Last week I revealed the sneaky physics behind the “joule thief,” an electrical circuit that lets you squeeze more energy out of seemingly dead batteries. The key, it turned out, was a clever pairing of a transformer and a transistor. But the transistor deserves its own headline, because it's maybe

Critic’s Notebook Trump’s devoted aide, who is said to follow the President around with a printer, does not seem to be driven by the conventional desires for wealth and power. August 22, 2026 Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at

President Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do? Listen · 7:21 min Natalie Harp with President Trump at a meeting last month in Ankara, Turkey.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times Aug. 18, 2026 Leer en español See more of our coverage in

One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is

Alejo Carpentier, profundo conocedor de los orígenes, esencias y comportamientos de la identidad del Nuevo Mundo, autor del concepto identitario que llamó “lo real maravilloso americano” —que además estilizó en su novelística—, afirmó que el “descubrimiento” de América, que se materializa en 1492, era el acontecimiento más trascendente de la

Fault Lines How I Became a Subaru Socialist By the time Bernie Sanders ran for President, in 2015, I was financially secure. But the previous decade had left a mark. August 18, 2026 Illustration by George Wylesol This is part of a series of columns about young people and the

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired. President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s

The case represents a new front in President Trump’s mass deportation drive: arrests at airports of people who have active immigration cases and no criminal history. Listen · 9:43 min Galina Bobreneva and her husband, Brent Jindra, at their home in Redwood City, Calif.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times Published Aug.

“They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.” The words were delivered slowly, deliberately and with some steeliness by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her audience, crammed

Photo-Illustration: Sean McCabe/Photos: Shutterstock, Getty Images, Alamy This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here. On the last Thursday of May, Tanya Simon’s staff packed up her office. They filled boxes with personal items accumulated over more than 25 years at 60 Minutes: Emmys,

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has

A Reporter at Large Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took back to the U.S. August 17, 2026 As a boy, Luwi Ikabala moved with Carleton Gajdusek to the U.S. “I

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret.

Jason Arday, the school’s youngest Black professor, was found dead on Friday. The school ignored a series of warnings about his life story and his work. Listen · 15:20 min Cambridge University in May. Jason Arday was hired in 2023, becoming the university’s youngest Black professor. Published Aug. 15, 2026Updated

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has

OpinionM. Gessen Credit...Anne Vetter for The New York Times OpinionM. Gessen Credit...Anne Vetter for The New York Times Listen · 35:14 min Aug. 13, 2026 On Feb. 25, Siobhan Kirchstein received an official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles instructing her to surrender her driver’s license. She was one

Ahora que Rosalía se ha pasado a la mística y el “filósofo del 15-M” Ernesto Castro se ha convertido al cristianismo, no es de extrañar que también la ciencia se deje seducir por Dios. Científicos de todo el mundo se animan a investigar temas como el cielo, la reencarnación o

By some metrics, Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is the happiest man on Earth. In brain scans, researchers noted that Mingyur’s neural activity showed off-the-charts levels of activation in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm and joy. In other tests conducted when

Guest Essay Aug. 12, 2026 Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times Listen · 7:59 min Leer en español阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版 See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google Dick Cheney’s

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired