Anthropic’s Claude ran a snack operation in the WSJ newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish—and taught us lessons about the future of AI agents. Thanks Kimberly!

Here are two sides to the AI debate, and both are perpetuating the idea that AI is “inevitable, all-powerful, and deserves to be controlled by a tiny group of people,” says the Empire of AI author.

“The whole of modernity,” Bauman wrote, “stands out from preceding epochs by its compulsive and obsessive modernizing—and modernizing means liquefaction, melting and smelting.” Relationships have become provisional. Anxieties are no longer concrete and local but diffuse and global. Products are designed for obsolescence. Even identity itself is consumable—you “try on” selves like clothes, discarding them when they no longer serve you. Gender is merely an expression, and love

The misguided temptation to exaggerate poverty

DM Good morning. What are the core reasons that humans across history, and still today, appear to possess, leverage, and perhaps enjoy such (overt!) bloodlust for solving personal and collective problems, such as conflict, aggression and greed (even as continuing enjoyment within our entertainment)? Good morning, Sciart. This is one of those questions that sits at the uncomfortable intersection of our evolved nature and our aspirations for ourselves. Let me walk through seve

It may have became the basis for most written languages, beginning 4,000 years ago in the Sinai desert.

For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Excerpt: "As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless. The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks thi

The defense secretary sends the wrong signals about U.S. leadership and justice. Excerpt: " This is how leadership always works in practice, even in organizations less hierarchical than the military. Some subordinates go along with orders or expectations because they’ve been taught not to challenge authority. Others do so to bask in the leader’s approval and proximity or to advance their careers, which expressions of dissent could torpedo. This is why leaders should be carefu

Yascha Mounk and Kelly Born discuss the socioeconomic impact of artificial intelligence.

It’s a perilous moment for creative life in America. While supporting oneself as an artist has never been easy, the power of generative A.I. is pushing creative workers to confront an uncomfortable question: Is there a place for paid creative work within late capitalism? And what will happen to our cultural landscape if the answer turns out to be no?

As Trump tries to negotiate Ukraine peace deal, European leaders sound alarm that Russia could target their countries next Quick Summary European officials are increasingly warning their citizens to prepare for potential conflict with Russia, a psychological shift for the continent. NATO’s European members plan to increase traditional defense spending to 3.5% of their economies by 2035, up from 2% currently. Russia is suspected of conducting a covert “gray zone” assault on Eu

In post-apocalyptic fiction, imagined futures turn today’s political and cultural tensions into geography.

The U.S. president’s pardon schemes encourage public officials to place personal interests ahead of the interests of the people.

Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were striking flints to make fires, researchers have found.

The union movement’s problem isn’t that workers don’t want to fight; it’s that they don’t want to lose.

For half a decade we’ve been worrying that ideas are getting harder to find. In fact, they might just be harder to sell. Excerpt : "However if ideas remain as discoverable as ever, but their economic impact is fading, then we need to look downstream from the laboratory. The decline in allocative efficiency should be more of a main focus — we need to throw more of our intellectual capital at understanding how to increase competitiveness and the market potential for innovative

More Americans have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago, and even well-known professions are changing

The attack at Brown University is just the latest example.

The problem with fixating on inequality, oligarchy, and other abstractions Excerpt: "As Stephen Colbert explained long ago , common sense comes from thinking “from the gut, not the brain.” Psychologists have a more sophisticated way of articulating this distinction. As readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink know, the human mind exhibits two different systems of cognition. The first is rapid and concrete, focusing on primary represent

DM Good morning! After all our multitudes of conversations directly or indirectly which relates to my topic of today, I again want to continue to explore the essential factor(s), core(s) or most fundamental reason(s) for why humans, and by extension, collective units of humanity, so endlessly and tenaciously rely upon, display and spread unfounded confidence, certainties and outright hubris within the knowledge which they hold so dear and constantly project to others. This in