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According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.

Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. Trump’s slashing of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants in May 2025 may have been unique as an expression of political malice toward the arts, but otherwise it was on trend with years of cuts to fellowships of all types. Even the Stegner Fellowship has suffered from tightened budgets: in August of last year, Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Stegner founded, gathered twenty-three of the program’s lecturers and announced that their current contracts were being terminated.

People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public. At so many parties or book launches, a quick way to earn the scorn of attendees is to ask: “How do you really make a living as a writer?” How did the twenty-seven-year-old freelancer who wrote all of three New Yorker features a year buy her Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom? By what magical means did the short story author for all the hot lit mags convert pennies and prestige into health insurance? Could book reviews, even brilliant ones, pay for bicoastal lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, or even bohemian ones in Lisbon and Berlin?

Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital is underwritten by capital capital; the ways in which literary legitimacy is made possible because someone subsidized it. It’s ironic that we call this supposedly tactful silence “class” when one’s class status is precisely what it conceals.

Stronger borders don’t deter desperate souls fleeing war zones, the climate crisis or economic hardship. Not when they can be circumvented. As a travel journalist, I cross borders for a living. In the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, I saw how African migrants risked death to swim around the razor-wire fences and watchtowers guarding the EU’s land border with Morocco. Mexican cartels have carved long and sophisticated tunnels beneath Trump’s wall.

It could even be argued that stronger borders encourage migrants to stay on longer than they might do otherwise. Through much of the 20th century, Mexicans crossed the porous border into southern US states for seasonal work. Once the harvest was in, they’d go home. Now, having endured a dangerous and expensive passage into the US, they’re more likely to want to stay permanently.

It was when I travelled the 300-mile length of the Irish border that I really understood the absurdity of hard borders. There, I visited communities and even farmhouses that Ireland’s partition had cleaved in two a century ago. The concrete barricades that once blocked roads are now gone, but the trauma still reverberates. Not simply as a result of the loss of life during the Troubles, but in the border regions’ ongoing economic disadvantage compared with the rest of Ireland. The threat of this hard border returning after Brexit prompted many of the people I met there, regardless of their personal politics, to believe that Ireland’s future lies in reunification rather than continued division.

On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondent’s Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.

The presumed exemption from violence of the elite rests on a broader bedrock of delusion that exists in its most virulent form on the ascendant American right. Last summer, U.S. Representative Madeleine Dean wielded the most unlikely of rhetorical weapons in a debate on the congressional floor: a banana. Across her sat Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, attempting to defend the Trump administration’s tariff policy. After confirming with Lutnick that the president’s baseline 10 percent tariff applied to banana imports, Dean explained that the price of bananas at Walmart had risen 8 percent. To which Lutnick replied: “If you build in America, there is no tariff.” This exchange did not exactly soar to the heights of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it was no less illuminating of the basic political conundrum of our era: that a critical mass of the political leadership of the United States appears to sincerely believe in magic.

People still use large handcarts in so-called “developing countries”. However, they can be just as useful again in the large cities of the industrialized world, as I can testify after using one for a couple of months. Last autumn, I received an internship application from Kozimo, who studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In his application, Kozimo sent a video of a large handcart he made, which he was driving on the streets of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

I have always dreamt of a handcart. I have never owned a car, and the only times I miss one are when I have to move stuff, something which has become increasingly common lately. Consequently, I proposed to Kozimo to build a handcart for me.

Now, I can no longer imagine living without it. I have used the vehicle to move houses and offices, pick up materials and objects I bought online, new or second-hand, and transport workshop and event materials (bike generators, solar panels, solar ovens, books, sound systems). I have done the same for friends. During these trips, I often took home materials, furniture, or objects that I found for free on the streets of Barcelona.

Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures. Neither do I need to pay taxes and insurance. The handcart is a very democratic vehicle. It allows anyone to carry a load wherever they want, while older, less affordable cars and vans are no longer allowed to enter city centers due to the installation of Low Emission Zones.

It would make a lot of sense to offer vehicles like this at community centers, where they are available for all neighbors to use when needed. Few people would need a handcart each day, and communal use would solve the parking problem. Although our handcart can also be parked vertically, it won’t fit in most apartments.

An experimental, individualized therapeutic cancer vaccine that uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to treat pancreatic cancer continues to show potential in a small patient group. Follow-up results from a phase 1 clinical trial show that nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive up to six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is around 13%, according to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Statistics 2026 report.

“These early results show this new immunotherapy approach has the potential to make a difference for one of the deadliest cancers,” says Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) physician-scientist Vinod Balachandran, MD, the trial’s principal investigator and Director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at MSK (OCCV). “The latest data from this small study suggest vaccines can meaningfully stimulate the immune system in some patients with pancreatic cancer — and these patients continue to do well years after vaccination.”

The phase 1 study, led by Dr. Balachandran, was testing autogene cevumeran (BNT122, RO7198457), a therapeutic mRNA cancer vaccine that is being developed and researched by BioNTech and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group.

You're at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It's right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.

How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?

Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It's neither of those. What it's actually doing is far more clever.

Internal documents reveal that Microsoft plans to temporarily suspend individual account signups to its GitHub Copilot coding product, as it transitions from requests (single interactions with Copilot) towards token-based billing.

The documents reveal that the weekly cost of running Github Copilot has doubled since the start of the year.

Microsoft also intends to tighten the rate limits on its individual and business accounts, and to remove access to certain models for those with the cheapest subscriptions.

President Donald Trump has now been in office for about 15 months, and his numbers keep getting worse. Our latest Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted April 10–14, finds just 35% of U.S. adults approving of his job performance, with 61% disapproving — a net approval rating of -26. That’s a new low in our poll, down from -23 last month and a steep fall from (an already poor) -16 when we first began tracking this question in May 2025.

This deterioration has been driven largely by his handling of the economy and prices. Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation has fallen to -46 — the worst rating on any single issue in the history of our poll, and a stunning 6-point drop from March’s already record-low -40. Nearly three-quarters of Americans (72%) now disapprove of the way Trump is handling prices.

Here are the poll’s headline findings:

Headline poll findings

• Job approval: 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance; 61% disapprove (net -26, down from -23 in March)
• Generic ballot: Democrats lead Republicans 50% to 43% among registered voters, a 7-point margin
• Direction of the country: 55% say things are going poorly and major changes are needed, a new high. Just 8% say things are going well
• Prices: Trump’s net approval on prices/inflation has fallen to -46, the worst rating on any issue we have ever recorded
• Border security: The one bright-ish spot — border security bounced back to net +1, making it once again the only issue where Trump is not underwater
• Iran: 64% of Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth the cost, up from 58% in March. 48% say the U.S. should never have gone to war in the first place

Most of us, we would like to think, would help out a relative, a friend and perhaps even a stranger in need. Maybe giving directions or lending a few quid. But how many of us would donate one of our organs to someone we will never meet?

That is exactly what Tom Cledwyn did in 2012. Since then, his life has been shaped by acts of generosity towards strangers, culminating in Drop Dead Generous, a social experiment giving 1,000 people $500 (£378) each to spend on helping others in creative ways. Backed by an anonymous philanthropist, the project is part grant scheme, part provocation: what happens if you trust people to be generous?

Cledwyn donated his kidney at 25, after reading about Kay Mason, the first person in the UK to give a kidney to a stranger.

“It was an honour to be able to do it. And the same applies to all forms of giving. It doesn’t have to be a kidney. It can be a smile, some time, or being there when someone is struggling,” he says. “The experience of giving is the closest thing I’ve experienced to something that really matters.

“I knew I’d get minimal feedback and would never meet the recipient. That felt important too, doing something without seeing the outcome.”

After the operation, he set up a blog called The Free Help Guy, trawling Gumtree and offering anonymous help to people who needed it, whether that meant moving house or fixing things around the home. Demand grew quickly, until the money ran out.

A stint at Meta followed, where he rose to become a senior executive, but after seven years he left, pulled back towards the idea that generosity could be scaled.

Together with co-founder John Sweeney, he launched Drop Dead Generous, with a $500,000 (£378,000) fund. At the time of writing, 266 grants have been awarded across 21 countries.

Applicants are asked two simple questions: who needs help, and what would you do with $500 to “blow their socks off”?

Whether the first hundred days become a foundation or a high-water mark depends partly on Albany. The budget gap Mamdani inherited from previous city and state administrations constrains new investment, and his largest revenue proposal, the wealth tax, requires the governor and state legislature to act. But the trajectory is already set. By fall, 2,000 two-year-olds will have full-day, full-year childcare seats that did not exist in January. By 2027, a city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem selling subsidized food on the same spot where LaGuardia built one ninety years ago. Those cost money the way fire departments and public schools cost money: because delivering the service is the point.

Your city and state can do everything mentioned here and even more.

You can go find your city councilmember and state house representative. Tell them what you want, in person, persistently, and specifically.

This is a weird time to be alive.

I grew up on Asimov and Clarke, watching Star Trek and dreaming of intelligent machines. My dad’s library was full of books on computers. I spent camping trips reading about perceptrons and symbolic reasoning. I never imagined that the Turing test would fall within my lifetime. Nor did I imagine that I would feel so disheartened by it.

Around 2019 I attended a talk by one of the hyperscalers about their new cloud hardware for training Large Language Models (LLMs). During the Q&A I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Since then, friends have been asking me what I make of all this “AI stuff”. I’ve been turning over the outline for this piece for years, but never sat down to complete it; I wanted to be well-read, precise, and thoroughly sourced. A half-decade later I’ve realized that the perfect essay will never happen, and I might as well get something out there.

This is bullshit about bullshit machines, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play.

Some of these ideas felt prescient in the 2010s and are now obvious. Others may be more novel, or not yet widely-heard. Some predictions will pan out, but others are wild speculation. I hope that regardless of your background or feelings on the current generation of ML systems, you find something interesting to think about.

On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away.

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.

Little is known about the motives of Tom or Hussein, or the politics of the Indianapolis shooter, but reporters and the online commentariat quickly dredged up Moreno-Gama’s Discord chats and Substack posts. He was a reader of rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues, as the title of his last book puts it, if Silicon Valley builds a “superintelligent” AI, “everyone dies.” Per the San Francisco Chronicle:

Online records show Moreno-Gama published multiple essays and forum posts warning that AI could lead to human extinction, calling AI models deceitful and misaligned with human interests. He accused tech leaders, including Altman, of lacking morals and being willing to gamble with humanity’s future, and adopted the alias “Butlerian Jihadist,” referencing a fictional anti-AI crusade from the 'Dune' series. His writings grew more urgent over time, with some posts edging toward calls for extreme action despite community moderators warning against violence.

According to the SFPD, after attacking Altman’s house, Moreno-Gama went to OpenAI’s offices, where he was arrested while banging the front doors with a chair, threatening to burn the office down and kill everyone inside. He had a jug of kerosene and a list of other AI leaders names and addresses, police said.