Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty.

Symbols and markings carved into tools and figurines by Stone Age humans over 40,000 years ago could be an ancient precursor to writing, according to a new analysis. The marks, found on 260 artifacts ...

Poetry and artificial intelligence can appear as opposites—one deeply human; the other cold and mechanical. Sasha Stiles sees them as expressions of the same impulse. Poetry, the Kalmyk- American poet ...

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. ChatGPT and food-delivery droids came to my campus at roughly the ...

On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the ...

This is a column about a helpful trick that will radically improve your memory with minimal effort so you can learn faster. But before I get to the science behind the technique and how it can help ...

All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers. Whether your New Year’s resolution was to lock in this semester, ...

In my high-school English classes, I often tell my students that they write their papers backwards: They devise a thesis and then look for evidence to support it. They’ll find what they want to see, I ...

January is traditionally a month for starting projects, trying new things, and working to break bad habits — particularly anything that gets in the way of self-improvement or productivity. Polygon ...

Nowadays data breaches aren’t rare shocks – they’re a weekly drumbeat. From leaked customer records to stolen source code, our digital lives keep spilling into the open. Git services are especially ...