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In 2019, Sophie Knight reflected on the unusual way she and her husband tried to deal with the imbalance of time spent on home chores: He paid her for housework.

In 1783, George Washington faced a potential mutiny of the Army. Two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Congress still hadn’t paid American servicemen and was repudiating promised pensions. Alexander Hamilton, then in Congress, encouraged soldiers to rebel, because he thought the pressure would lead Congress to approve the taxing authority he sought. Washington reproached Hamilton in a letter: An army is “a dangerous instrument to play with,” he wrote.

For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, strength is everything. At home, that means repressing minorities and co-opting the press. Abroad, it means responding to any criticism of New Delhi with anger—and even, it seems, with political assassinations on friendly soil.
On September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that the Indian government had killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia over his useless push for Sikh separatism.

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Google is taken for granted as a dominant force in the generative-AI market—so it’s easy to forget that, in the initial frenzy following the release of ChatGPT, the search giant was caught flat-footed. The company raced to catch up with OpenAI, and its early models made some basic and highly publicized errors.

Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a source of staggering morbidity and mortality.

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An alarming phenomenon has sprung up over the past few years: Many students are arriving at college unprepared to read entire books. That’s a broad statement to make, but I spoke with 33 professors at some of the country’s top universities, and over and over, they told me the same story.

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Thanksgiving can be a time to reconnect with the things we watched, wore, and listened to in the past (especially for those staying in their childhood bedrooms this weekend).