy). But triumph, at last, was hers: the vile warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) lay dead at her feet, and hundreds of newly liberated desert dwellers were erupting in celebration. Amid the chaos, Furiosa scanned the crowd for Max and caught him slinking away. For a moment, he looked back and gave her an approving nod--then turned and vanished into the throng.

I met my husband in 2008 and therefore skipped the whole online dating universe that dominates how we hook up and fall in love in 2022. So I was pretty excited to try out The Right Stuff--the Peter Thiel-backed dating app for conservatives--you know, for journalism, and end my personal streak of dating-app virginity. "Inae falls in love with a patriot and divorces her husband," my esteemed colleague Abigail Weinberg had predicted for me. But after filling out the questionnaires and selecting photos to build my profile, I got stuck on the last step requiring an invite. I had no choice but to hit delete; my status as a dating app virgin remains intact. But it turns out I wasn't the only one disappointed by the system--a bunch of reviewers in the app store, first spotted here, also had complaints.

This might sound like a hot take but it's not: In 50 years, when historians look back on the crazy 2020s, they might point to advances in artificial intelligence as the most important long-term development of our time. We are building machines that can mimic human language, human creativity, and human thought. What will that mean for the future of work, morality, and economics? Bestselling author Steven Johnson joins the podcast to talk about the most exciting and scary ideas in artificial intelligence and an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the frontier of AI.

And this is guilt-free hooning since I'll recover, going downhill, most energy expended going up. Give her the spurs, Moon Flower. The Model 3's uncanny stability while cornering is mostly the product of its lithium-battery keel; but Tesla didn't skimp on the suspension bits: upper and lower A arms (aluminum and steel) with virtual steer axis geometry, twin-tube coilovers and anti-roll bar in front; in the rear, a multi-link geometry, also with twin-tube shocks and anti-roll bar. For now the hottest tires available are the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, which are nice all-rounders but not particularly grippy. I'm no financial analyst, but I do know cars.

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque--though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally rupturing, like miraculous sidewalk weeds, up through the literary cracks. That's thanks, in very large part, to a very small book called Annihilation. When it came out in 2014, the first in a three-part series, many people professed to love it. Perhaps a few of them genuinely did.