Once you declare something the best, there’s not much more that needs to be said. So I’ll keep my praise for Michael Lewis’s 2003 “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” brief. It’s the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read, and on the short list of the most impactful. Until “Moneyball” revealed how Oakland …
Not long ago, humankind seemed destined to grow more informed over time. After all, we’ve had millennia to accumulate scientific findings, brilliant literature and new technologies. Then something miraculous happened: The internet made it easy to disseminate and democratize all that wisdom. With reliable broadband and ubiquitous smartphones, the entire sum of human knowledge is …
Shira Ovide’s March 8 analysis “Our faith in technology officially died this week,” in the online edition of The Post rang a bell for me. In the 1980s and 1990s, I edited Change, a higher-education magazine that, among other subjects, trumpeted what the internet and World Wide Web could do for us — for scholarly …
On Sept. 13, Charles E. Schumer, Mike Rounds, Martin Heinrich and Todd Young — the Senate’s bipartisan AI group of four — hosted their equivalent of the Vanity Fair Oscars party. The AI Insight Forum wasn’t just star-studded. (Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg headlined, but the guest list ran deep and A-list.) It …
Former president Donald Trump asked Elon Musk last summer whether the billionaire industrialist would be interested in buying Trump’s social network Truth Social, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation. The overture to Musk, whose business empire includes SpaceX, Tesla and the social networking site X, did not lead to a deal. But …
Not long after my wife and I bought a farm in the Virginia countryside, we decided to stream a movie with our kids. This was a perilous undertaking. With internet download speeds of no more than 15 megabits per second in our home — compared with speeds of 100 or even 1,000 mbps in the …
For the better part of four months, NASA scientists in Houston puzzled over an infuriating conundrum. A sleek metal container carried a sample that could shed light on the earliest days of the solar system, and perhaps even the origins of life on Earth. The disk-shaped container, roughly the size of a small tire rim, …
Columnist January 15, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EST (Ann Kiernan for The Washington Post) Comment on this storyComment Add to your saved stories Save Would you like to know when you’re going to die? A group of Danish and American social scientists announced that with artificial intelligence and a huge data set, they were able …
Comment on this storyComment Add to your saved stories Save Workforce shortages, housing and artificial intelligence are likely to dominate state legislatures this year as 37 begin their sessions in January and another nine will follow in the coming months. Last year, roughly 170,000 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country, while about 39,000 …
Comment on this storyComment Add to your saved stories Save The iPhone was lying on the ground, in airplane mode, with its battery half full. The screen, fully intact, showed a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines flight 1282. A social media user by the name Sean Bates found the device while …