Love it or hate it, we are concentrating an enormous share of the economy on this AI bet, and you’re going to hear more from politicians who see an opportunity to funnel voter anger through a clear anti-AI populism.

The Canadian scientist Daniel Drucker, who has done more than practically anyone in the world to illuminate the benefits of GLP-1 drugs, proposed that GLP-1’s anti-inflammatory effects could provide a “unifying” mechanism for these drugs’ effectiveness:

There is an idea that comes from the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that, whereas pre-modern people were lost in finitude—that is, their choices were constrained by tradition or religion or economy—modern anxiety comes from an opposite affliction. We are lost in infinitude , the boundlessness of choices. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,”... See more

The frustrating truth is that we don’t really know for sure what the digital empire of short-form video is doing to our minds. But a systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory... See more

But these renters, who are on the verge of homeownership, seem to be “gambling for redemption”—that is, taking bigger risks on speculative bets to get that final windfall that will make homeownership possible. In essence, these economists discovered a large group of younger Americans who are treating the US economy like a slot machine that they... See more

But excessive chronic inflammation, which results from an immune system over-policing threats throughout the body, is a leading cause of organ damage, stroke, and neurological problems. GLP-1 drugs seem to bind to receptors throughout the body—in our gut, on our immune cells, and throughout the central nervous system—to broadcast the same message:... See more

In one 2025 study by researchers at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, three top AI models were pitted against MFA-trained writers. In initial tests, expert readers clearly preferred the human writing. That’s comforting. But once researchers fine-tuned ChatGPT on an individual author’s full body of work, the results... See more

The future will be filled with slop. But it will also be filled with stories, images, videos, and writing that will seem indelibly human, even when its silicon-based author lives in a data center in Virginia.

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the sort of shared moral language that was once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. I think that’s half-right. We have lost something with the erosion of religion, perhaps, but we’re still bound by an ethical... See more