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AI-powered visual search tools, like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search, promise a new way to search the world—but most people still type into a search box rather than point their camera at something. We've gotten used to manually searching for things over the past 25 years or so that search engines have been at our fingertips. Also, not all objects are directly in front of us at the time we’re searching for information about them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Polity series by English science fiction author Neal Asher is a limitless thrill-ride of grotesque aliens, badass hardware, rogue AIs, and deadly secret agents. It’s got everything a science fiction fan could want from an action-adventure story, and that’s definitely by design. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

While I gave birth to my first child in 2015, my brother sat across the street from the hospital in a bar, live tweeting his experience of waiting to meet his nephew. As the hours of my long labor wore on, my brother got drunker and his jokes more off the wall. When my son was finally born and I went to send an email birth announcement, I found that everyone already knew. Emails had flooded my inbox already congratulating me. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this year, my home was infested with smart speakers—I've used a lot of them at this point. But I’ve never used an Alexa device as dedicated to the cause as the Polk Command Bar, a soundbar that wants to be an Amazon Echo so badly that it’s practically in cosplay. It’s designed to look like engineers smushed an Amazon Echo Dot right into the center of it. In many ways, that's precisely what Polk did. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I was walking through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn with another parent I’d just met at a child’s birthday party. “I like it here,” he observed. “But the people smell bad.” Hgst. Someone has commented on the odor of an entire people. A bad moon rose. Then another. All around us were men in tzitzit, fedoras. I stabbed at the map on my phone. “I don’t smell anything,” I lied; the air was thick with the hot scent of political anguish. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Everybody is searching for something. Paul Ashby’s search began with an unexpected phone call on July 8, 2017. It was a Saturday night in Townsend, Tennessee, a small town just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An affable Army vet with gray hair, a goatee, and wire-frame glasses, Paul worked as a concierge at a rustic event space called the Barn. He was dressed in his usual top hat and coattails that night, greeting guests who were attending a wedding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Susan Gerbic spent her career photographing babies at a department store in Salinas, California, just 100 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the retired 55-year-old has dedicated her life to something entirely different: Wikipedia. As a member of the skeptical movement, Gerbic is committed to promoting critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and empirical evidence—particularly when it comes to fringe ideas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lamar Smith has liked the idea of flying cars since he was a kid growing up in Texas. So when the Republican representative from San Antonio was walking along the National Mall a few months ago, he became fascinated with a remote-controlled flying car operated by 10 year-old boy and his mom. “The advantage of this one is that it flies so slowly you can stay out of trouble,” Smith told the hearing room at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, as he embraced his inner Oprah. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The lava fields of Hawaii. The peaks of the Himalayas. The crowds of a Justin Bieber concert. These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread. They ain’t got nothin’, though, on waters of our planet’s polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a puny human like you in a heartbeat. Robots, though? This is the stuff their tough-as-hell bodies were made for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lately, in considering the erosion of America, the image that first comes to mind is Mariah Carey's now-iconic "I don’t know her" GIF. The gleeful shake of Carey's head. The subtle mischief of her utterance. The animation frames our current moment with dead-on precision. In fairness, from its earliest days, America has never looked like we knew it could. Which is to say, America—a country of sharp contradictions and tangible evils—has never lived up to what it could be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices