This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on streaming platforms, FAST channels, and the future of entertainment, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started

Ed Sheeran has long been known as the “Mr Nice Guy” of music. His is an unthreatening kind of pop stardom; he looks and talks like the bloke who might be standing behind you in a pub, rather than someone selling out stadiums. He champions other artists, he celebrates different

Every year since 2007, Apple has debuted a new flagship iPhone. Other than the just plain “iPhone” original, they all have numbers of some sort in their name. If you make a list of them in order, it’s a bit of a marketing curiosity that the only one of the

As A.I. upends education, university leaders have been all over the map about how to respond. It can be very confusing for students. Listen · 10:19 min Some university leaders have said schools must embrace A.I. to stay relevant.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times Sept. 15, 2026 See more

Q. & A. Employees of A.I. companies are increasingly sounding the alarm. What should we make of their warnings? September 16, 2026 Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic.Source photograph from Getty Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics

It is just past noon on a midweek day, and already every table at Au Bon Accueil cafe-bistro in the northern Burgundy village of Saint-Martin-sur-Ouanne is taken. The three-course lunch menu today – including a choice of a hefty chunk of steak with chips or a meaty lasagne – is

OpinionGuest Essay Credit... Listen · 21:33 min Sept. 11, 2026 Leer en español The biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway. Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military

The Keynote I loved the keynote’s “You want a great opening scene?” opening, which ran through a series of genre-inspired hook-you-from-the-first-shot pretend movie openings. Apple started with a title card that said “The following was shot on iPhone”, but the whole keynote — including the fun fake-movie openings — was

When iOS 27 first came out back in June, we started working on a series of in-depth feature guides and how tos that go through all of the updates in Apple's new software. Our ultimate guide aggregates all of our ‌iOS 27‌ coverage, and it is useful for iPhone and

Last year, a baby named Emanuel was born in Sweden. Before his first birthday, his parents were told that Emanuel could no longer stay in the country. The department of migration ordered his removal, alone, to Iran – despite the ongoing war. Emanuel’s parents were legally in the country. They

Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of nonconsensual sex and intimate image abuse. On the afternoon of Sunday, November 2, 2025, Maddie Kowalski stopped by a house in Gainesville to drop off a present. The University of Florida sophomore had traveled to Japan that summer, where she’d picked up an

A Critic at Large Where Benjamin Moser replaces one story of Jewish exceptionalism with another, Omer Bartov shows what’s lost when polemic takes the place of history. September 13, 2026 A ship named for the founder of political Zionism brings Jewish immigrants to the Port of Haifa, in 1948. According

Credit...Brandon Celi OpinionGuest Essay Credit...Brandon Celi Listen · 22:30 min Sept. 10, 2026 The popular uprising against data centers has emerged so suddenly that politicians stumble over their own pitchforks racing to the front of the crowd. Where most industries would be launching into crisis P.R. mode, perhaps even engaging

Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Is there anything more to know about the world’s richest man? And more importantly, do you want to know it? Elon Musk is such

I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a

Donald Trump loves rallies. Everyone can see how they energize him, how the crowd’s applause encourages him to ditch the hackneyed prose of his speechwriters and go on wild riffs, how the music and cheering are like water to a parched man. Tonight, at the end of a two-day rally

Forty years ago, as an undergraduate in Hokkaido, Toshiyuki Nakagaki came upon a lemon-yellow stain in a petri dish. That encounter turned him into a doyen of slime mould research – and fed a storm of biological and philosophical debate about the meanings of life and intelligence that persists to

Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI’s frontier were ceding control. By using AI’s coding skills to accelerate work on the

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Updated at 4:32 p.m. ET on September 8, 2026. In the fall of 2007, as the American housing market began to buckle, a Morgan Stanley bond trader named Howie Hubler lost $9 billion.