The Daily The New York Times

Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence and self harm.

Last fall, an Army reservist killed 18 people at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Maine, before turning the gun on himself.

Dave Philipps, who covers military affairs for The Times, had already been investigating the idea that soldiers could be injured just by firing their own weapons. Analyzing the case of the gunman in Lewiston, Dave explains, could change our understanding of the effects of modern warfare on the human brain.

Guest: Dave Philipps, who covers war, the military and veterans for The New York Times.

In 2020, motivated to try a different way to combat drug use, Oregon voted to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs including fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine.

Things didn’t turn out as planned.

Mike Baker, a national reporter for The Times, explains what went wrong.

Guest: Mike Baker, a national reporter for The New York Times.

For years, a mysterious company has been buying farmland on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, eventually putting together a plot twice the size of San Francisco.

At every step, those behind the company kept their plans for the land shrouded in secrecy. Conor Dougherty, an economics reporter at The Times, figured out what they were up to.

Guest: Conor Dougherty, an economics reporter for The New York Times.

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.

A mission known as CHAPEA, an experiment in which four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists for 378 days, sets out to answer that question.

President Biden used his State of the Union address last night to push for re-election and to go on the attack against Donald J. Trump, his likely adversary in November. Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy at the White House for The Times, discusses the speech’s big moments.

When Google released Gemini, a new chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, it quickly faced a backlash — and unleashed a fierce debate about whether A.I. should be guided by social values, and if so, whose values they should be. Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times and co-host of the podcast “Hard Fork,” explains.