#NewYorkEr

Louis Menand reviews “On the Mark,” by Florence Hazrat, and “Verb Your Enthusiasm,” by Sarah Kaufman.

David Owen on our obsession with putting our belongings in metal boxes and then never looking at them again.

James Dinneen on the search for dark oxygen in the Moab Khotsong gold-and-uranium mine, outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ana Karina Zatarain on Dutch photographer Pie Aerts’s images of the puesteros of Chilean Patagonia, who look after other people’s livestock for not very much money, and sometimes go months without seeing anyone else.

Jessica Contrera reports on how A.I. is quietly changing our relationships at home, as Amazon’s Alexa+, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other chatbots become regular features of domestic life.

A broken phone or corrupted hard drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. Julian Lucas visits data-recovery experts who specialize in undoing disaster.