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