Author: David Reyes

The Daily Wire didn’t give the first indication that something wasn’t right. It originated from a post made on Friday afternoon by Cameron Arcand, a political reporter, who casually mentioned that he had recently been laid off and was searching for new employment in Washington, D.C. The remainder of the story started to leak out in a matter of hours. The Nashville headquarters, which Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing had so successfully moved from California in 2020, had been destroyed by the time the company released its formal statement on May 1. As this develops, there’s a feeling that something…

In a brief startup pitch I saw a few weeks ago, the founder casually referred to his product as “a chatbot that talks like your grandmother after she’s gone.” He described it as a meal kit subscription. Nothing dramatic. Not even a pause. It’s just another construction project. And it stayed with me because the peculiar thing about it wasn’t the product itself, but rather how commonplace it sounded. While most of us were busy debating whether AI would replace human labor, the engineering community quietly caught up to the idea of digital immortality, which has been present in movies…

The way people discuss their jobs at dinner parties reflects the current state of unease. It’s always brought up by someone. Half-laughing, a friend who works in marketing says that her company has begun “experimenting” with AI tools. For a very long time, no one laughs back. The question remains unanswered as the conversation awkwardly switches to sports or the weather. The statistics that underlie that discomfort are beginning to emerge. The Washington Post published a recent study from GovAI and the Brookings Institution in March that mapped American occupations along two axes: exposure to AI and adaptability. It’s not…

He Xiaopeng cut open the leg of his robot in front of a live audience, even though he didn’t have to. The humanoid moved with such eerie grace when XPeng unveiled IRON in Guangzhou last November—a tiny hip sway, a flicker of weight shifting from one foot to another—that online viewers accused him of stuffing a person inside a costume. He thus unveiled it on stage. servos, joints, and wires. The audience chuckled. He appeared relieved. This brief, somewhat dramatic moment seems to encapsulate the current state of China’s AI industry, which is defensive about being questioned, eager to prove…

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…