James' World 2

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As an Avianca flight approached Kennedy International Airport in New York, a serving cart collision began a legal saga, prompting the question: Is artificial intelligence so smart? Credit…Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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No matter who you are, where you are, or how quickly you’re moving, the laws of physics will appear exactly the same to you as they will to any other observer in the Universe. This concept — that the laws of physics don’t change as you move from one location to another or one moment to the next — is known as the principle of relativity, and it goes all the way back not to Einstein, but even farther: to at least the time of Galileo. If you exert a force on an object, it will accelerate (i.e., change its momentum), and the amount of its acceleration is directly related to the force on the object divided by its mass. In terms of an equation, this is Newton’s famous F = ma: force equals mass times acceleration.

But when we discovered particles that moved close to the speed of light, suddenly a contradiction emerged. If you exert too large of a force on a small mass, and forces cause acceleration, then it should be possible to accelerate a massive object to reach or even exceed the speed of light! This isn’t possible, of course, and it was Einstein’s relativity that gave us a way out. It was commonly explained by what we call “relativistic mass,” or the notion that as you got closer to the speed of light, the mass of an object increased, so the same force would cause a smaller acceleration, preventing you from ever reaching the speed of light. But is this “relativistic mass” interpretation correct? Only kind of. Here’s the science of why.

The first thing it’s vital to understand is that the principle of relativity, no matter how quickly you’re moving or where you’re located, is still always true: the laws of physics really are the same for everyone, regardless of where you’re located or when you’re making that measurement. The thing that Einstein knew (that both Newton and Galileo had no way of knowing) was this: the speed of light in a vacuum must be exactly the same for everyone. This is a tremendous realization that runs counter to our intuition about the world.

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Credit: Jahobr/Nevadawest of Wikimedia Commons/  This moving, zipping star field appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space, extremely close to the speed of light. Under the laws of relativity, you neither reach nor exceed the speed of light if you’re made of matter. You might be able to approach it if you had a large-enough amount of an efficient-enough fuel, but you still need to obey the rules of relativity

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As someone with more than 50 years of experience in both industry and academia who also happens to be a person with autism, managers in charge of DEI at major corporations often invite me to give lectures. These companies range from steel, pharmaceuticals, computers, and consumer products to cattle and livestock handling, transportation, and social media. I always get asked the same basic question from management: What do they need to do to make their workforce more inclusive?

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Illustration by Lalalimola

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Proverbs 18:21

Amplified Bible

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Not long ago, I was preparing to interview Tom Hanks at Symphony Space, a theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for an audience of seven hundred-plus people at The New Yorker Live. Hanks had just published a novel called “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and he was hitting the road for a while. Symphony Space was the first stop on the tour. Someone from Knopf, his publisher, let me know that I would embarrass Hanks if, in my introduction, I went through the litany of movies he has starred in since the early eighties. In fact, if I had, that would have been the whole evening. The list is long and shimmery. Hanks is that rare thing, a real movie star who has sustained a four-decades-and-counting career. It’s not just that he has won two Oscars in a row (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”) or made box-office hits including “Splash,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and Steven Spielberg’s most enjoyable film, “Catch Me If You Can.” He’s also capable of taking on a predictable vehicle, such as the recent feature “A Man Called Otto,” and pumping some life into it while attracting a sizable audience.

What surprised me is the degree to which Hanks, particularly in front of a live crowd, in no way resembles Jimmy Stewart, the laconic Hollywood icon to whom he’s most often, and most lazily, compared. When we met beforehand, then onstage for an hour and a half, and, finally, over a long dinner at a local Greek restaurant, Hanks was about as laconic as Muhammad Ali. Or a hand grenade. He is funny, sarcastic, self-knowing, and a tireless raconteur, particularly about his day job. In our interview, he sometimes answered questions as he might in a more private setting than Symphony Space; far more often, he took some element of the question as a cue for a prolonged, well-polished anecdote, performed at the edge of his seat. Hanks’s novel is all over the place at times, undisciplined and overstuffed, but it contains extended passages and set pieces describing how movies are made that are entirely worth the ticket.

As an editor, I’ve always been frustrated by the degree to which the gatekeepers of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as Hanks calls it, bar reporters from watching how a film gets made, limiting inquisitive journalists to a few distant glimpses of the process and then a concocted interchange on the official press junkets. And so I began our conversation at Symphony Space, which was recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour and is published here in edited form, with my parochial complaint and a discussion of how Hanks sees things from inside.

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Photograph by Lloyd Bishop / NBC / Getty 

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Facebook, which was created in 2004, amassed 100 million users in just four and a half years. The speed and scale of its growth was unprecedented. Before anyone had a chance to understand the problems the social media network could cause, it had grown into an entrenched behemoth.

In 2015, the platform’s role in violating citizens’ privacy and its potential for political manipulation was exposed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Around the same time, in Myanmar, the social network amplified disinformation and calls for violence against the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in the country, which culminated in a genocide that began in 2016. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram, which had been acquired by Facebook in 2012, had conducted research showing that the app was toxic to the mental health of teenage girls.

Defenders of Facebook say that these impacts were unintended and unforeseeable. Critics claim that, instead of moving fast and breaking things, social media companies should have proactively avoided ethical catastrophe. But both sides agree that new technologies can give rise to ethical nightmares, and that should make business leaders — and society — very, very nervous.

We are at the beginning of another technological revolution, this time with generative AI — models that can produce text, images, and more. It took just two months for OpenAI’s ChatGPT to pass 100 million users. Within six months of its launch, Microsoft released ChatGPT-powered Bing; Google demoed its latest large language model (LLM), Bard; and Meta released LLaMA. ChatGPT-5 will likely be here before we know it. And unlike social media, which remains largely centralized, this technology is already in the hands of thousands of people. Researchers at Stanford recreated ChatGPT for about $600 and made their model, called Alpaca, open-source. By early April, more than 2,400 people had made their own versions of it.

While generative AI has our attention right now, other technologies coming down the pike promise to be just as disruptive. Quantum computing will make today’s data crunching look like kindergarteners counting on their fingers. Blockchain technologies are being developed well beyond the narrow application of cryptocurrency. Augmented and virtual reality, robotics, gene editing, and too many others to discuss in detail also have the potential to reshape the world for good or ill.

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Carolina Niño

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You’ve done what you can to cut back your spending.

You brew coffee at home, you don’t walk into Target and you refuse to order avocado toast. (Can you sense my millennial sarcasm there?)

But no matter how cognizant you are of your spending habits, you’re still stuck with those inescapable monthly bills. You know which ones we’re talking about rent, utilities, cell phone bill, insurance, groceries…

So if you’re ready to stop paying them, follow these moves…

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By The Penny Hoarder Staff

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A favorite trope of sleep research is to divide the entire human population into two cute, feathered categories: early birds (also called larks) and night owls. Often, these studies link people’s natural sleep patterns—called their chronotype—with some waking behavior or personality trait.

It doesn’t take long to see which team more often comes out on top. (Hint: it’s the one that catches the worm.) Research says that early birds are happier, more punctual, do better in school, and share more conservative morals. Night owls are more impulsive, angry, and likely to become cyberbullies; they have shoddier diets and, most critically, are worse at kicking soccer balls.

But can the population really be categorized so neatly? Or is the research painting an incomplete and overly moralistic picture?

A study published May 24 in PLOS ONE by a group of Polish researchers takes a fresh look at the long-established link between being an early riser and being conscientious by examining a separate but potentially important variable that might underlie the link: being religious. The team found that people who woke up earlier tended to score higher on all dimensions of religiosity, leading them to conclude that being religious could help explain why early risers are more conscientious and more satisfied overall. “Morningness” might be closely aligned with godliness, in part because certain religions practice early-morning prayer—so religion could be driving the link between rising early and being conscientiousness.

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It looms. STEFANI REYNOLDS/Getty Images

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