Editor’s Note: This article, by nature of the topic, may include language that is considered sensitive and/or vulgar to some readers. ...

The United States is in the grip of a reading recession—nearly half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023, and fewer than half read even one, according to data from YouGov and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Since the...

Aging brings about a range of changes—often unwelcome—to our bodies: sagging skin, graying or thinning hair, and a decline in muscle strength and vitality. But aging also affects us on the inside, altering proteins and other biomolecules in ways that increase our risk of developing...

The influential computer scientist Mark Weiser once wrote that “a good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.” By this definition, many of our digital tools...

Sherlock Holmes, the famous fictional detective, believed that his brother, Mycroft, could also have been a brilliant solver of crimes if he had not been so impossibly lazy. Mycroft was large and slow-moving, and he avoided all unnecessary exertion. He enjoyed sitting by a window...

Producing art and text using computers is not new. It has been happening since the 1970s. What is new is that computers are acting independently—without programmers providing any input; the computer program generates the work, even if programmers have set the parameters. ...

Missouri Republicans in early April voted to cut all public funding for libraries as part of their state budget proposal. ...

Television has been experiencing a boom in the United States, the likes of which has never been seen before. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were 532 scripted TV shows that were broadcast or streamed the year before—an all-time high. In 2022, there...

As a research librarian, my professional life has focused on connecting people to reliable information. In the last thirty years, I have been stunned to watch as the rise in digital information that initially held so much promise in providing people with diverse and trustworthy...

The public sector in the U.S. has been shrinking rapidly since the 1990s as a deluge of privatization has, to various degrees, overtaken many so-called public services and institutions. Public education, for example, has been increasingly privatized by way of racist school voucher programs,...