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Why Music Really Does Make You Happier

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that the truth about life is largely invisible to humans.

03/10/2024

For How Much Longer Can Life Continue on This Troubled Planet?

Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010.

03/10/2024

Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret.

This past spring, a man in Washington State worried that his marriage was on the verge of collapse. “I am depressed and going a little crazy, still love her and want to win her back,” he typed into ChatGPT.

02/10/2024

Revenge of the Office

More than a year since the World Health Organization declared the end of the pandemic public-health emergency, you might expect the remote-work wars to have reached a peace settlement.

02/10/2024

Hurricane Helene Just Made the Case for Electric Trucks

More than a million American are still without electricity. EV owners are using their cars to keep the lights on.

01/10/2024

The Next Big Thing Is Still … Smart Glasses

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg stood on a stage in California holding what appeared to be a pair of thick black eyeglasses. His baggy T-shirt displayed Latin text that seemed to compare him to Julius Caesar—aut Zuck aut nihil—and he offered a bold…

01/10/2024

The Ozempic Middle Way

Many people who take GLP-1 drugs find that their cravings disappear. I went to a Buddhist monastery to try to understand why that doesn’t feel like enlightenment.

30/09/2024

Lost Kept Punishing Its Unlikeliest Hero

Twenty years ago, Lost revolutionized television with its nonlinear storytelling, unfurling a narrative via flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even flash-sidewayses.

30/09/2024

The $120 Million Passion Project That’s Too Ahead of Its Time

While working on his latest film, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the movie itself?

27/09/2024

AI Is a Language Microwave

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that AI would kill the undergraduate essay. That reaction came in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT, when the sudden appearance of its shocking capabilities seemed to present endless vistas of possibility—some…

27/09/2024

The Dead-End Policy That Harris and Trump Agree On

Eliminating college-degree requirements for jobs is very popular with voters, but would do almost nothing to help workers who don’t have a diploma.

27/09/2024

How to Stop Self-Obsessing and Be Happier

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In Dante’s Inferno, the Roman writer Virgil leads the story’s narrator down through the circles of hell.

26/09/2024