The Electric Typewriter

Over the past weeks we’ve created new collections of the best work by some of our favourite journalists:

Steven Johnson’s writing takes you on a journey, whether he’s tackling the history of humanity, the dangers of invention or the workings of the brain.

Josh Dzieza wrote several of our favourite articles from the past few years, including classic pieces on AI, work, undersea cables, clouds and bees.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus covers urgent social issues, global challenges facing humanity and scientific controversies with rare nuance.

Derek Thompson offers fascinating takes on some of the biggest questions we face.

Brook Jarvis’ deep dives into ecology, climate science, and a whole range of other fascinating subjects are always worth exploring.

Andy Greenberg’s gripping reporting on digital crime, cyberwar and hacking is impossible to put down.

Plus we’ve updated a few of our exisitng author pages:

Kathryn Schulz’s writing is always full of immagination, whether she’s describing our impending doom, getting personal or ranking mythical creatures.

There’s a clarity to Zadie Smith’s prose, about joy, politics or writing, that keeps you captivated.

Jia Tolentino’s commentary on our bodies, hot-button issues and contemporary culture is second to none.

Philip Ball brings cutting-edge science, psychology and life itself to life.

What Is Claude? by Gideon Lewis-Kraus - Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs by Josh Tyrangiel - Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?

Friend or Faux? by Josh Dzieza - What do you love when you fall for AI?

To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an A.I. Robot by Eli Saslow - At 85, Jan Worrell lived alone on a remote corner of the Washington coast. Could ElliQ become her companion?

The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think by Michael Hirsh - The Pentagon is racing to integrate AI into its weapons system to keep up with China and Russia. Where will that lead?

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Anonymous - Does the world really need another ‘The Case For Why AI Could Be Dangerous’ essay?

We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint by James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart - The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next

You Sound Like ChatGPT by Sara Parker - AI isn’t just impacting how we write — it’s changing how we speak and interact with others. And there’s only more to come.

Why Does A.I. Write Like That? by Sam Kriss - Chatbots have developed a distinctive — and grating — voice

A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. by Bill Wasik - The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past?

The Great Fiction of AI by Josh Dzieza - The strange world of high-speed semi-automated genre fiction

AI Will Not Make You Rich by Jerry Neumann - The disruption is real. It’s also predictable.

This Is How the AI Bubble Bursts by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques - The tangle of AI deals among tech giants could be signs of dangerous overinvestment in the developing technology

Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War? by Dexter Filkins - With global conflicts increasingly shaped by drones and A.I., the American military risks losing its dominance

Putin has Redrawn the World - But Not the Way He Wanted by Allan Little - We are living in new and more dangerous times

The AI-Powered, Totally Autonomous Future of War Is Here by Will Knight - Ships without crews. Self-directed drone swarms. How a US Navy task force is using off-the-shelf robotics and artificial intelligence to prepare for the next age of conflict

How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine by C.J. Chivers - Outnumbered and desperate, the nation began hacking cheap consumer drones with explosives — bringing a brutal new form of violence to 21st-century warfare

AI Warfare Becomes Real for US Military With Project Maven by Katrina Manson - US military operators started out skeptical about AI, but now they are the ones developing and using Project Maven to identify targets on the battlefield

How an Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar by Andy Greenberg - Blackouts in Ukraine were just a trial run. Russian hackers are learning to sabotage infrastructure—and the US could be next

The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army by Ed Caesar - The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?

The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over by Jerry Hendrix - The United States has ceded the oceans to its enemies. We can no longer take freedom of the seas for granted

How the US Created a World of Endless War by Samuel Moyn - In 2008, many of Barack Obama’s supporters hoped he would bring the global war on terror to a close. Instead, he expanded it.

Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic by Ben Taub - For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe

This Giant Microwave May Change the Future of War by Sam Dean - The defense tech startup Epirus has developed a cutting-edge, cost-efficient drone zapper that’s sparking the interest of the US military. Now the company has to deliver.

GDP by Oliver Kim - We really don’t know how good we have it

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life by Steven Johnson - Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.

The Real Reason Humans are the Dominant Species by Justin Rowlatt and Laurence Knight - Energy is the key to humanity’s world domination

The Birth of Religion by Charles C. Mann - We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

The Case Against Civilization by John Lanchester - Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?

The Worst Mistake in History by Jared Diamond - Archaeology is demolishing the belief that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress

Beyond the !Kung by Manvir Singh - A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale

A History of Violence by Steven Pinker - Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence

Money ? Happiness. QED. by Bill McKibben - The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?

What We Get Wrong about Technology by Tim Harford - Forget flying cars or humanoid robots, the most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook

How the System Works by Charles C. Mann - An essay series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life — and what happens if we don’t maintain them

The Golden Quarter by Michael Hanlon - Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?

Why the Age of American Progress Ended by Derek Thompson - Invention alone can’t change the world; what matters is what happens next

We Should Fix Climate Change — but We Should Not Regret It by Thomas R. Wells - Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

On the Importance of Staring Directly Into the Sun by Adam Mastroianni - There’s something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries

People With Parents With Money by Various Authors - 14 adults come clean about the down payments, allowances, and tuition payments that make their New York lives feasible

Why it Pays to be Privileged by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison - Within Britain’s elite occupations, the advantages of class are still mistaken for talent

Billionaires Are Not Like Us by Alex Morris - They have fantasies of going to Mars, transhumanism, and superhuman AI. How the heck does someone get this way? And what does it mean for the rest of us?

The Haves and the Have-Yachts by Evan Osnos - Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers.

Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff - The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene by Caitlin Flanagan - Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality

The Airport-Lounge Wars by Zach Helfand - When you’re waiting for a flight, what’s the difference between out there and in here?

The Fake Poor Bride by Xochitl Gonzalez - Confessions of a wedding planner

Links by Albert Chu’s Best of 2025

The Sunday Long Read’s Best of 2025

David Brooks’ Best Nonfiction Essays of the Year

Businessweek’s Jealousy List

The 2025 National Magazine Award Finalists

The Best of the Guardian Long Read in 2025

The Top Twenty-five New Yorker Stories of 2025

The Atlantic's Most Read Stories of 2025

Longreads’ Best of 2025

Links I Would Gchat You’s 20 Best Links of 2025

How to Practice by Ann Patchett - I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death

If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us? by Sarah Wildman - She turned to me and asked, “What if this is the best I ever feel again?” Three hundred and seventy-six days later, she was dead.

The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell - The story of a couple who died on a scalding hike with their one-year-old daughter

I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What it’s Like to Survive. by Maggie Slepian - On coming to terms with a near-death experience

A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing? by Jia Tolentino - What the death of a health-insurance C.E.O. means to America.

The Science of Climate Change Explained by Julia Rosen - Definitive answers to the big Questions

How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? by Sandra Upson - A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse

Has the Amazon Reached Its ‘Tipping Point’? by Alex Cuadros - Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may become a grassy savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide

What to Do with Climate Emotions by Jia Tolentino - If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?

After Climate Despair by Matt Frost - The hope for a global conversion to austerity has failed to stop climate change. What comes next?

The Future Is Too Easy by David Roth - There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it

Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth by Jon Gertner - Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?

AI Means the End of Internet Search as We’ve Known It by Mat Honan - Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge

AI Has a Hotness Problem by Caroline Mimbs Nyce - In the world of generated imagery, you’re either drop-dead gorgeous or a wrinkled, bug-eyed freak

AI and the American Smile by Jenka Gurfinkel - How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression

The Power of Exposure by Derek Thompson - Fame and familiarity — in art, music, politics

The Art of Rules by Sherri Irvin - Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang - To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

Everyone’s a Sellout Now by Rebecca Jennings - So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?

Go Ahead and Ban My Book by Margaret Atwood - To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.

What Romance Really Means by Heather Havrilesky - Long-married romance is not the romance of watching someone’s every move like a stalker, and wanting to lick his face but trying to restrain yourself

Against Chill by Alana Massey - In recent years, “chill” has become one of the most desirable qualities in a romantic prospect. But it is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species

This Was How Things Ended by Michael Hobbes - An essay about breakups

How to Be Single by Phoebe Robinson - How to be alone and only mildly hate and lukewarm love it

Tinder Hearted by Allison P. Davis - How did a dating app become my longest running relationship?