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The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I

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In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy...
In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household uses in a day. At the time, de Vries, who is Dutch, was working at a consulting firm. In his spare time, he wrote a blog, called Digiconomist, about the risks of investing in cryptocurren...

artificial intelligence climate change energy crisis renewable resources
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The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One's Voice

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On a recent night, a woman named Robin was asleep next to her husband, Steve, in...
On a recent night, a woman named Robin was asleep next to her husband, Steve, in their Brooklyn home, when her phone buzzed on the bedside table. Robin is in her mid-thirties with long, dirty-blond hair. She works as an interior designer, specializing in luxury homes. The couple had gone out to a natural-wine bar in...

artificial intelligence crimes robocalls scams
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Carl Newport on his PhD experience at MIT: How I learn to concentrate

newyorker.com

I arrived at M.I.T. in the fall of 2004. I had just turned twenty-two, and was...
I arrived at M.I.T. in the fall of 2004. I had just turned twenty-two, and was there to pursue a doctorate as part of something called the Theory of Computation group—a band of computer scientists who spent more time writing equations than code. We were housed in the brand-new Stata Center, a Frank Gehry-designed fe...

focus intellectuals m.i.t.productivity thinking
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The Magic of Bird Brains

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At around 9 A.M. every weekday, a crow caws in the Jardin des Plantes, the oldest...
At around 9 A.M. every weekday, a crow caws in the Jardin des Plantes, the oldest botanical garden in Paris. The sound is a warning to every other crow: Frédéric Jiguet, a tall ornithologist whose dark hair is graying around the ears, has shown up for work. As Jiguet walks to his office at the French National Museum...

animal behavior crows ornithologists
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The Deep Sea Is Filled with Treasure, but It Comes at a Price

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The International Seabed Authority is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, in a building that looks a bit...
The International Seabed Authority is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, in a building that looks a bit like a prison and a bit like a Holiday Inn. The I.S.A., which has been described as “chronically overlooked” and is so obscure that even many Jamaicans don’t know it exists, has jurisdiction over roughly half the...

books environment metal mining ocean
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"Dune" and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

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A trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by...
A trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, yelling something foreign and uninterpretable to a horde of desert people. We see Chalamet as the embodiment of charismatic fury: every facial muscle clenched in tension, his voice strained and thro...

fantasy films languages science fiction
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What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet

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You are probably familiar with the Earth’s magnetic field, which makes all life here possible by...
You are probably familiar with the Earth’s magnetic field, which makes all life here possible by deflecting dangerous radiation from outer space. If you could see that field, it would look like a relatively tidy series of rings surrounding our planet, flowing out at the South Pole and reëntering at the North. The so...
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Inside North Korea's Forced Labor Program

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A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

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When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly...
When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly chronicled both ends of her long life in a series of nine memoirs. The first of these, “Instead of a Letter,” was published in 1963 and recently rereleased in the U.S. as part of the NYRB Classics series; it recounts her jolly, upper-cl...

british writers editors memoirs
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The Old House at Home (1940)

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McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off...
McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in the city. In eighty-six years it has had four owners—an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter—and all of them h...
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Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country (2017)

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The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next...
The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next to the Harrods department store, in Knightsbridge. Sometimes plainclothes police officers, or vans with tinted windows, can be found outside the building. Sometimes there are throngs of people around it. Sometimes there is virtually n...
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The Argument over a Long-Standing Autism Intervention

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When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for...
When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for how she spoke: she talked too softly, she talked in a monotone, she paused too long between words, she didn’t talk enough, she talked to herself. “Something’s wrong with her head,” kids would say. She was always fid...

autism behavior health care therapy
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The Second Death of Pablo Neruda

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It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history...
It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution ...

chile literature pablo neruda poetry
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Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

newyorker.com

My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political...
My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program....

advertising audiences layoffs media readership
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Baruch Spinoza and the art of thinking in dangerous times

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In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a...
In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on Matters of Theology and Religion.” But Van Eede, after setting the first half of the manuscript, became uneasy about its h...
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The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam

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As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around...
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 A.M. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage m...

audio corruption immigration rural
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The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires

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The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose...
The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Last year, Alberta’s first wildfire of note broke out unusually early, on April 30th, near the tiny town of Entwistle, about sixty-five miles west of Edmon...

audio climate change invertebrate wildfires
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A Teen's Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld

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Sharma was calling from Apartment 504. If he’d stepped out onto the balcony, or just looked...
Sharma was calling from Apartment 504. If he’d stepped out onto the balcony, or just looked out a window, he likely would have seen the dead body down below. Perhaps he called Nunes to find out whether the police had drawn a connection between the body and the building. Or perhaps Sharma believed that, through some ...

audio
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Don’t Eat Before Reading This (1999)

newyorker.com

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded...
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundre...
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Jaron Lanier: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

newyorker.com

Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage...
Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage to have memories, but, for better or worse, I have them. It’s been more than forty years since I co-founded the first company to make headsets and software for simulated experiences, and came up with familiar terms like virtual and...

artificial intelligence headsets software technology virtual reality
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Inside the Music Industry's High-Stakes A.I. Experiments

newyorker.com

Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and C.E.O. of Universal Music Group, the largest music company in...
Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and C.E.O. of Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, is curious, empathetic, and, if not exactly humble, a master of the humblebrag. His superpower is his humanity. A sixty-three-year-old Englishman, who was knighted in 2016 for his contributions to the music ...
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The Twins Obsession

newyorker.com

Half a century later, they still return our gaze, staring back at us in their dark...
Half a century later, they still return our gaze, staring back at us in their dark dresses and white stockings, their white headbands pinned in place. The seven-year-old identical twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side, pressed together as if to create the illusion that they are conjoined. One twin smile...
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We're sorry to see you go: please select the reason you wish to unsubscribe

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Please select the reason you wish to unsubscribe:⃞ I didn’t sign up for these e-mails.⃞ I...
Please select the reason you wish to unsubscribe:⃞ I didn’t sign up for these e-mails.⃞ I get too many of these e-mails.⃞ I don’t get enough of these e-mails. Yeah, that’s it.⃞ I receive enough of these e-mails, but I don’t “get” them.⃞ I don’t remember signing up for these e-mails.⃞ I don’t remember signing up for ...
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The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest (2015)

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Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the...
Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west...

earthquakes seismology
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