MYKHAILIVKA, a village on the right bank of the River Dnieper in Ukraine, lies dangerously close to the front line of Russia’s war on its western neighbour. Seventy years ago, however, it was the site of an excavation by Ukrainian archaeologists. There, they discovered one of the earliest known settlements of the Yamnaya culture…
This article first appeared online in The Economist on 5 May 2024 (and in the magazine on 11 May 2024). To continue reading, click here (paywall).
A class-action lawsuit filed in a US federal court last Valentine’s Day accuses Match Group – the owners of Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid dating apps, among others – of using a “predatory business model” and of doing everything in its power to keep users hooked, in flagrant opposition to Hinge’s claim that it is “designed to be deleted”…
This article first appeared in The Observer on 28 April 2024. To continue reading, click here.
THERE’S a scene in The Simpsons in which Homer’s half-brother Herb unveils his new invention – a machine for translating baby talk – and Homer tells him: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it…”
This article first appeared in The Guardian magazine on 7 January 2023. To continue reading, click here.
IN 2015, the American technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that humanity wasn’t ready for a pandemic. Seven years on, as the world emerges (hopefully) from a pandemic for which it wasn’t ready, he thinks we have it within our power to make sure this one was the last. There will be more disease outbreaks, but we now possess the tools and the knowledge to prevent them from becoming global catastrophes…
This article first appeared in the New Statesman on 4 May 2022. To continue reading, click here:
AN artificial intelligence has beaten eight world champions at bridge, a game in which human supremacy has resisted the march of the machines until now…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 29 March 2022. To continue reading, click here.