Friends and fans of the illustrator Jason Polan find inspiration over crunchy tacos.

When we think about a future with robots, we tend to imagine Rosie, from “The Jetsons”: a humanoid doing chores. But the robot revolution isn’t going to end with people-shaped machines folding shirts. I live in New York City, and almost everything I can see was made by human hands. Central Park looks natural, but it was once a mostly featureless swamp. Thousands of laborers spent years creating the reservoir, the lake, the rolling hills. Their hands pushed shovels into the ground to build hillsides, lit fuses to blast rock away, and nestled saplings into the soil.

We often say that information that succeeds in this new ecosystem has “gone viral.” But virality is a shallow, fleeting, even passive form of success; to become centrally relevant is harder. You have to be interesting—ideally, not just interesting but provocative—and quantity is vital, too, as it affords for a kind of digital malleability.

I asked if he would place his confidence in a heart surgeon, no matter how gifted, who operated just once a week, as Oz does. “Well,” he replied, “in general you want a surgeon who lives and breathes his job, somebody who is above all devoted to that.” Again he mentioned Oz’s experience, but when I asked if he would send a patient to Oz for an operation, he looked uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. In many respects, Mehmet is now an entertainer. And he’s great at it. People learn a lot, and it can be meaningful in their lives. But that is a different job. In medicine, your baseline need has to be for a level of evidence that can lead to your conclusions. I don’t know how else you do it. Sometimes Mehmet will entertain wacky ideas—particularly if they are wacky and have entertainment value.”

Meditative video games such as the Sims or Minecraft have long offered players a form of immersive escapism into worlds of their own making. Stardew Valley, with its now famous pixelated barns and crops, was first released in the twenty-tens, a decade that also saw the rise of hygge, a Scandinavian stylized coziness to combat the darker seasons. Luxury candles and weighted blankets became millennial status symbols. But the popularity of #cozygaming represents a new ideal of technologically enabled self-soothing, both onscreen and off. 

Directed by Ridley Scott, nearly a quarter century after he steered the first “Gladiator” (2000) to smash returns and Oscar glory, this is the sword-and-sandal epic as both sequel and shell game. 

Five researchers look at the science behind our short attention spans, and how we can make our time more meaningful

“As well as greed, there has to be a love of gambling, a strong tendency to dream, a boundless optimism, a passion for quests, an enjoyment of physical risks, and a perverse desire to attempt that which is inherently difficult,” 

The bigger issue in many cities is that drivers don’t want to be slowed down – not even by kids having fun.

Evgenii Zvernov discovered the gym in early 2022, four months after arriving from Russia to work in computer graphics in Montreal.

While working out he met Ilya Zhulinsky, a Ukrainian who is also a recent arrival. Despite the tensions between their homelands, they shared contacts and started working out together.

“Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?” Mr. Zvernov says.

According to an analysis of fema data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House).