Category: News

(The Atlantic) – When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Now the top half of her head was shaved and staples ran in a ladder across it. IVs were taped to each arm, and a machine next to her bed was helping her breathe. She couldn’t speak. When she opened her eyes, they rolled.

Her older son was especially alarmed by how quickly she’d declined. He wanted the doctors to come into her room so they could explain what had happened. But one of our older relatives stopped him, saying that we couldn’t afford to make demands, let alone trouble, because “she don’t have a lick of health insurance.”

We knew that the hospital couldn’t deny her care, but we understood the tightrope you walk when you don’t have money. All she could afford to be was grateful. (Read More)

(Wired) – After a series of suicides allegedly linked to AI chatbots, one lawyer is trying to hold companies like OpenAI accountable.

Amaurie’s case is part of a growing number of lawsuits brought by parents who say their children died after interacting with AI chatbots. The defendants include OpenAI, Google, and Character.ai, a company that lets its users create chatbots with customized personalities. (Google is part of the case because it is connected with Character.ai through a $2.7 billion licensing deal.) As AI tools have begun playing a more prominent role in children’s lives—as homework helpers, companions, and confidants—parents and mental health experts have voiced concerns about whether adequate safeguards are in place. These lawsuits, some experts say, represent not only individual tragedies, but they allege systemic product design failures, raising questions about who should be held accountable. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – OpenAI’s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024, but by 2025, 73 percent of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. (The Atlantic entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.)

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. Social chatbots provide the semblance of a kind of friendship that many people already want, or at least have gotten accustomed to: one that’s on demand, low effort, and completely personalized. “It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se,” Skyler Wang, a sociologist at McGill University who studies AI and has done work with Meta, told me. Instead, “they reveal what friendships are trending towards.” (Read More)

(Australia News) – Sasha and her sister were born in 1995 following their mother Penelope’s last round of IVF at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.

It has now emerged that the wrong embryo was implanted inside of her – and that they should have been born to another couple.

That couple went on to have another daughter, who is Sasha and her twin’s biological sister.

They were also undergoing IVF treatment at the same hospital at the same time but remarkably also lived in Coffs Harbour – just 15 minutes away. (Read More)

(Nature) – Chip allows people with paralysis to control a soft robotic hand.

China has approved a brain implant for people with severe paralysis to help restore their hand movements. The brain–computer interface (BCI) is the first in the world to be available for use outside clinical trials.

The device, developed by Neuracle Medical Technology in Shanghai, China, was authorized last week by the National Medical Products Administration. It will be available to people aged between 18 and 60 years old who have paralysis that affects all of their limbs and is caused by an injury to the neck area of the spinal cord. (Read More)

(Wired) – Dozens of Telegram channels reviewed by WIRED include job listings for “AI face models.” The (mostly) women who land these gigs are likely being used to dupe victims out of their money.

A WIRED review of dozens of recruitment videos and job ads posted to Telegram show people from around the world—including Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and multiple Asian countries—applying to be AI models or “real face” models in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. The region has become home to vast, industrialized scamming operations that hold thousands of human trafficking victims captive and force them to run online cryptocurrency investment and romance scams. (Read More)

(The Pilot) – How can rapid advancements in medical technology, questions about the criteria for brain death and the rise of transhumanism be considered within a Catholic framework? Charlie Camosy recently spoke on this topic with Gabriel LeBeau, a second-year neurosurgery resident at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who has had the bioethics of the brain on his mind for a while now with an interest in brain-machine interfaces, neurotechnology and cerebrovascular neurosurgery. (Read More)

(Derek Thompson Substack) – The quantified life has become a modern religion. But many of us are measuring life the wrong way.

In the late 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticized religion in part because he claimed its worshippers allowed an external system of values to stand in the place of the messy, beautiful work for discovering their own genius and agency. I have mixed feelings about Nietzsche’s critique of religion, but I think it applies profoundly to the state of life metrics. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and instills deep values in us, even as it sometimes keeps us from living our own values and building the life we want.

C. Thi Nguyen is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. In today’s conversation, we talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of our self that cannot be reduced to numbers. (Read More)