In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. “It’s at 40.7 ETH,” FEWOCiOUS gasped. “That’s crazy.” It was not quite 4 in the afternoon, and Victor Langlois, an 18-year-old cryptoartist,…

An 11-year-old in dark horn-rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities. He recently read “The Maze Runner,” a sci-fi thriller in which…

Pim Koeslag designs and fabricates some of the world’s most complicated mechanical timepieces. Especially ambitious is his Grand Tourbillon Minute Repeater, created for Ateliers deMonaco, a watch company he helped start. When I visited his bright,…

As a teenager in Maryland in the 1950s, Mary Allen Wilkes had no plans to become a software pioneer — she dreamed of being a litigator. One day in junior high in 1950, though, her geography teacher surprised her with a comment: “Mary Allen, when you…

In the center of the lab, CHIMP stretched out one huge arm, then gracefully unfurled its three metal fingers, as if about to beckon someone. On its head, two rapidly rotating laser scanners enabled it to monitor its surroundings, but the engineers…

Two years ago, Alison Darcy built a robot to help out the depressed. As a clinical research psychologist at Stanford University, she knew that one powerful way to help people suffering from depression or anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy, or…

To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Josh Harcus sells robots for a living. Robotic vacuum cleaners, to be specific — a model called the Whiz, which his employer, SoftBank Robotics…

“You just crashed a little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said. It was true: I’d slammed my rocket-powered surfboard into an icy riverbank. This was at Gazzaley’s San Francisco lab, in a nook cluttered with multicolored skullcaps and wires that hooked up to an…

“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.” This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is…

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt. Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed…

In the spring, Cincia Dervishaj was struggling with a take-home math quiz. It was testing her knowledge of exponential notation — translating numbers like “3.87 x 10²” into a regular form. Dervishaj is a 13-year-old student at St. John’s Lutheran…

BLOCKCHAIN CHICKEN FARM And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside By Xiaowei Wang Raising free-range chickens isn’t easy, a Chinese farmer named Jiang tells Xiaowei Wang in a fascinating new book, “Blockchain Chicken Farm.” Why? “Chickens…

The spectacle of human bodies on an ice track, hurtling headfirst at speeds of up to 90 m.p.h., can make skeleton unsettling enough merely to watch. For the athletes, it’s even more extreme. Each of the three phases of a run comes with its own…

EILEEN BELLOLI KEEPS very good track of her friends. Belloli, who is 74, was born in Framingham, Mass., which is where she met her future husband, Joseph, when they were both toddlers. (“I tripped her and made her cry,” recalls Joseph, a laconic and…

Back in the ’70s, Scott Burnham was a technician working for a company that made guitar cables and accessories. While soldering parts one day, he accidentally attached the wrong resistor to a circuit board. It was a fortunate error, because the…

Is Iran going to build a bomb? Many people wonder, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to have the answer. Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the…

Here’s what you see if you look at my face: a skinny titanium headband stretched across my forehead. It looks like a futuristic pair of sunglasses, minus the lenses. On my right-hand side there’s a computer, a metal frame with a small, clear cube of…

When I met with Jim Rogers one day this spring, he tossed back two double espressos in a single hour. A charming and natty 60-year-old, Rogers is the chief executive of the electric company Duke Energy. But he has none of the macho, cowboy stolidity…

It was only a virtual Baghdad, baking under a virtual sun. As in real life, though, troops were dodging gunfire. I was at the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey, Calif., playing a new X box video game called Full Spectrum Warrior.…