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The View From Inside the AI Bubble

Secret parties, lavish buffets, and talks of annihilation at one of the largest AI-research conferences

14/12/2025

How to Be Happy Like Thomas Aquinas

Modern social science finds that the 13th-century theologian’s recipe for “imperfect happiness” turns out to be perfect.

11/12/2025

The Philosopher of Scraps

Broccoli stems don’t tend to rouse strong emotions. Most home cooks toss them in the trash or compost without a second thought. But when I threw out some broccoli stalks—tough and woody ones, let it be known—while cooking dinner recently, guilt…

11/12/2025

The Most Impractical Tool in My Kitchen

My relationship with carbon-steel knives began with a lie. When I was in graduate school a few years ago, I walked into a schmancy New York City knife shop, determined to buy a lithe 210-millimeter Suisin Gyuto. But the clerk didn’t want to sell it…

10/12/2025

The Atlantic and Prologue Entertainment Strike Exclusive First Look for Films and Series

The Atlantic and Prologue Entertainment—the independent production studio founded by Lloyd Braun, Sarah Bremner, and Noah Oppenheim, and backed by RedBird Capital Partners—have entered into an exclusive first-look agreement to develop films and…

09/12/2025

Mamdani’s Plans Rely on New York’s Wealthiest

Fourteen years after Occupy Wall Street, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign radiated the spirit of the 99 percent: The mayor-elect promised to pay for free buses and universal child care by raising corporate taxes and increasing the city income tax by 50…

08/12/2025

The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable

This year, gene-editing technology was customized to fix mutations in a single patient’s genes for the first time.

08/12/2025

Frank Gehry’s Best Work Was Not His Flashiest

If you really want to understand the late architect’s transformative genius, look past the titanium showpieces that made him a household name.

08/12/2025

ChatGPT’s Self-Serving Optimism

OpenAI’s new guidelines ask its chatbot to celebrate ‘innovation,’ contradicting its stated goal of objectivity—and raising questions about what objectivity even means.

08/12/2025

James Patterson’s Maxims for a Happy Life

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1922.

04/12/2025

‘AI Psychosis’ Is a Medical Mystery

Researchers are scrambling to figure out why chatbots appear to lead some people to delusional thinking.

04/12/2025

Three Ideas for Lowering Electricity Costs

Electricity prices are becoming an outsize issue in American politics because they themselves are legitimately outsize.

03/12/2025