When Stephen Kornfeld set sail aboard the MV Hondius in early April, his grand plan for the cruise was to add as many new species as possible to his birding list. A medical oncologist based in Bend, Oregon, Kornfeld is also an avid birder—second on eBird’s renowned rankings of birders worldwide—and the ship would visit several remote islands, where he might spot some of the globe’s most obscure avians.

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For true fans of Diet Coke, soda is sacrament, and reverence comes with strict parameters.

Before Ted Turner created a world of endless news, he imagined how the news would end. In 1980, in the run-up to the launch of CNN—in the days when 24-hour news cycle was a pipe dream, and something of a joke—the future mogul commissioned a segment to be aired in the case of environmental disaster, nuclear holocaust, or a similar Armageddon.

Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine UnHerd, Anthropic’s Claude has really blown his hair back. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins came away marveling at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence.

In the before times—before machines could hallucinate, before compute was a noun—it was not uncommon to go several weeks without someone telling me the world was about to end. Similarly, a whole season might pass without anyone assuring me that it was also, simultaneously, about to become perfect.
That particular luxury died on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. What followed was less a news cycle than a weather event—a tropical depression that would not budge.

Why don’t more Republicans defy President Trump? The president’s poll numbers are bad. The war in Iran is raising gasoline prices. The president’s family is pocketing billions. The president seems to care only about building glitzy monuments to himself. With the impending midterms looking pretty bad for Republicans, you’d think that Trump’s co-partisans would be taking a cue from Meat Loaf: “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” But no.

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.
But then came Kash Patel.

Over the weekend, reproductive-health-care providers across the country confronted a puzzle they had never before needed to solve at scale: how to offer medication abortion without mifepristone. The drug, also known as the abortion pill, is the first in a two-pill regimen that the FDA approved for pregnancy termination in 2000.