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Kristin Idaszak | Longreads | October 22, 2026 | 3,741 words (13 minutes)

The city of the dead is the obverse of the society of the living, or rather than the obverse, it is its image, its intemporal image. For the dead have gone through the moment of change, and their monuments are the visible sign of the permanence of their city.

—Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death

Shortly after I graduated from college, my best friend sent me a postcard from the Sedlec Ossuary, a Catholic chapel formally named the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora, a town about an hour east of Prague. The postcard depicted the chapel’s interior: a chandelier of bones flanked by two towers of skulls. On the back she wrote, “The chandelier alone contains all the bones in the human body. Thanks to the plague, we have this work of totally weird art!” 

Immediately I started planning my own trip to Kutná Hora—a place made prosperous by silver mining but famous for its bone church—and arrived with the zeal of a pilgrim. Today the town has 20,000 residents, but in its 14th-century heyday it boasted almost four times as many souls. The late Middle Ages was a tough time to be alive, between the Black Death, various crusades and holy wars, and famine—not to mention the labor conditions of silver mining. Kutná Hora was also a popular place to die, and all the villagers wanted to spend eternity at the medieval Sedlec Abbey. After one of the crusades, an abbot had brought back a handful of soil, supposedly from Golgotha, and strewn it on the abbey grounds. Burial in that soil was believed to grant quicker access to heaven, which led to an overcrowded cemetery. The solution? Build a subterranean chapel to house the remains. And then a half-blind monk, in the wake of a terrible plague, exhumed the victims and used them to redecorate. 

An ossuary is any repository for human remains, but it’s also the term for a holy site that serves this function. Another name for this kind of church is charnel house, which to me evokes the image of an abattoir. Death historian Philippe Ariès connects the term to the French idiom une vieille carne, translated as an old nag or a tough piece of meat. It’s apropos: These buildings enshrine human remains as décor in macabre, otherworldly, electrifying memento mori. 

Four months later, I found myself in the Czech Republic. A coat of arms made out of bones greeted me when I arrived at the bone church. Upon closer inspection, the heraldry included a skeletal bird, its slender beak playfully pecking out a long-disintegrated eye from an empty socket. As I descended the stygian steps from the ticket kiosk, I took in the pyramid of bones that guarded the four corners of the room. 

The chapel seemed to exist in a perpetual gloaming, the air hushed and cool. The sheer presence of so many human remains disoriented me; they surrounded me on every side. Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude. The remains took on an animated quality—not in a Halloween-y, top hat–wearing, dancing skeleton sense; nor in an eerie, horror movie sense; but in the sense that each one radiated a life force.

I loved it. I loved being surrounded by skeletons and weird art and death.

Death and the afterlife fascinated me. I devoured stories of women who visited the underworld and returned—Alcestis, Eurydice, Persephone—and philosophers and poets who broached the subject—Nietzsche, Camus, Dante. Thanatos, my favorite philosophy professor called it. The death drive. But I had no sense of the fragility of my own body. My knees did not yet make those alarming soft pops; the permanent ache had not settled into my shoulder; my heart wouldn’t sputter erratically in my chest for another decade. The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.

I’d like to tell you that my visit to the Sedlec Ossuary changed everything, that after my trip I appreciated life’s transitory nature. Or that it gave me a premonition of what lay in store for me, my own brushes with death that were to come.

It did not.

While I was underground, I felt temporarily transported and transformed—or at least, I had a flicker of understanding: I sauntered into the chapel with the hubristic notion of a young artist that my words would become immortal. The bones confronted me with the truth. My legacy would be deposits of calcium and protein and collagen. My art wouldn’t endure, but these nameless victims of plague and famine and war—they did. It humbled me.

But I left the ossuary’s insights with the dead. In my early 20s, I didn’t need the bone church to convince me to suck the marrow out of each day. I went to grad school, became a playwright, got married, traveled to all seven continents. Somewhere in there, I relegated the bone chapel to memory.

In the summer of 2020, I got sick with a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia. I had so many episodes of VT I lost count, and any one of them could have ended in cardiac arrest. These events were indescribably painful and frightening. They enervated me, sapping me of my strength, vitality—eventually my will to persevere. My life became very small.

Mortality was no longer an abstraction: I was scared of what would happen to me when I died. Of how much it hurt. Of the nothingness of bones.

In the years that followed my initial descent into illness, I rarely left home. At the time I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, a third-floor walk-up. Climbing the stairs could, unpredictably, trigger a cardiac event, and so unless I had to leave for work, I spent most of the time in my living room. I can close my eyes now and return to that place. I’d painted the walls a shade of cornflower blue I grew to loathe. The television tottered precariously on an ancient table. Cherry-stained bookcases lined the wall. The top of the bookcase displayed a golden Japanese fan with a cloud tree painted on it. Next to it stood a penguin pitcher I bought on my honeymoon in Tierra del Fuego. Three vintage-style travel posters advertised Antarctic destinations: Beagle Channel, Lemaire Channel, Paradise Harbor.

That room was the real ossuary. 

One of my favorite Greek tragedies is Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the eponymous heroine journeys to Hades in her dying husband’s stead. The god Apollo tricks the Fates so that her husband, the king, can live if he can find someone to take his place in the underworld. There’s an exchange I think about a lot: “Possible to say she is both alive and dead,” her servant reports, and the chorus leader, understandably confused, asks, “How could someone die and keep on living?” This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.

The play takes a strange turn when Heracles arrives amid his twelve labors. During a supremely awkward evening of drunken revelry at the palace, he figures out what’s going on and hustles to the graveyard to wrestle death and bring Alcestis back. 

I didn’t have a demigod to save me. But I didn’t want to be lost and gone. 

Sitting in my apartment day after day, surrounded by artifacts from the world I used to inhabit, was slowly killing me. I was afraid of things that had caused my VT, which meant I was afraid to go to the grocery store. I was afraid of taking a yoga class. I was afraid to simply be outside if it was really hot out. Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.

I formulated a drastic plan to return to the land of the living. I took time off teaching and planned a sabbatical to travel and write. I couldn’t hide in my house if I rented it to someone else, if I jetted to the other side of the world. Instead of crossing the River Styx I ferried myself across the Pacific Ocean, and then the Atlantic. The final stop on my sabbatical was leading a study abroad in the Czech Republic, to attend an international scenography and performance festival. The ossuary didn’t really fit into the rest of the itinerary, but I wanted to give my students the experience I’d had all those years ago. 

Though contemporary visitors can experience ossuaries as disturbing or revolting, they didn’t start out that way. In The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, Paul Koudounaris traces their proliferation in Europe during the 13th century as a storage solution to the medieval Christian problem of where to keep the dead safe for their resurrection. There were more bodies than places to put them. Death preoccupied the medieval imagination. After the Bubonic plague, medieval artists began portraying its grotesque physicality: images of rotting corpses, poetic descriptions of worm fodder. You get the sense they would’ve painted the stench if they could. Is it any wonder that these decomposed cadavers eventually became the artistic medium itself? 

Dozens of bone chapels sprang up across Europe by the 17th century, in a confluence of theology and aesthetics that seems morbidly inevitable. During the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism leaned into opulent and lavish Baroque art. It also leaned into corporal mortification, the kind that now shows up in mass-market thrillers as a fetishization of pain and suffering. 

The appetite for gaudy-verging-on-gauche bone art swelled when the Romantics arrived on the scene in the 19th century. Gothic literature supplanted the medieval Ars Moriendi; a secular touchstone of this cultural moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today, the Sedlec Ossuary has benefitted—or suffered from—the kitschification of gothic art, popping up in surprising places like The Young and the Restless and the “uninvolving and cliché-ridden” vampire B movie Blood and Chocolate.

Romanticism also marked the rise of a phenomenon now known as “dark tourism,” which refers to the practice of visiting sites associated with disaster, war, atrocity. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term in 1996, in reference to tourism spawned by John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Scholars often point to concentration camps and Chernobyl as the field’s quintessential sites. Yet it’s a concept as old as tourism itself, dating back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims travel to the site of Thomas Becket’s murder. During the Grand Tours of the Romantic era, visits to places like the Paris catacombs (an underground labyrinth containing the bones of some six million people) and Pompeii (mass grave by way of volcano) came into vogue as a way to cultivate the Sublime. 

It can’t be an accident that this coincided with the proliferation of ossuaries. I have to believe not everyone went to charnel houses for the sake of holy contemplation. Prurience is not an invention of the digital age, even if we have elevated it to new heights (or denigrated it to new social media-inflected nadirs). I imagine gentlewomen in whalebone corsets and dilettantish young men titillating their companions with stories of the macabre.

The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity. Before I got sick, I went to Auschwitz as well as Hiroshima. The power of these sites is undeniable. They serve as monuments to some of modern history’s darkest moments and have been carefully transformed into vehicles for education, reflection, and solemn commemoration. I went because it felt important to bear witness to the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred there. But I’ve also participated in dark tourism less consciously, and perhaps you have, too. I’ve seen an Ai Weiwei art installation at Alcatraz, toured the Colosseum where murder was a matinée, peeked into the bakeries and brothels of Pompeii, strolled through Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. I skipped Hell’s Museum, which a friend recommended in Singapore, and wish I’d skipped a ghost tour of Savannah, Georgia—what made it haunting was the way the city’s bloody history of enslavement and oppression was repurposed as entertainment for partiers carrying to-go cups of watered-down vodka.

The counterargument is self-evident: It leaves these sensitive sites vulnerable to exploitation. The suffering of one group commodified as a cocktail party anecdote for another. The exit through the gift shop. 

It would be a neat narrative if the newest wave of dark tourism had gained traction after the pandemic, when there was a momentary reintegration of death in our day-to-day. In actuality, it flourished before COVID spread, before ambulances drove through empty city streets and bodies piled up in overcrowded mortuaries, before corpses were stashed in refrigerated trucks in New York City because the morgues were beyond capacity. And now, when those months and years have receded like a bad dream and no lessons were learned, it’s hard to attribute a newfound reverence for mortality to this renewed appetite for dark tourism. 

I never thought about what I was doing as morbid. I gravitated to many of these attractions unconsciously, often because I wanted to understand history—and history is littered with corpses. But I think back uneasily to the casual way these sites were slotted into my itineraries. I remember the okonomiyaki place I went to after the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the hole-in-the-wall with the cheerfully ursine line cook, but not how I possibly could’ve been hungry.

The impetus for this flavor of tourism isn’t monolithic. Some dark tourists are processing their personal or ancestral experiences, some are genuinely curious, some don’t even realize they’re doing it, and some are rubberneckers. Regardless of motivation, one effect of present-day dark tourism under global capitalism is the Disneyfication of death.

The first months of my sabbatical were rocky. Fear dogged me through the streets of Sydney, Mumbai, Athens. A few weeks before I went back to the Czech Republic to lead my study abroad, I went to another bone chapel, in a small town east of Lisbon called Évora. Visitors flock to Évora for its prehistoric megaliths and Roman temple to Diana, but I’d driven across Portugal to see the charnel house. My GPS misled me through the hot, dusty town, and I circled around the temple and its remaining Corinthian columns—which seemed dropped into the town square like an abandoned film set—until I found the Capela dos Ossos.

The 17th-century Capela has more bling than Sedlec, from azulejo tiles to ceiling frescoes, with skulls where cherubs might usually repose. (Other charnel houses put the Capela to shame in their ostentation, such as the skeletons at the German Basilica of Waldsassen wearing jewel-encrusted gold costumes, which were originally posed with chalices with dried blood at their feet.) The chapel is crammed, floor to illustrious ceiling, with​ bones stacked horizontally, so only the knobs show. Lined with osteological columns, the architecture echoes the ruined temple to the pagan goddess in the town beyond. Before you even enter there’s a Dantean inscription: Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos. 

We bones that are here await yours. 

I found the inscription strangely comforting as I entered the inner chamber. The first interpretive sign explained the function of a bone chapel as a memento mori: “It is expected to serve as a consolation to some and news to others.” 

Lucky them, I thought.

I appreciated the aesthetics of the Capela dos Ossos, but it lacked the Hadean quality that engendered my near-mystic experience at the Sedlec Ossuary. Afterward, I continued on my sabbatical still mistrustful of my body, still afraid to move through the world. 

But when I got to Prague, something shifted. It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t walk into the bone chapel and have an epiphany. A logjam loosened in my psyche. Shepherding a group of young adults in a foreign country, I couldn’t hide in the hotel or confine myself to strictly prescribed routes and routines. For many of them it was their first trip overseas, and overwhelmed, they looked to me for guidance. 

At 7 a.m. one morning, 20 students piled onto a bus to Kutná Hora. On the drive, I strove to impart my love of bone churches: Ossuaries aren’t morbid (okay, well, they are, but they’re not only morbid); they highlight the brevity of our lives to help us live more intentionally. But in a kind of punk rock way. Carpe fucking diem. The students were curious but respectful. Some found it moving, others creepy. 

When we arrived, the bone chapel was different than I remembered. Tentatively, I descended into the brightly lit space below. In the open area of the chapel, monitors now played a video of renovators handling the bones. The video explained a restoration project to shore up the building’s structural integrity and preserve the skeletons. The foundation is unstable and has started sinking since it was built sometime in the 14th century. In the Baroque period the Czech-Italian architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel redesigned the ossuary as it exists today, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that a carpenter named František Rint created the bone art, including the famous chandelier and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms that reproduced the heraldry of the local aristocrats. 

That wasn’t the origin story I’d learned years ago, about the monk and the plague—was the monk even real? The crepuscular lighting and gloom were gone. Where was the ambience? How could you commune with the dead like this?

Behind me, another busload of tourists arrived, and another, and another. Tourists overran the chapel, their guides speaking into little microphones in various languages while they snapped photo after photo. At the entrance, the lone employee said in English, no photos allowed. Everybody ignored her. 

Snap. 

Desensitized, they gawked without seeing. 

Snap. 

No photos, repeated the ticket taker. 

Snap.

The scores of tour groups weren’t part of my memory. 

Through a side door I climbed the stairs into an outdoor cemetery. The videos of the restorers kept replaying in my mind. It’s one thing to envision an apocryphal monk constructing pyramids of bones, it’s another to watch footage of archaeologists cleaning them and then putting them back in the pile. One of my students was minoring in archaeology and, as we strolled through the cemetery, she told me that ethical and legal restrictions governed archaeologists’ handling of human remains. It was obvious once she said it, but I hadn’t thought about it. The videos had close-ups of hands in nitrile gloves cleaning the dirt off the bones. Afterward, the bones were soaked in lime solution, which is also how Rint first prepared them in the 1860s. His chlorinated lime solution is the reason the Sedlec Ossuary’s decorations have remained relatively white over the years, while bones in other ossuaries have browned with age. The archaeologists also have the benefit of video mapping to help them rebuild the pyramids once the bones are cleaned and restored. 

It must take incredible dedication for these archaeologists to put themselves in this proximity with death. To sustain that intimacy day after day—I know the cost. 

I resented the crowd of tourists I’d left thronging the chapel. More than that, I felt a sense of superiority. Now that I was ready for the ossuary to transform me, I’d found an atmosphere that was more carnivalesque than sacred. 

But as I meandered among the headstones in the fresh air, it occurred to me: Did I really think that none of those tourists had ever lost a parent or child or partner, ever grieved, ever had a near-death experience of their own? Did I really think my proximity to death, my awareness of its phalanges drumming on my shoulder, had given me some privileged access to the charnel house’s true meaning? To the contrary, after I got sick, I guarded my life like a dragon hoarding a treasure pile in a dark cave, and it moldered away, unspent. Those bones had more vivacity than I did. 

For the medieval peasants whose skeletons limned the walls, death was a prolonged nap until everyone woke up during the rapture. There was a fluidity between death and the afterlife. These days it seems so much more final. (Per Ariès, once it was tame and now it is wild.) Much has been made of the deathbed’s move in modern society from the home to the hospital: out of sight, out of mind. Ossuaries thrust mortality squarely in your line of vision. They ask that you regard death as a transition, not a terminus. Not something to guard against hyper-vigilantly, but a natural part of a cosmic continuum. 

It was time to live again.

Going back to the Sedlec Ossuary was not some purifying rite. It was an ordinary day. The tourists streamed past me, discussing where they were going for lunch. The ​students had moved on, browsing for trinkets at the shop across the street. I recoiled at the kitschy skull mugs and shot glasses, but when I got home, I wished I had a memento mori to put next to the penguin.  

After Heracles brings Alcestis back from the underworld, she’s silent for the remainder of the play. Still sacred to the god of the dead, she cannot speak until three days have gone by, Heracles explains. I think there might be other reasons she stays silent. Maybe she preferred it down there. Maybe she left some irretrievable part of herself behind. Maybe she found the light above a little too harsh, the music too loud, the colors too saturated; found herself attracted to dusk, to intertidal zones, lintels, liminal spaces. Or maybe she has nothing left to say.

When I got home, I went through my old photos. I couldn’t figure out if my memories of Sedlec were real until I found a photo of myself, painfully young, standing in the semi-dark underneath the chandelier, its bones glowing white—either from the camera flash or an out-of-frame light source. I look half-happy, half-haunted, like I’m about to say something, but I can’t remember what.

Kristin Idaszak is an internationally produced and award-winning playwright and essayist whose recent work explores the intersection of ecology and chronic illness. She is a 3Arts Awardee, two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, and the former Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Goodman Theatre. She received the Kennedy Center ACTF Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her essays appear in The American Scholar, Fourth Genre, HowlRound, and elsewhere.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

• Walmart chief people officer Donna Morris oversees more than 2 million workers globally.
• She shared three green flags that make her lean in during a job interview.
• Morris said she likes to see a track record of grit in a candidate.

Donna Morris oversees over 2 million employees, so she knows a strong candidate when she sees one.

Walmart's chief people officer identified three green flags that make her lean in during a job interview — regardless of the role they're applying for. First, she told Business Insider that she looks for a genuine alignment with the company's purpose and values.

Second, she wants to see an ability to take on multiple responsibilities and make things work.

"They demonstrate a track record of grit," Morris said, defining those individuals as people who have overcome adversity.

In an ideal world, she said that means they've worked on the frontline, since so many of Walmart employees have customer-facing roles. She said the company looks for candidates with a focus on service.

Morris, who started working at 13 at a dry cleaner's and then worked at a drugstore for eight years, said that if a candidate has never experienced what it's like to be a frontline hourly worker, it may be challenging for them to lead. Morris said those jobs gave her purpose, and she found it hard to resign.

Now, when she interviews candidates, Morris said her go-to question is "If I was to ask people who've worked for you before, what will they tell me?" She said the open-ended question generates a genuine response and helps her gauge whether the person is focused on servant leadership, which is a "big green flag."

Asking this question allows her to hear more about a candidate's first job or a work experience. She said that while graduating from an Ivy League school is valuable, she's more focused on hearing about what they've learned from work experience.

"What was the grit they had to persevere through?" Morris asked.

The chief people officer, who worked at Adobe for more than 17 years before joining Walmart, said that her third green flag is candidates who are passionate about making a difference.

"That, to us, would be really, really key," Morris said.

O Walmart apresentou nesta quarta-feira (21) novas ​ferramentas que permitirão que agentes ​de inteligência artificial façam compras e concluam transações para os clientes.

A iniciativa ressalta o empenho do Walmart em promover compras com tecnologia de IA (Inteligência Artificial) e contrasta com a Amazon, que tem buscado ⁠limitar o acesso ​de agentes de compras de IA de ​terceiros à sua plataforma.

A rede de varejo ⁠informou que lançará os “Perfis de ⁠Agentes” no próximo mês, permitindo que ​os ‌consumidores autorizem agentes de IA individualmente, acompanhem suas ⁠compras separadamente e definam limites de gastos ou exijam aprovação para cada transação.

O Walmart afirmou que os ‌clientes ⁠poderão monitorar ‌as compras feitas por agentes de IA separadamente de seus próprios pedidos e revogar o acesso ⁠dos agentes a qualquer ⁠momento.

A empresa também lançou o “Walmart Agent Gateway”, uma plataforma que ‌permite que assistentes de IA, como o ChatGPT da OpenAI, o Gemini do Google e o Muse da Meta, se conectem diretamente aos ‌sistemas do Walmart e do Sam’s Club para pesquisar produtos e concluir compras.

O Walmart afirmou que ⁠os clientes manterão o controle sobre as compras, enquanto os agentes de IA não terão ​acesso aos dados dos cartões de pagamento e poderão ser ​bloqueados por violarem as regras da empresa.

A empresa informou que as ferramentas estarão disponíveis para todos os titulares de contas ‌do Walmart.

• Walmart is rolling out two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on behalf of customers.
• The company says the tools give people more control of their bots, and help bots be more accurate.
• Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, after it blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site.

Walmart wants your bot to shop.

The retail giant said Wednesday that it has two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on customers' behalf: agent profiles and an agent gateway.

The agent profiles link all transactions to the bot that performed them, and allow Walmart customers to manage authorizations and spending limits as they would for an additional user on their credit card account, the company said.

With agent gateways, bots no longer have to navigate a website that is designed for humans. Instead, Walmart is granting access through a model text protocol that it says will help agents work more quickly and accurately.

Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, which recently blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site, saying agents violate Amazon's conditions of use. Amazon has also pushed back on other third-party agents, including a lawsuit against Perplexity and restrictions on agents from Google and OpenAI.

"As customers begin using agents to help them shop, we're building connections, permissions and options that complement those tools and support how customers want to use them," the company said in a statement.

The company also said the gateway protects the information that Walmart has about its customers, and only provides what is necessary for completing a given transaction. In particular, the gateway can share a relevant pattern or preference — such as a customer's favorite laundry detergent brand — without sharing their entire purchase history with the agent.

The company also laid out a set of terms and conditions regarding how AI agents are expected to operate when shopping.

Under the terms, the company said it will honor its usual returns policy and that agents will always see the same pricing that a human would see on Walmart.com.

• Target has launched a beta version of its Ask Target AI chatbot to help with the holidays.
• Major retail competitors like Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's have offered the features for months now.
• Conversational apps can help shoppers discover new products and build larger baskets.

Target shoppers have a new elf to help with their holiday gift lists.

The Bullseye retailer just launched a beta version of its AI-powered chatbot, called Ask Target, in time for the seasonal rush. The move brings Target into closer step with rivals like Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's, each of which has offered the feature for months now.

"We have seen a lot of traction as we start to think about that conversational AI, so the team was excited to push it through to capitalize on our biggest season of the year," chief merchandising officer Cara Sylvester told Business Insider during a holiday preview event in New York.

Sylvester also said that the app can answer Target-related questions, not only holiday-specific ones. An internal rollout of the tool had store employees brushing up on new merchandise, particularly in the new Beauty Studio department.

The AI assistant comes two months after Target hired former Lowe's AI head Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer. At Lowe's, Nair oversaw the home improvement retailer's Mylow chatbot, which the company has credited with "dramatic improvements" in customer service.

Whether it's renovation advice or recipe ideas, retailers say chatbots trained on proprietary in-house data are more effective at responding to customer queries than an outside bot like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. The in-house bots can also act as a digital counterpart for personal AI agents like Meta's Muse.

Walmart has said that its Sparky agent has helped the retailer better understand its customers, as shoppers are having more conversational interactions rather than simple keyword searches. Sparky users discover more items and build shopping baskets that are 40% larger than those of non-users, the company has said.

Sylvester said it's too early to say what the basket-size impacts of the new Ask Target agent are.

El Barcelona todavía no es el PSG, si acaso se le parece, más que nada en la intención, inferior a su referente en el trepidante partido del Parque de los Príncipes. Hubo una distancia apreciable entre la juvenil formación dispuesta por Flick y el doble campeón de Europa. No es que los azulgrana dieran un paso atrás como pudo parecer por la zamarra que vistieron y la suplencia de Rodri. La cuestión es que el original fue superior a la copia porque los franceses son un equipo ya completo y los azulgrana están a medio camino de ser importantes en Europa.

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El ansiado primer gol del curso de Julián Alvarez y un ejercicio de resistencia a la vieja usanza del Atlético de Simeone por la expulsión de Hjulmand a media hora para el final le dieron al Atlético un valioso punto ante el volcánico Stuttgart. Ese primer tanto del argentino en el inicio del segundo tiempo recompuso a un equipo que había sido avallasado en la primera mitad. La alocada tarascada de Hjulmand llegó cuando mejor enlazaba su juego el Atlético, que pudo salir vivo recuperando su espíritu de intentar jugar a que no pase nada.

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Aging former comedian Jon Stewart has signed up for two more years of failure with The Daily Show.

The post Nolte: Jon Stewart Signs up for Two More Years of ‘Daily Show’ Failure appeared first on Breitbart.

John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.

Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.

• Walmart is offering a new membership bundle that combines Walmart Plus and Sam's Club Plus.
• The new combo includes both memberships for less than the price of a Costco Executive membership.
• A key feature of each membership is their increasingly fast delivery services.

Walmart rolled out a perk for its Plus membership programs, taking a shot at rivals Amazon and Costco.

The retail giant said Tuesday that it is offering a membership bundle that includes Walmart Plus and Sam's Club Plus for $120 per year.

That means existing Sam's Club Plus members now effectively get Walmart Plus included, and Walmart Plus members can add the premium-level club membership for an additional $22.

CEO John Furner took a not-so-subtle jab at Amazon and Costco in a statement announcing the news.

"Consider what people may be paying today: $139 for a retail membership with delivery. $130 for a warehouse club," he said, referring to their respective fees.

Walmart has been taking sharp aim at both retail competitors, with membership perks that overlap in several areas, like streaming entertainment, pharmacy services, and deals from partner businesses.

The biggest perk for Plus members — whether at Walmart or Sam's Club — is an increasingly fast delivery operation that fulfills orders from stores and clubs in as little as 30 minutes. Some orders have arrived in fewer than 10 minutes.

"The bundled offering screens as another signal of WMT pushing more value into its overall ecosystem, and highlighting its rapid delivery capabilities," Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said in a note.

Walmart doesn't disclose membership counts or fee revenue, but Mizuho estimates the chains have about 25 million Walmart Plus members and 30 million Sam's Club members. The bank also estimates an overlap of about 10% between Walmart and Sam's Club members.

Globally, Costco reported more than 150 million membership cardholders, and Amazon is estimated to have more than 220 million Prime members.