The Price of Bitcoin Mining and More: The Week in Reporter Reads – The New York Times

This weekend, listen to a collection of articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.

Written and narrated by Gabriel J.X. Dance

Winter Storm Uri had knocked out power plants across Texas, leaving tens of thousands of homes in icy darkness. Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin, the worlds largest cryptocurrency.

The New York Times has identified 34 such large-scale operations, known as Bitcoin mines, in the United States, all putting immense pressure on the power grid and most finding novel ways to profit from doing so. Their operations can create costs including higher electricity bills and enormous carbon pollution for everyone around them, most of whom have nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Until June 2021, most Bitcoin mining was in China. Then it drove out Bitcoin operations, at least for a time, citing their power use among other reasons. The United States quickly became the industrys global leader.

Written and narrated by James Poniewozik

Im so sick of smiling, Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) says in the first episode of Netflixs Beef. You may have noticed that hes not alone in this. Blame it on the pandemic, the culture, the economy, but people are mad right now, on planes and on trains and like Danny and his car-crossed antagonist, Amy Lau (Ali Wong) in automobiles.

Beef, a dark comedy about a road-rage incident that careers disastrously off-road, has good timing, but thats not enough to make a great TV series. What makes this one of the most invigorating, surprising and insightful debuts of the past year is how personally and culturally specific its study of anger is. Every unhappy person in it is unhappy in a different and fascinating way.

Written by Nico Grant and Karen Weise | Narrated by Nico Grant

In March, two Google employees, whose jobs are to review the companys artificial intelligence products, tried to stop Google from introducing an A.I. chatbot. They believed it generated inaccurate and dangerous statements.

Ten months earlier, similar concerns were raised at Microsoft by ethicists and other employees. They wrote in several documents that the A.I. technology behind a planned chatbot could flood Facebook groups with disinformation, degrade critical thinking and erode the factual foundation of modern society.

The companies released their chatbots anyway. The aggressive moves by the normally risk-averse companies were driven by a race to control what could be the tech industrys next big thing generative A.I., the powerful new technology that fuels those chatbots.

Written and narrated by Erika Solomon

Russian and Danish naval vessels that disappear in the Baltic Sea, days before an underwater pipeline blast. A German charter yacht with traces of explosives, and a crew with forged passports. Blurry photographs of a mysterious object found near a single surviving pipeline strand.

These are the latest clues in the hunt to reveal who, last Sept. 26, blew up most of the Kremlin-backed Nord Stream pipelines, some 260 feet below the Baltic Sea, that were once the largest supplier of Europes natural gas. A flurry of new findings and competing narratives has sown distrust among Western allies and presented an opening for Russian diplomatic pressure that has raised the geopolitical stakes in Europes Baltic region.

Nowhere is the tension felt more strongly than among the 98 residents of Denmarks Christianso an island so tiny, you can walk across it in 10 minutes. Living just 12 nautical miles away from the blast site, everyone from the herring pickler to the inn chef sees skies and waters filled with foreboding.

Mornike Giwa Onaiwu was shocked when day care providers flagged some concerning behaviors in her daughter, Legacy. The toddler was not responding to her name. She avoided eye contact, didnt talk much and liked playing on her own.

But none of this seemed unusual to Dr. Onaiwu, a consultant and writer in Houston.

I didnt recognize anything was amiss, she said. My daughter was just like me.

Legacy was diagnosed with autism in 2011, just before she turned 3. Months later, at the age of 31, Dr. Onaiwu was diagnosed as well.

Autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communication difficulties as well as repetitive behaviors, has long been associated with boys. But over the past decade, as more doctors, teachers and parents have been on the lookout for early signs of the condition, the proportion of girls diagnosed with it has grown.

The Timess narrated articles are made by Tally Abecassis, Parin Behrooz, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Jack DIsidoro, Aaron Esposito, Dan Farrell, Elena Hecht, Adrienne Hurst, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Prez, Krish Seenivasan, Kate Winslett, John Woo and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.