David Oks

In July 2023, a 25-year-old man named Jagdish Whitten was out for a run in San Francisco.

A resident at a “witch camp” in northern Ghana Here is the story of a murder.

Here is a question that I think about a lot.

One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten.

Photos from Lars Tunbjörk’s “Office” series Consider Toto.

Cultures of the world, photographed by Irving Penn In November 2025, shortly after OpenAI released GPT-5.1—a new model that promised “a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT”—a small set of users started to notice something weird.

All photos by Mike Kelley from his “Life Cycles” series It might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious a…

Consider, for a moment, a funeral in Ghana.

Here are a few headlines from the world of science.

When all is said and done, and the final accounting is made of all human ambitions and achievements and follies, and the final historian turns to that strange realm of human endeavor that we call “computing,” that strange enterprise that gradually grew to…

A few months ago, J.

Photos by Lars Tunbjörk, from his photobook Office Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay on Twitter with the title “Something Big Is Happening.”

Benedetta Cappa, Speeding Motorboat Hello!

Female farmers in Bamiyan, Afghanistan Is it possible for an economy to double overnight?

Josef Albers, Persistent Hello!

Lagos, Nigeria Here’s the story of a remarkable scandal from a few years ago.

Cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo At the very tail end of 2025, three economists published an essay that I think qualifies as a strong late entrant for “most important essay written in 2025.”

Nicolás Maduro and his wife in custody As the fates of despots go, “abducted in the middle of the night and whisked off to stand trial in New York” is really not such a bad end.

A few weeks ago my house got robbed.

Photo by Togo Moise A few days ago, Our World in Data published what I think might be the most important article written this year.