Ross Andersen

This afternoon, as the moon’s shadow slanted across the United States of America, millions upon millions of people within the centermost line of its path gazed up at totality, the most extraordinary sight that nature has to offer, here on Earth and perhaps in the universe at large. During the Great American Eclipse of 2017, totality left me awestruck. This year, outside the total-eclipse zone, was a more muted affair: On The Atlantic’s rooftop terrace in Washington, D.C.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have each taken a turn as technology’s alpha dog, but none of them can claim that title now. Musk has become a polarizing figure, drained of all mystique. Zuckerberg sold us on a social-media dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Bezos self-ejected from the CEO chair at Amazon, so he could make rockets and frolic on his yacht with his fiancée. (Good for him.)
At the top of the tech world, a vacancy now looms like a missing tooth.

One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language.

An atmospheric river is exactly what it sounds like: a ribbon of concentrated moisture that can stretch for 1,000 miles through the sky. The one that brought all manner of chaos to Los Angeles this week formed when water vapor rose from the sea’s surface somewhere east of Hawaii. As the planet turned, it got caught in a narrow channel between pinwheeling pressure systems. Strong winds pushed it east, until it came to hover like a snake over Southern California.

Few people have derived more profit from a colleague’s superstition than Tim Hallam, a former communications director for the Chicago Bulls. In the spring of 1991, the Bulls were preparing for their first NBA Finals, against Magic Johnson’s aging Lakers, when Hallam approached Michael Jordan, the team’s superstar, to ask him for a kindness.

Yesterday afternoon, my dad, Erik Dybkaer Andersen, lay sleeping at home in his hospice bed when a calm settled over his body and he drew his last breath. He was 78. For more than a year, we had known that cancer would take him; only the hour was uncertain. But it is still a shock to find him missing from his bedroom, from his family, from the world. It is too early to measure, much less put into writing, all that he meant to us.

The Belgian empire invaded the Congo rainforest during the late 19th century and swiftly established itself as the cruelest imperial force in Africa. The Congo is the world’s second-largest rainforest behind the Amazon, and King Leopold II treated it like a personal loot box. To strip away and sell its resources, he enslaved the Indigenous population, destroying much of the region’s preexisting culture and politics from the family unit on upward.

Ilya Sutskever, bless his heart. Until recently, to the extent that Sutskever was known at all, it was as a brilliant artificial-intelligence researcher. He was the star student who helped Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers of AI,” kick off the so-called deep-learning revolution.

Earlier this year, I asked Sam Altman whether decisions made by OpenAI’s leaders might one day lead to unemployment among the masses. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop,” he told me. He couldn’t have known then that his would be among the first.

For millions of years, the river Ebro has sloshed south from Spain’s jagged Cantabrian Mountains, carving out a broad valley that is now home to one of the country’s most fertile wine regions. Between its sprawling vineyards, the landscape rises steeply to hilltop medieval towns. Laguardia is the best known, on account of its high walls, cobblestones, and cavernous wine cellars. But the town’s rustic grandeur conceals a deep history of violence.

Whatever basketball’s blue-collar bona fides, whatever its associations with the barbershop and the neighborhood blacktop, its culture has proved hostile to at least one category of everyman: the plumber. A few years ago, fans on YouTube and TikTok began uploading grainy footage of star players from previous decades and zooming in on the defenders, usually white guys with short shorts, long mustaches, and very little muscle definition.

For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention.

I remember the first time I saw the floaty rock. It was the middle of night, and I was facing the insomniac’s dilemma: to reach for the phone or not. I reached and opened Twitter—this was two weeks ago; the new name hadn’t yet sunk in—on the theory that a scroll through my feed might achieve some hypnotic effect, creating an opening for sleep to take hold. That’s when I saw the blurry video.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor.

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed.

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

Bettmann; Kevin C. Cox / Getty; Paul Spella / The AtlanticIn the end, the NBA bubble held. A complex of resorts and mini-arenas in Orlando, Florida, somehow kept the coronavirus out of the playoffs, as though it were a member of the New York Knicks. Tonight, the curtain fell on the whole affair after the Los Angeles Lakers dominated the Miami Heat to close out their 17th championship, tying the Boston Celtics for the most in NBA history.