At around 2 am local time in Caracas, Venezuela, US helicopters flew overhead while explosions resounded below. A few hours later, US president Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured and flown out of the Country.” US attorney general Pam Bondi followed with…
Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media. Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On…
After years of hype about generative AI increasing productivity and making lives easier, 2025 was the year erotic chatbots defined AI’s narrative.
I am, admittedly, a big flirt. I love everything about the exchange of getting to know another person. The playful banter. The rush of dopamine. The sexual subtlety and subtext of everything not said. Flirting, to me, remains one of the last human endeavors where people are intentionally trying to find common ground. It’s pure…
Take yourself back to 2017. Get Out and The Shape of Water were playing in theaters, Zohran Mamdani was still known as rapper Young Cardamom, and the Trump administration, freshly in power, was eager to prop up its favored energy sources. That year, the administration introduced a series of subsidies for struggling coal-fired power plants…
Gemini Live is the more conversational, natural language way of interacting with the Google Gemini AI bot using your voice. The idea is you chat with it like you would chat with a friend, interruptions and all, even if the actual answers are the same as you’d get from typing your queries into Gemini as…
When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI’s Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn’t kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth’s circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia—not…
When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz. Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions…
On a drizzly and windswept afternoon this summer, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a startup developing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their words were swiftly translated from Mandarin to English, and then transcribed onto a tiny translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company’s new…
In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a…