Welcome to slot-machine Britain, where election day gives the people a chance to pull the lever on a one-armed bandit. Our bewildering range of outcomes emerges not so much from a belief that the ...

This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. Earlier this year, a slightly balding man in spectacles, a black T-shirt, and bright high-top ...

Music recommendation algorithms were supposed to help us cut through the noise, but they just served us up slop. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ...

As a journalist who covers AI, I hear from countless people who seem utterly convinced that ChatGPT, Claude, or some other chatbot has achieved “sentience.” Or “consciousness.” Or—my personal favorite ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

Squaring — multiplying a number by itself — seems harmless, but repeat it long enough and it becomes a mathematical explosion. What begins as 2² quickly turns into 2⁴, 2⁸, 2¹⁶ — racing past the limits ...

Dwayne Johnson’s latest film wasn’t exactly a “smash” hit. In fact, it was the lowest opening weekend of the blockbuster action star’s career. Johnson starred in “The Smashing Machine,” an arthouse ...

You’re at the checkout screen after an online shopping spree, ready to enter your credit card number. You type it in and instantly see a red error message ...

Russia’s war machine is unraveling. From drones to missiles, explosives to basic vehicle parts, critical shortages are crippling its ability to fight. Years of overconfidence, sanctions, and outdated ...

A man died on Thursday from his injuries after the chain around his neck caused him to be pulled into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine at a medical building in Westbury, New York. Newsweek ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a mathematical problem that tries to calculate the longest possible run-time of a Turing machine ...