Just two days before Slovakia’s elections, an audio recording was posted to Facebook. On it were two voices: allegedly, Michal Šimečka, who leads the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, and Monika Tódová from the daily newspaper Denník N. They appeared to be discussing how to rig the election, partly by buying …
Read More »The 15-Minute City Conspiracy Theory Goes Mainstream
Back in February, when a Conservative Party lawmaker in the UK’s House of Commons voiced support for the 15-minute city conspiracy, he was laughed at by his fellow members of Parliament. Now, eight months later, the British government is fully embracing the fringe conspiracy and placing it at the heart …
Read More »DNA Drives Help Identify Missing People. It’s a Privacy Nightmare
Earlier this month, state police in Connecticut held a “DNA drive” in an effort to help identify human remains found in the state. Family members of missing people were invited to submit DNA samples to a government repository used to solve these types of cases, a commercial genetic database, or …
Read More »Extremely Online Republicans Are Provoking a US Government Shutdown
washington’s biggest problem these days isn’t partisanship. It’s that far-right lawmakers are living in their own reality. Extremist Republicans have broken off from the rest of their party to create an alternate universe in which they’re in charge, empowered by Donald Trump’s followers. This disconnect is fueling an internal GOP …
Read More »The Dumb Alien Mummy Story Takes an Entirely Predictable Turn
On September 12, ufologist and journalist Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed to be evidence of alien life to the Congress of Mexico. On September 19, Mexico’s scientific community gathered for a conference to ask a simple question in return: “Extraterrestrials or Llama Skeletons?” The answer was right there in …
Read More »The Kids Don’t Want to Go to College Anymore, and Why Would They?
ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Paul Tough, education journalist and author of The Inequality Machine, about the future of higher education. Even as many Americans return to college campuses this month, rising costs and a lower return on investment have raised …
Read More »The UK Is Burning Climate Pledges to Fuel a Culture War
The UK government has taken the unusual step of scaling back major climate commitments, despite widespread pushback from scientists, businesses, and lawmakers across the political divide. In a speech today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the UK would push back deadlines for the planned phaseout of gas-powered vehicles, ending fossil-fuel …
Read More »A Concrete Crisis Has the UK Literally Crumbling
As it rolls from one political crisis to another, it’s hard not to think of Britain as metaphorically crumbling. Now, it seems, significant pieces of the country are literally structurally unsound. More than 150 schools, colleges, and nurseries in England have been ordered to close parts of their buildings due …
Read More »No, This Is Not an Alien. Here’s Why
It was like an alien unboxing—but they were just Nazca mummies from Peru. Toward the end of a public hearing in the Green Room of the Chamber of Deputies Congress of Mexico, Jaime Maussan, ufologist, journalist and host of the Mexican television program Tercer Milenio, announced a surprise. The well-known …
Read More »Inside the Senate’s Private AI Meeting With Tech’s Billionaire Elites
US senators are proving slow studies when it comes to the generative artificial intelligence tools that are poised to upend life as we know it. But they’ll be tested soon—and the rest of us through them—if their new private tutors are to be trusted. In a historic first, yesterday upwards …
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