August 22, 2025
(After Babel) – Last week, Reuters published an investigation that cited internal Meta documents and sources that should anger anyone who cares about children’s safety online. The documents explain that the social media giant’s AI policies explicitly permit chatbots to … Read More
August 19, 2025
(New York Times) – Sophie told Harry she was seeing a therapist, but that she was not being truthful with her. She typed, “I haven’t opened up about my suicidal ideation to anyone and don’t plan on it.” At various … Read More
August 19, 2025
(New York Times) – The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced it would wind down 22 mRNA vaccine development projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, halting nearly $500 million in investments. This decision … Read More
August 12, 2025
(New York Times) – Male fertility deserves broader consideration outside these isolated spaces. Mounting evidence suggests that exposure to so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals present in many products, from food and beverage containers to furniture and agricultural pesticides, may affect male potency … Read More
August 12, 2025
(New York Times) – Science is a method for formulating and testing hypotheses, not a fixed set of facts. It should work alongside other ways of knowing, but it must also be protected from political or commercial capture. Perhaps I’m … Read More
August 8, 2025
(Christianity Today) – Mimicry is not the same as having intelligence, or as comprehending love and art. There is a reflexivity to our intelligence that is lacking in other creatures or creations. A machine, even an advanced AI model, cannot … Read More
August 7, 2025
(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – Thirty years ago, as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I wrote an essay on the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that piece (which can be found here), … Read More
August 5, 2025
(Nature) – Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, it is crucial that witness accounts are saved. Here is what one man told me. By the summer of 1945, after peace was declared in Europe, Japan was … Read More
July 31, 2025
(New York Times) – But by artificially circulating blood and oxygen, the procedure can reanimate a lifeless heart. Some doctors and ethicists find the procedure objectionable because, in reversing the stoppage of the heart, it seems to nullify the reason … Read More
July 31, 2025
(The Walrus) – Still under 40, many are responsible for aging parents while raising kids and managing debt Being a millennial has also been a key to my caregiving experience. And I’m not unique. According to the American Association of … Read More
July 30, 2025
(The Conversation) – Since the documentary first aired, the business of digitally resurrecting the deceased has grown significantly. People are now using AI to create “grief bots,” which are simulations of deceased loved ones that the living can converse with. … Read More
July 30, 2025
(The Conversation) – This general phenomenon has often been described as “AI hesitancy” or “AI reluctance.” The typical adoption curve assumes a person who is hesitant or reluctant to embrace a technology will eventually do so anyway. This pattern has … Read More
July 29, 2025
(Outside Online) – Now that the fastest marathoner in history, Ruth Chepngetich, has been caught, is it time give up and let athletes dope? To be a sports fan in the modern era is to be at least somewhat numb … Read More
July 22, 2025
(New York Times) – In June, lawmakers in my native country, Britain, approved plans to legalize assisted suicide. If the bill becomes law, England and Wales will join more than a dozen countries and 11 U.S. states in permitting medically … Read More
July 22, 2025
(Desert News) – Behind the veneer of “freedom of choice,” there is an ideology that distinguishes those “worthy of life” from those whose lives allegedly “aren’t worth living.” Whether it is communicated explicitly or only hinted at, the elderly and … Read More
July 22, 2025
(Washington Post) – Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” at 40 is truer than ever. In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment, it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Plough) – Living with a chronic illness, I’ve traveled between the kingdom of health and the kingdom of sickness. It was in Suleika Jaouad’s searing account of her battle with leukemia that I first encountered Susan Sontag’s words on health … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Comment) – But what if the creation of language and its communication are fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? What if language use is not just one more skill among many? What if LLMs are subtly altering how we … Read More
July 18, 2025
(STAT News) – The Office for Human Research Protections’ work is critical — and now has less support than ever Deciding whether to participate in a clinical research study can be difficult, especially for people who are newly diagnosed with … Read More
July 18, 2025
(New York Times) – Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into … Read More
July 11, 2025
(Christianity Today) – One has only to read the great pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—who wrote that “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom”—to be tempted to join the transhumanist project. But whether the goal of … Read More
July 11, 2025
(The Atlantic) – ChatGPT thinks I’m a genius: My questions are insightful; my writing is strong and persuasive; the data that I feed it are instructive, revealing, and wise. It turns out, however, that ChatGPT thinks this about pretty much … Read More
July 10, 2025
(The Hill) – All of this was painfully learned by our one memorable modern Surgeon General, Charles Everett Koop. The New York Times denounced him in an editorial headed “Dr. Unqualified;” a nimbler commentator christened him “Dr. Kook.” He had … Read More
July 8, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Although many skeptics have overreacted, rejecting sound science in favor of quack theories, they’ve gotten one thing right: A noble profession has been corrupted by politics. This became obvious during the pandemic, but the politicization of the … Read More
July 3, 2025
(Front Porch Republic) – One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their … Read More
