Author: David Reyes

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…

The city seems almost too good to be true on a certain type of evening on the South Bank. The lights along the Thames blur into something you’d put on a postcard, tour groups meander between the Globe and the National Theatre, and buskers work the crowd near the river. London is once again bustling. The hotels are completely booked. The British Museum has lines that go all the way around the block. Nevertheless, someone is holding their phone a bit more tightly than usual somewhere in that throng. It’s difficult to ignore it. Travelers who used to carry their…

A British summer that has lost its rhythm has an odd quiet. By mid-June, lawns turn brown. shallow rivers. Elderly people fanning themselves with whatever is available while sitting in shaded doorways and listening to the radio. The script used to be none of this. However, this past month, the strangeness no longer seems strange when strolling through any mid-sized English town. It resembles the new configuration. In its most recent State of the UK Climate report, the Met Office confirms what most farmers and gardeners already knew: the nation is warming at a rate of about 0.25°C every ten…

A brand based on the romance of the open road, being anchored by a congested breather port, is almost ironic. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has confirmed that Harley-Davidson is recalling 88,039 motorcycles nationwide, and that is precisely where the company finds itself this week. Even though the flaw seems minor on paper, no rider wants to find out about it the hard way. The problem stems from a single part, the airbox backplate (part number 29000373), which is installed on a variety of touring and Softail models manufactured between 2024 and 2026. Pressure begins to build inside…

When the lights go out on a military base—and not because of a storm—a certain kind of silence descends. Last week, recruiters at a Coast Guard station in St. Louis continued to work by flashlight, sorting paperwork, taking phone calls, and performing the unglamorous administrative tasks necessary to keep the service operating. The electricity had been turned off. The bill was still outstanding. Because the US government was unable to reach a consensus on how to finance the Department of Homeland Security for 76 days, the bill had not been paid. That sums up the peculiar and somewhat embarrassing tale…

The timing is almost ironic. A retirement match that was drafted under one administration and signed into law under another will soon begin operations under a third, but this time it will have a different name on the door. President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday while seated in the Oval Office with Kevin Hassett by his side. This order gave final form to the retirement proposal he had hinted at, albeit incoherently, during his February State of the Union speech. More than 50 million Americans, the majority of whom work in small businesses, drive for app-based platforms, or…

There’s something quietly unsettling about a recall that involves an object most of us have stopped thinking about. A Thermos isn’t a car. It isn’t a crib or a power tool. It’s the dented metal cylinder sitting at the back of a cupboard, the one you grab when packing soup for a hike or coffee for a long drive. And yet, on April 30, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that 8.2 million of them are being pulled back from American kitchens, after reports that the stoppers on three popular models can launch upward like a small, blunt missile.…