Author: David Reyes

On Monday morning, something unusual occurred—the kind of thing Wall Street rarely witnesses, and when it does, traders usually just sit back in their chairs and observe. GameStop, the company that sought to acquire eBay, saw its stock fall more than 10% in the opposite direction, while eBay’s stock shot up roughly 6% right away, surpassing $110. It was almost theatrical, the inverse symmetry. It appeared more like a market attempting to make sense of something it couldn’t quite believe than a corporate development. The proposal is unique in and of itself. A non-binding offer was made by GameStop, which…

The forecast, which is the type of bulletin meteorologists slip into the rotation when something unusual is brewing, arrived quietly on Sunday afternoon. The National Weather Service escalated it by Monday morning. Weather advisories, watches, and winter storm warnings are piled up on a map that ought to be getting greener by any reasonable reading of the calendar. May is here. That’s the part that consistently surprises people. In towns close to Red Feather Lakes and Estes Park, snowplows that were put away last month are being brought back out, and ski resort employees who had already begun counting down…

A law attempting to regulate a technology that is intended to be invisible from the first line of code has an almost poetic quality. Senate Bill 73 in Utah, which goes into effect on May 6, does more than just venture into the uncharted territory of online age verification. With its eyes closed, it plunges headfirst and hopes for the best. Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill in March, making Utah the first state in the union to specifically hold websites responsible for users who use VPNs. It is audacious. It’s also either technically impossible or visionary, depending on who…

In 2026, if you walk into a McDonald’s almost anywhere in America, you’ll notice a subtle difference. Most of the time, the soda fountain is still there, humming under fluorescent light, with neatly stacked lids and lemon wedges in a tiny plastic tray. However, you’ll see employees reaching for the cup more frequently than patrons. It’s a subtle shift that’s easy to overlook; you only notice it the third or fourth time. After that, it sticks. Since 2023, McDonald’s has been moving away from self-serve soda fountains, and by 2032, the company intends to remove them from every dining room…

A cruise ship has an oddly cinematic quality that no one desires. For days, the MV Hondius, a small expedition ship designed for polar tourism, has been anchored off the coast of Praia with its passengers instructed to remain motionless. There are three dead. In a hospital in Johannesburg, a British man is battling for his life. Cape Verde, the nation nearest to it, has graciously but firmly declined. The ship had been transporting wealthy tourists from Ushuaia to Antarctica and back across the South Atlantic, doing what these specialized expedition cruises do best. One stop was Saint Helena. Cape…

The tiny 6 mL Afrin bottle has an almost commonplace quality. You’ve undoubtedly seen one hidden behind the register at a gas station, sandwiched between travel-sized deodorant and gum. It’s the kind of thing you grab on the way to a flight when your sinuses start reminding you that allergy sufferers don’t do well in pressurized cabins. The most recent recall seems odd in part because of this ordinariness. The bottle remained unchanged. The medication remained the same. One line of text on the front label was what changed, or more accurately, what was absent all along. Bayer voluntarily removed…

The Sony settlement story is one of those cases that has been stealthily proceeding through the legal system for years; most players only become aware of it when an unexpected credit shows up in their PSN wallet. For millions of people who most likely haven’t considered buying a 2019 digital game since the day they made it, that moment might come if the court rules in October. The dispute is almost unremarkable; there is no dramatic courtroom drama, no whistleblower, just a slow-moving antitrust complaint that has finally been assigned a sum of $7.85 million. The lawsuit, Caccuri et al.…

Graduate students are hunched over screens showing Van Gogh’s Starry Night on a weekday afternoon in the Gates Computer Science Building, but they aren’t appreciating the brushwork. They are witnessing an algorithm explain how it feels. The picture loads. There’s a line of text. Wow. This painting’s blue and white hues give me the impression that I’m looking at a dream. Someone laughs. It is written down by someone else. The race to create emotionally intelligent machines looks like this, and it’s more bizarre than the headlines portray. The ArtEmis project, which originated at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, has…

On a Tuesday night, the scene in any university library is nearly identical to what it was five years ago. The same students hunched over laptops, the same half-eaten sandwiches, the same fluorescent hum. The screens are different. There is frequently only one window open, a silent dialogue scrolling between a student and a chatbot that doesn’t grow weary, doesn’t pass judgment, and responds in a matter of seconds, whereas there used to be ten browser tabs of JSTOR and Wikipedia. The speed at which this occurred is difficult to ignore. According to surveys conducted in 2024, about two-thirds of…

Campuses are currently experiencing an odd silence, the kind that occurs when something significant is happening but no one wants to be the first to identify it. You can see it if you stroll through any university library on a Tuesday afternoon. Instead of writing paragraphs, students were bent over laptops with headphones on and their fingers tapping out prompts. A different chatbot is being used by a professor down the hall to grade essays in the same manner. Everyone is aware. No one knows exactly what to do. Sometime last year, the panic phase came to an end. What…