Once a week, Adrian Billings drives his white Chevy pickup from his home in Alpine, Texas, to Presidio, a city along the Mexican border. This summer he’s been taking his son Blake, who’s home from college, with him. The drive, through mountains and desert on a two-lane highway across which actual tumbleweeds roll, takes an hour and a half.

Billings is a family doctor, one of only a handful in this part of West Texas. He offers a one-stop shop for his patients’ ailments: heart murmurs, kidney stones, etc. Most of the time he works in Alpine or the nearby city of Marfa. But he makes the weekly drive to Presidio because, without doctors like him, it wouldn’t have medical care. There’s no hospital and no full-time doctor. His clinic, which opened in 2007 with the help of government grants, is the only access residents have to even a local pharmacy.

Like many successful products that come from Silicon Valley startups, Dall-E became a phenomenon during a testing period when it was available to only a relatively small group. The hype built with online chatter from early adopters, who documented the highlights on Twitter and Reddit, giving the broader world a taste of what was to come.

Let’s say you come home and there’s a gorilla sitting on the couch in your nicely appointed living room. You are partly to blame for leaving the door unlocked, but world events have also conspired to let him in the door.

You are carrying a baseball bat. But you know that getting into a fight with an unruly 300-pound beast is going to wreck the house. You try nudging him out the door without creating a lot of collateral damage, but that doesn’t work. So now it’s clear that some furniture is going to get broken.

Imagine for a second life before smartphones. Simple tasks—ordering takeout, staying in touch—become frustratingly difficult, never mind dealing with emergencies. In China that’s sort of what it’s like to live without

Axie Infinity’s vision of a “play-to-earn” video game has crumbled, and the company behind it now tells the players who bought into the hype it was never about the money, anyway.

Figure out what everyone needs. Moors

When the Swatch was born four decades ago, the plastic timepiece breathed new life into the staid Swiss watch industry, which was struggling to compete with cheap quartz models from Asia. By the early 1990s, Swatch sales soared to about 20 million a year as consumers snapped up the colorful designs that married Swiss-made precision with an affordable fun factor. That boost provided financial cover for the slow-motion comeback of struggling high-end manufacturers (Blancpain,

For three days each week during the month of April in 2014, a seasoned product manager named Lulu Young, an engineering manager named Paul Connolly, and a 24-year-old jewelry salesman named Nick Molnar gathered in a bare, windowless conference room in Melbourne to hash out the features and functionality of a financial product that existed only in Molnar’s head. The goal was to appeal to two constituencies at once: online retailers, who were always eager to convert more virtual browsers into actual shoppers; and consumers, some of whom didn’t have credit cards but, Molnar thought, might still like a way to get their goods first and then pay for them over time.

One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter.

In a short video ad posted online in May, a middle-aged man gives a scary speech while adjusting a large object hidden under a tarp in the bed of a pickup truck. Parked on the street outside a suburban home, he ticks off a few of his favorite tech services—smartphone apps that give driving directions and overnight e-commerce delivery—then says, “Politicians have a plan to get rid of all that.” The video ends with him jumping into the driver’s seat and buckling up as the sentence fragment “

Armstrong’s message led to some resignations, and tons of media coverage ahead of Coinbase’s public stock listing. Detractors, including former Twitter CEO

Drew Afualo’s laugh is a weapon, a cri de coeur, and a cleansing fire. It’s a staccato, full-chested explosion of high-pitched emotion and outrage. It’s also brimming with the shock of recognition: Of course this jerk would say that. Afualo says it’s just how Polynesian people laugh (she’s Samoan), but she deploys it as a kind of punchline and for a very specific purpose. She makes some of the

Ever since he transformed Louis Vuitton from a venerable maker of steamer trunks into a handbag juggernaut more than 30 years ago, Bernard Arnault has pursued a simple yet lucrative strategy: buy respected but slightly fusty brands; freshen up their management, marketing, and operations; and weave them into the ever-expanding luxury tapestry known today as

In the early days of the pandemic, when markets plunged and 22 million Americans lost their jobs, Congress and the Federal Reserve sprang into action to stabilize an economy at risk of buckling. After trillions of dollars of Covid-19 relief cash and a monsoon of cheap federally sponsored loans, US households are sitting on

Fear is like acid on the brain, etching memories that remain long after you’ve forgotten things like the formula for photosynthesis or your first boyfriend’s favorite band.

More than a quarter century has gone by, but there’s so much I remember about that day in Miami: The tacky black satin sheets on the bed in the one-bedroom condo my boyfriend’s friend had loaned us for our weekend trip, the white glare of the sun outside, and the double line on the indicator window of the at-home pregnancy test I held in my hand.

The clear-cut through the forest in Mexico’s southeast is long (the section shown above will be 121 kilometers, about 75 miles), 40 meters (131 feet) wide, and as straight as modern engineering can make it. It’s the right of way for a train—the Maya Train, or Tren Maya, which will run for 1,554 kilometers and connect five states in the Yucatán Peninsula. This is arguably President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s most ambitious infrastructure project, and he’s vowed, repeatedly, to have it ready by the end of next year.

In a stunning crime spree, a pair allegedly stole millions of dollars in watches, bags, and other luxury items from celebrities, the fabulously wealthy, and even friends. Their trial begins on Aug. 25.