The bus smashed into him last month, when he was crossing the street with his wheelchair. By the time he made it to the public hospital in California where I work as a doctor, two quarts of blood had hemorrhaged into one of his thighs, where a tender football-shaped bulge distorted the skin. He remembered his view of the windshield as the bus bore down, then, as he toppled, of the vehicle’s dirty underbelly. He was convinced he’d die.
He didn’t.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Although exercise has clear benefits for both physical and mental health, for many people, “those are side effects of the aesthetic goal,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2023.
In May, I asked Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might’ve actually written. “You’re probably rolling your eyes,” the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at.
Decades of movies that explore the potential of machine consciousness—Blade Runner; Ex Machina; I, Robot; and many others—have tended to treat the arrival of said consciousness as a matter of course. Theirs are worlds in which society is able to sympathize with, and even socially accept, a true artificial intelligence. Recognizing AI’s presence as inevitable, of course, does not make it less anxiety inducing, either in fiction or in reality.
When Donald Trump ordered air strikes on key Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites last month and immediately declared that the targets had been “completely and totally obliterated,” he was counting on a single display of overwhelming air power to accomplish a major strategic goal. Though initially hesitant to join Israel’s 10-day-old bombing campaign against Iran, the president came to believe that the United States could finish off Tehran’s nuclear ambitions all at once.
After the tariff turmoil of months ago, what do we make of the big upswings we’re seeing in the markets?
Chase and Amex are about to spike their annual fees. It’ll drive away customers. That’s the point.
For decades, the state’s landmark environmental law made it easy to block home construction. A new law changes that.
The president’s attempts to undermine the Fed’s authority are not to be taken lightly.
James Frey joins Felix Salmon to talk about the ultra-rich people who inspired his latest book, Next to Heaven.
The politics of the party have shifted, with more of the GOP base reliant on welfare programs. But policy hasn’t followed.
Six Republicans said big cuts to the low-income health insurance program were unacceptable. Now they have to vote.
The procedure was already being performed in the state following a lower court ruling.
Republicans now support counterculture drug research, while Democrats have become cautious about unproven medical treatments.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
The crowded contest in the Garden State shows how hard it is to address pocketbook issues.
As we broadcast, the House was soon set to vote on the so-called big, beautiful bill before the July 4 deadline imposed by President Trump. Should the House pass the legislation, the bill would be sent to Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The bill massively increases funding for ICE, cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade and adds $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.
In his first live broadcast interview since being released from ICE detention, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil tells Democracy Now! about his experience behind bars, the ongoing threat of deportation that hangs over him and why he continues to speak out against the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza. The Columbia University graduate was the first pro-Palestinian campus protester to be jailed by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump has targeted undocumented immigrants, but the GOP bill will bar those who played by the rules from subsidized care, too.
Nichole Ayers / NASA
Earlier this week, the NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured an amazing image of a sprite, a rarely photographed weather phenomenon, as the International Space Station passed above a storm over Mexico. Ayers wrote: “Sprites are TLEs, or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below.
In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When a woman’s clothes constrict her movement, squeezing her into unforgiving shapes, or her exercise regime is a punishing ordeal meant to winnow her down to the smallest possible size, the result is all too often an alienation from her body.
As part of our July Fourth special broadcast, we continue our extended interview with Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The book documents the rise of OpenAI and how the AI industry is leading to a new form of colonialism. “One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao.
