Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has often said that AI will cure most diseases in the next 10 years. Late last month, he claimed that his company had taken a first step toward that future: Claude had, in less than 24 hours, discovered a new “enzyme system” that the company says resembles CRISPR, a gene-editing tool currently curing people of diseases.
Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety.
Usually, when the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams play, it’s a relatively short commute. But this evening, the teams will kick off the NFL’s first-ever regular-season game in Australia.
The two teams have taken diametrically opposite approaches to preventing the 8,000-mile journey from disorienting their stars.
On the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday, in the nation’s capital, people were sweating through their shirts, and tourists were pressing electric fans directly to their foreheads. The record-breaking heat wave that roasted the Midwest earlier this week has turned Washington, D.C., into hell. Temperatures peaked at 102 degrees Fahrenheit, with a heat index of 117. The sky was cloudless, and the humidity was encouraging me to lie down and cry. It was difficult to believe that D.C.
There are many things you can buy for $10,000: A nose job. With luck, a used car. A middling ticket to the World Cup final. Or you could purchase a MacBook Pro. That’s how much the highest-end, fully loaded version of Apple’s laptop now costs—$3,000 more than it did last week.
Maybe you don’t need the most powerful MacBook Pro. But last Thursday, Apple announced price hikes on most of its products. Apple’s cheapest laptop, the MacBook Neo, debuted for $600 just a few months ago.
In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan’s official surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency guided by “the free intelligence of the scientist” that would fund investigations into how the world works. As of 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, supplied about one in every 10 federal research dollars going to U.S. universities.
A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID, it is initiating a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance. This time, programs that survived the initial purge precisely because they were judged to be lifesaving are slated for cancellation.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording.
Since last month’s cease-fire, Gaza has been divided by a yellow line splitting Hamas-controlled Gaza to the west from Israeli-occupied Gaza to the east. At first, the line was invisible. But after Israeli soldiers repeatedly opened fire on Gazans who crossed it, Israel began to give the line a physical dimension with yellow concrete blocks. Now a U.S.
Immediately after Hamas and Israel agreed to the first phase of President Donald Trump’s peace plan, food and medical supplies were supposed to start flooding into the Gaza Strip. Like other key aspects of the agreement, that influx did not go exactly as planned. Some food, fuel, medical supplies, and other resources are moving, but the flow of aid remains clogged.
Updated at 7:31 p.m. ET on August 26, 2025
One of the more surreal knock-on effects of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. government is now holding a massive fire sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, generators, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural equipment, motorbikes, mobile health clinics, and more. Until recently, these items supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid projects that the Trump administration has now canceled.
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations.
This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his address to a global vaccine summit to disparage global vaccination. The conference was organized by Gavi, the world’s leading immunization program, and in a recorded speech, Kennedy accused the organization of collaborating with social-media companies to stifle dissenting views on immunization during the coronavirus pandemic and said it had “ignored the science” in its work.
Gambling has swallowed American sports culture whole. Until early 2018, sports betting was illegal under federal law; today, it’s legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. (and easy enough to access through backdoor channels even in the states where it isn’t). During NFL games, gambling commercials air more often than ads for beer. Commentators analyze not just whether a team can win, but if they might win by at least the number of points by which they’re favored on betting apps.
After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me.
It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs.
There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.
Since September 29, when the smell of chlorine first began to waft over metro Atlanta, Georgia residents’ lives have been upended by an enormous chemical fire. That day, a chemical plant containing millions of pounds of pool sanitizer burned to the ground in Conyers, Georgia. The blaze was extinguished in hours, but an enormous plume of orange and black smoke remained for days, so thick that drivers on Interstate 20 struggled to see past their windshield.
This year, just like last year, the nearly 200,000 kids in Chicago’s public elementary schools spent recess indoors during the first week of school, when the heat index hit 114 degrees. In the past few weeks, outdoor activities were canceled at schools in and around Washington, D.C., where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees last month, and in Southern California too.