Posted on January 8, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi There’s a lot of a to-do about Mark Zuckerberg announcing that moderation teams on Meta’s social media properties are being largely phased out and replaced by a system similar to X’s “community notes,” and that Meta will now basically allow people to…

What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be? Wait, What Even Is Flu? Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins,…

In the days after Donald Trump inspired a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, it felt like his days in politics were numbered. Republican leaders trashed him. He was banned from every social media platform. Television networks stopped covering his remarks live for fear that he would incite another…

Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing at large. That sounds like hyperbole, but after watching the keynote for a second time—the first time was from the front row,…

Ann Telnaes, a giant of the editorial cartoonist world who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, has resigned from The Washington Post after the paper killed a cartoon she submitted depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos (among others) negatively. Telnaes explains: I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who…

The question has been hurtling through think pieces, op-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now? The most recent entry in this genre came in December, when David J.…

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By | Photographs by Todd Meier for WSJ Dec. 30, 2024 at 5:30 am ET BOISE, Idaho—Brienna Hall has the most valuable role that you’ll never see at the most vital company that you’ve never heard of. Until she began working at ASML last year, she didn’t know the first thing about the company. She also…

Posted on January 1, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi In retrospect, Tor Books officially releasing Old Man’s War on January 1, 2005, doesn’t seem like a huge vote of confidence in the novel. One, the holiday season is over and all the spending has been done save for a stray, occasional gift card. Two,…

Search Annals of Inquiry English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result. December 23, 2024 One multilingual scholar

Image: Getty A bipartisan group of senators is calling out the auto industry for its “hypocritical, profit-driven” opposition to national right-to-repair legislation, while also selling customer data

The twinkling of lit-up trees and festive displays in store windows have come to mean two things: The holidays are upon us, and so is COVID. Since the pandemic began, the week between Christmas and Ne

Jamelle Bouie Dec. 18, 2024 Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times Listen to this article · 10:25 min Learn more By Opinion Columnist Democrats may be in the minority, but they are not yet an opposi

We’ve all been there. You open your inbox to find it overflowing with political fundraising emails — bizarre subject lines, dire warnings and urgent pleas for your money. Then your phone dings. It’s a

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to grant California permission to set stronger climate rules for cars and SUVs — a move that President-elect Donald Trump could attempt to reverse — according

As I noted previously, the 2024 Trump transition has been remarkable not just for the breakneck speed of the nominations, but for the reckless choices they’ve made as well. While most incoming administrations would only just now be starting to roll out their first major nominees, Trump has been…

Scientists have discovered that H5N1, the strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus currently spreading in U.S. dairy cows, only needs a single mutation to readily latch on to human cells foun

WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party messed up in the 2024 election, says Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it needs a dramatic course shift t

Zeynep Tufekci Dec. 6, 2024 Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock By Opinion Columnist It started barely minutes after the horrifying news broke that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Bria

Subscriber-only Newsletter The Tilt Voting records suggest Democrats who stayed home were less likely to support her, with no equivalent drop-off in Trump support among Republicans. By Dec. 3, 2024 Ar

Origins A study of a 12,800-year-old skull of a toddler offers a glimpse at how early Americans found food, and how their hunts may have led to a mass extinction. An artist’s impression of early North

N is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate. The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous

It has been an extraordinary week for US politics – and a very depressing couple of days for those such as me who spent hours on the phone to people, trying to persuade them to vote for Kamala Harris

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how

In December 2023, Ndileka Mandela, the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, condemned the rich world for supporting a global system of ‘climate apartheid’. Speaking at the COP28 summit in the United Arab

Personal computers started out simple. So simple that you could just type in programs and run them, save them, and even give them to your friends. But over time, things got more complicated. A lot mor

In a few years, new tech will be hidden under a street on the UCLA campus: When one of the university’s electric buses drives down the road, chargers embedded under the asphalt will wirelessly send it

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best. One F

Jay Graber, Bluesky’s chief executive, said there had been some “growing pains” as new users flooded the site. Credit...via Bluesky The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users sinc

Meet the new Mac mini—for the first time in the last fourteen years, not the same as the old Mac mini. The latest iteration of Apple’s most diminutive Mac really earns that superlative in its newest i

My mom died at the end of June this year. I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I w

Posted on November 8, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi Why is it different? Because the version I was initially thinking to write would mostly have been yell-y, and while I certainly do yell-y well, at the

This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC's special coverage Wednesday. Across the country, people are still making sense of what happened Tuesday. It’s fair to say many Americans, myself included, feel i

In close races, nothing is more important than closing strong. And with four days to go, Donald Trump is most definitely not closing strong. Just look at the last week of his campaign: On Sunday, Trum

Why this is a climate election—even if that hasn’t been apparent on the trail By Andrew Revkin | November 2, 2024 The word 'Vote' around a sun yellow from smoke during the 2020 wildfire season in the

Posted on October 26, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi (Photo adapted from an official White House photo by Lawrence Jackson) This last week the billionaire owners of both the Washington Post and the Los An

Guest Essay Democrats Finally Did What Sherrod Brown Asked For. It Might Be Too Late. Oct. 26, 2024 Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times By Mr. MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica. To re

Gerardo Ramirez flew into Los Angeles from Mexico City on Thursday and was surprised to learn that he couldn’t easily access a rail line from the main airport of a major city — something he’s come to

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web S