Recent Posts

Your Photos Aren’t Real

At a splashy media event this week at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Google announced four new Pixel phones. But the most important stuff unveiled at the Made By Google event wasn’t the hardware itself, but rather all of the generative AI tools packed into the devices. Most notable …

Read More »

Google Has Unleashed Its Legal Fury on Hackers and Scammers

About three years ago, some of Google’s security engineers came to company attorneys with a gigantic mess. The security team had discovered that Google unwittingly was enabling the spread of malicious software known as Glupteba. The malware had corrupted more than 1 million Windows computers, turning them into vehicles to …

Read More »

Researchers Have Ranked AI Models Based on Risk—and Found a Wild Range

Bo Li, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in stress testing and provoking AI models to uncover misbehavior, has become a go-to source for some consulting firms. These consultancies are often now less concerned with how smart AI models are than with how problematic—legally, ethically, and …

Read More »

This Mpox Outbreak Isn't Like the Last One

In May 2023, the World Health Organization released a statement declaring the end of mpox—formerly known as monkeypox—as a public health emergency. Just over a year later, the agency has been forced to backtrack, with a far more serious epidemic brewing across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Statistics show that more …

Read More »

The Who's Who of Political Influencers

This is a very exciting day! In addition to a fresh makeover for this newsletter, I just published a new project today outlining some of the biggest names in online political influencing from both the right and the left. Over the past week, I crowdsourced the names of some of …

Read More »

The Uncertain Path Forward for Psychedelic Medicine

For a while, it looked like the psychedelic drug MDMA was poised to become an approved treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, after being rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration, MDMA faces an uphill battle to becoming legalized as medicine. In 2017, the FDA granted MDMA “breakthrough therapy” …

Read More »

Tether Was Playing a Risky Game, a New Celsius Suit Reveals

On June 12, 2022, Alex Mashinsky, founder of crypto lender Celsius, made an urgent plea for help. As the price of bitcoin crashed, panicked customers were rushing to withdraw billions of dollars’ worth of crypto from their Celsius accounts. But after a series of bad investments, the company no longer …

Read More »