What To Expect When You’re Expecting (A World of Multi-Agent Systems)
Asterisk Magazineby Christine Kozobarich·4d ago
What To Expect When You’re Expecting (A World of Multi-Agent Systems) Christine Kozobarich How do we model the future of work? It takes an AI village.
Why We Like Things
Asterisk Magazineby Celine Nguyen·11d ago
When I was 22, I met, and later fell in love with, a woman who had impeccable taste. She dressed well; that was the first thing I noticed.
How Diplomats See the World
Asterisk Magazineby Abi Olvera·18d ago
Inside the boring-by-design U.S. fact-checking machine. A few years into my Foreign Service career, a colleague leaked a falsehood to the press. I couldn’t figure out why they’d done it.
Beware the Permanent Periphery
Asterisk Magazineby Anton Leicht·25d ago
Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying. Fear of AI disruption spreads in concentric circles.
All Work and No Play
Asterisk Magazineby The Editors·21 Jul 2026
If you're literate — a safe assumption, since you're reading this magazine — you have almost certainly come across the claim that AI will take your job.
Rust and Boll
Asterisk Magazineby Dylan Matthews·21 Jul 2026
Anthropic should learn from those cotton-picking socialists. The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible.
In Praise of Observational Evidence
Asterisk Magazineby Lennart Finke·30 Jun 2026
Everyone knows RCTs are the gold standard of evidence. ….Right? In 1710, Scottish doctor John Arbuthnot presented a new proof for the existence of God.1 He had observed that for 82 years in a row...
The Doomers Are All Right
Asterisk Magazineby Ozy Brennan·23 Jun 2026
“I think that in most timelines, humans will simply be irrelevant and extinct,” one interviewee said. I heard that a lot.
Engineering Peace
Asterisk Magazineby Josh Martin·16 Jun 2026
The development community treats war as inevitable. We’re learning how to pay to prevent it. Global development has a war problem.
We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides
Asterisk Magazineby Elizabeth Van Nostrand·3 Jun 2026
We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides Elizabeth Van Nostrand For health hackers, the risk is not experimenting. “Unfounded and reckless” is how Dr.
Selling Abstraction
Asterisk Magazineby Leah Libresco Sargeant·27 May 2026
What global financial markets have in common with necromancers. Everything has a price. It’s a warning you might receive from a hedge fund trader, along with your “welcome to the firm” fleece vest.
Boarding China’s Last Bus
Asterisk Magazineby Zilan Qian·20 May 2026
China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.
These Wild Young People
Asterisk Magazineby Tessa Augsberger; Elan Kluger; Rufus Knuppel·13 May 2026
Gen Z are a bunch of cowards…or are they risking it all on crypto? The editors of TheNew Critic report on their generation’s Risk-geist.
Rust in Numbers
Asterisk Magazineby Dan Bouk·6 May 2026
I met Norm two decades ago. I recall him clothed in slacks and a button-down — I think it was the sort of shirt that featured a breast pocket expressly for carrying mechanical pencils.
Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?
Asterisk Magazineby Dan Schwarz·29 Apr 2026
We all know they’re casinos. It’s time to look at the data behind the froth. In 2007, Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Daniel Kahneman, and other notable scholars published a statement arguing that...
How Long Until AI Doesn’t Need Humans?
Asterisk Magazineby Ajeya Cotra; Timothy B Lee·22 Apr 2026
How long until AI systems can sustain their own existence — such that, if every human died, they could keep growing their own population? METR’s Ajeya Cotra and Understanding AI’s Timothy B.
Shall We Play a Game?
Asterisk Magazineby Jon Peterson·22 Apr 2026
Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement.
Risk-Adjusted Return
Asterisk Magazineby The Editors·15 Apr 2026
Risk has always been a preoccupation of ours. (It is, literally, in our name.) Our first editorial observed that our lives were “getting stranger and harder to predict by the minute.” Three years...
The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet
Asterisk Magazineby Dynomight·15 Apr 2026
Acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and what doctors probably want you to know. Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, often sold as Tylenol or Panadol).
The Sweet Lesson of Neuroscience
Asterisk Magazineby Adam Marblestone·16 Feb 2026
Scientists once hoped that studying the brain would teach us how to build AI. Now, one AI researcher may have something to teach us about the brain.
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