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In July 2023, a 25-year-old man named Jagdish Whitten was out for a run in San Francisco. As he crossed a busy street, a car hit him; he did, in his words, “a little flip” over the vehicle, landed in the road, and dragged himself to the curb. Those who had seen the accident called an ambulance for him. But Whitten waved them off and called a friend, who drove him to a nearby hospital instead: “I knew that ambulances were expensive,” he said, “and I didn’t think I was going to die.”Whitten was…
A resident at a “witch camp” in northern GhanaHere is the story of a murder.In northern Ghana, on the western bank of the Volta river, there is a village called Kafaba. There’s not much I can say about Kafaba that would make it seem special or remarkable in any real way: indeed there’s no real sense in which Kafaba is very different from the other villages nearby. Like the other villages around it, Kafaba is a farming community, populated by members of an ethnic group called the Gonja; and like…
Here is a question that I think about a lot.In the year 1950, much as today, the two largest countries in the world by population were China and India. China was a good deal larger at the time, holding 22 percent of the world’s population to India’s 15 percent; but really the two were in a very similar position. Both of them were giant countries that had assumed their current state—India as the independent Republic of India, China as the People’s Republic of China—in the preceding three years.…
One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten.In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in…
Photos from Lars Tunbjörk’s “Office” seriesConsider Toto.If you spend much time in American public bathrooms, or rather if you’re simply a particularly attentive patron of American public bathrooms, you’ll probably have noticed Toto’s toilets at some point or another: they’re distinguished by a quite memorable serif-font “TOTO” logo. Toto toilets aren’t quite dominant in American bathrooms, since they have healthy competition from our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and…
Cultures of the world, photographed by Irving PennIn November 2025, shortly after OpenAI released GPT-5.1—a new model that promised “a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT”—a small set of users started to notice something weird. GPT-5.1 was indeed smarter and more conversational; but it also had a strange habit of referring to things as “goblins.” For a time this was treated as a quirk—language models, after all, do all sorts of strange things—and nobody gave it much thought. But soon things…
All photos by Mike Kelley from his “Life Cycles” seriesIt might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious and weighted with fearful portent, but lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time reading about the death of Spirit Airlines. Spirit, for those lucky enough to have never flown on one of its planes—I have a few memories of terrible Spirit…
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
The making and breaking of scientific life
How the commercial spreadsheet reshaped America
