This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on GTA VI and the state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes...
The first serious workplace studies of generative AI did not reveal one universal productivity multiplier. They revealed a slope.
At the lower end of the experience curve, an AI assistant could act like an always-available coach, supplying phrases, procedures and...
A woman on a flight out of Bangkok once told me, somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, that she had not spoken to her sister in eleven years. We had been airborne about forty minutes. I knew her drink...
Discipline is usually presented as a down payment on happiness. Resist now, persist now, choose the harder option now, and a better emotional life is supposed to arrive later.
That sequence feels intuitive partly because disciplined people often do report...
Read other people’s eyes, the saying goes, because the eyes never lie. It is an old and romantic idea, the eyes as the window to the soul, and like a lot of folk wisdom it is half true in...
Articles about the habits that destroy relationships usually offer a grab-bag of plausible-sounding clichés. Relationship science has been more precise than that. Thanks largely to decades of work by the psychologist John Gottman, who spent years watching couples interact...
Soft living is the wellness world’s pushback against the militaristic morning routine, the five o’clock start, the cold plunge, the twenty-step optimisation ritual performed before dawn. In its place it offers something gentler: an unhurried, kind, low-pressure start to...
The Justice Department sued TikTok and ByteDance in 2024 for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy, and illegally collecting their information. The defendants were accused of violating a law requiring online services aimed at children to obtain parental consent...
So pretty. | Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge
I remember having a Spirograph as a kid and being obsessed with it. Its geometric patterns are hypnotic and gorgeous. I also love generative music composition. So bringing those two things...
I’m just as confused as you. | Image: Aundre Larrow
W. Kamau Bell is one of those people who has always just seemed to be there. From Totally Biased, to Politically Re-Active, United Shades of America, and We Need to...
