Many people believe that writing is a gift—you either have it or you don’t. But the truth is far more empowering. Writing is not about being naturally talented or magically creative. It’s about ...

When technology reporter Alex Heath has a scoop, he sits down at his computer and speaks into a microphone. He’s not talking to a human colleague—Heath went independent on Substack last year—he’s ...

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its ...

Does money lead to happiness? Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. Researchers from a coalition of West Coast universities were curious ...

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this ...

A venerable IRS program called Free File allows 70% of taxpayers to file their taxes for free, just as the name implies. Only 2% of taxpayers used the service in 2024. That is the finding of a ...

Altman said OpenAI "screwed up" GPT-5.2's writing quality by prioritizing coding and reasoning. He claims the regression as a resource tradeoff, not a permanent direction for the model family. Future ...

First published in the spring of 1994, two months before the birth of Amazon and one month after the death of Kurt Cobain, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has far outlasted the era of its origin, becoming ...

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave ...

Daily, we are bombarded with media messages promising quick-fix solutions to transform our lives — attached to expensive course offerings, dietary supplements, and exercise plan enrollments — all of ...