When the Pacific Exhales
El Niño has not just formed — it is firming toward the top of the record. The latest forecasts now put every major model at strong or above, with most reaching "super" territory. What that means for the year ahead.
Edition 004
Edition 004
The World This Week — Edition 004
Edition No. 004. Saturday, 13 June 2026. Eleven stories across ten sections — from a half-million square miles of reopened Pacific to Part II of The Emptied Sea.
As Far As the Eye Could See
What two sailors remember of the ocean before the counting began — and what the Indian Ocean's vanishing tuna reveal about how much we have already agreed to forget.
The Island of Many Treasures
Three hundred and forty miles off Costa Rica, reachable only by a day and a half at open sea, lies an island of buried gold, hammerhead schools, and a family's name carved in the rock. A dispatch from the place Cousteau called the most beautiful in the world.
First, Teach Them to Swim
In a town pressed between mountain and Atlantic, a big-wave surfer's small swim club has spent eight years turning nearness into belonging — opening the ocean to the children who grew up locked out of the water at their feet.
The Net Nobody Drops First
Anthropic has asked the world to slow down before machines learn to build their own successors. The request is more honest than its critics allow — and less likely to work than its authors hope. I have watched this arithmetic play out before, on water.
Learning to Listen
For the first time, machine learning is finding structure in the sounds whales make — an alphabet, even vowels. We still cannot say what any of it means, and some doubt the structure is real. But whether whales have language has become a question of data, not of poetry.
The Rocks Beneath the Cloud
The race to dominate artificial intelligence is also a race for the minerals and the power that run it — and that contest is being fought, largely unwatched, in places like Tanzania. A first-in-fifty-seven-years visit to Moscow is one visible thread of it.
Faster Than the Tracing
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has roughly doubled in a week. There is still no vaccine for this strain, and contact tracing is running at half of what it needs to be.
Two Days of Open Fire
Two days of open US–Iran strikes gave way to a memorandum the two capitals already describe differently: Washington calls it a settlement to end the war; Tehran says nothing is final — and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed.