We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask; The New York Times, July 8, 2026

  Anne-Laure Le Cunff, The New York Times; We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask

"More than 60 percent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer.

Google is hardly alone. Claude, ChatGPT and upstart competitors like Perplexity do roughly the same thing: They take a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches — clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned — is disappearing.

For anyone who publishes on the internet, this is a troubling development, since it lowers website traffic and makes it hard to protect and profit from your intellectual property. But you might think it is good news for internet users. Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?

There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world...

I hope my former colleagues at Google and the engineers building similar tools elsewhere take these suggestions to heart, and that the industry develops best practices that protect curiosity rather than treating it as an afterthought. The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away.

The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask."

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh; New York Times, August 15, 2017

John L. Dorman, New York Times; August Wilson’s Pittsburgh

"The stacks of the main Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh soon became Wilson’s new classroom, nurturing his intellectual curiosity. I walked throughout the building, imagining Wilson using the large reading rooms and admiring the architecture. With the words “Free to the People” etched in stone across the entrance, the ornate library, which opened in 1895, complements the nearby 42-story Gothic Revival Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.

Back in the Hill District, the local Carnegie Library branch has a community room dedicated to Wilson. During my visit it was packed, filled with patrons playing chess. There is that stool salvaged from Eddie’s restaurant, a large map of the Hill District and notably, a high school diploma issued to Wilson by the library.

August Wilson was 60 years old when he died of liver cancer. His memorial service, held at the grand Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland, was followed by a jazz-infused procession through the Hill District.

“When Wynton Marsalis played ‘Danny Boy’ at the service, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Mr. Udin said. “August dealt with death in a manner of dignity, the same way he would have done with any of his characters.”

I always wondered how August Wilson could write about joy and tragedy with such vigor. But then I realized that his use of raw vernacular among African-Americans was rather unprecedented. Not only are Wilson’s poems and plays necessary, but they will continue to be vital in understanding the complexities of the common man."

The Danger of an Incurious President; New York Times, August 9, 2017

Sarah Vowell, New York Times; The Danger of an Incurious President

"Having just read Barbara Tuchman’s book “The Guns of August,” about the madcap rush into World War I, Kennedy said, “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, ‘The Missiles of October.’ ”

Would a more curious mind like Kennedy have made different decisions from Truman in 1945? Probably not — once “the Gadget” worked, it was going to be used. But he might have asked more questions beforehand. What we do know is that in 1962, nuclear holocaust was averted in part because a president read a book and learned from it.

We know that our current president reads neither books nor the Australian prime minister’s mood. And thanks to a leaked talk to congressional interns last week, we know that his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, the administration’s supposed voice of reason who is charged with ending the opioid epidemic, brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and presumably proving the existence of God, actually said these words, out loud, to people with ears: “We’ve read enough books.”"

The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump; New York Times, May 16, 2017

Ross Douthat, New York Times; 

The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump

"One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent — charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be."