Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosing a pope, doge, emperor or magistrate could inste...
Read article
A setting exists on your phone but vanishes on your laptop. An onboarding screen refuses to advance even though every field appears complete. An organization account opens a dashboard that a...
Read
An email can be perfectly written, legitimately requested and sent from a real company — and still end up in spam. The reason is that modern email delivery is no longer determined only by wh...
Read
Astronomy has a reputation for expensive telescopes, complicated star charts and distant objects visible only through professional instruments. Yet some of the sky's most memorable events re...
Read
Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
Read
Ask a modern AI system about a breaking scientific discovery and the answer may arrive with links to a university, a journal and a newspaper. It can feel as though the model has opened the i...
Read
There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
Read
For years, the basic experience of generative AI could be reduced to a remarkably simple exchange: you type something, the machine types something back. Ask for a summary, a translation, an...
Read
The idea of launching an object into space was born of a scientific and political ambition that changed the course of history. The first artificial satellite, launched in 1957, was not jus...
Read
Why AI Doesn’t Really Understand the World (But Reconstructs It) When people talk to ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant, they often say: “It understands everything.” The truth is mo...
Read