For the past half-century, the city of Kabul has endured more than its fair share of hardship and tragedy. Afghanistan's capital now faces a "severe and multifaceted water crisis" that, if not addressed immediately, "will soon pose an existential threat" to Kabul's 6 million residents, said a new study by the nonprofit Mercy Corps. The crisis may earn Kabul the ignominious distinction of becoming the first major capital in modern history to fully exhaust its water supply. 

How much water does Kabul have?
Kabul's underground aquifers have "plummeted 25 to 30 meters in the past decade," with usage "exceeding natural recharge by a staggering 44 million cubic meters annually," said Mercy Corps. Absent immediate action, Kabul could completely exhaust its groundwater supply by the start of the next decade, said Unicef. 

How did Kabul get to this point?
While Kabul is hardly the only city facing resource challenges, its water crisis stems from a unique combination of factors, including political mismanagement and rapid population growth. And the water shortage has been "compounded by climate change," said Al Jazeera. Not only has precipitation dropped, but rising temperatures have led to "greater evaporation raising agricultural water consumption." 

Kabul's population explosion has also contributed to the problem. The city's populace has "grown roughly sixfold over the past 25 years," but "no decent water management system has been put in place" to address the growing strain, said The New York Times. Many internationally funded projects to address water scarcity were "abruptly stopped after 2021" when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan.

Compounding the crisis, some 80% of the city's groundwater is contaminated as a "consequence of widespread pit latrine use and industrial waste pollution," said CNN. Residents "without the means to dig hundreds of meters for water" are then left "at the mercy of private companies or must rely on donations" for reliable access to water. 

Are there any solutions?
"Increased engagement with the private sector" is a potentially "sustainable way forward" in the absence of "significant funding boosts" to directly address the water crisis, said Mercy Corps. The "largest and most important projects remain plagued by significant funding shortfalls and planning hurdles." 

The shuttering of the USAID program by the Trump administration has been catastrophic for Afghanistan, said CNN. "Only about $8 million of the $264 million required for water and sanitation" has been delivered.

Job seekers who manage to land interviews are increasingly facing a new hurdle: being interviewed not by an HR manager but by a robot. You might worry that artificial intelligence is "coming for your job," said The New York Times, but it may also be "coming for your job interviewer." 

'Paradoxically humanizing' 
AI interviewers can be a "godsend" for middle managers, said Fortune. The tech can help save time in first-round calls, allowing human interviewers more time to have "more meaningful conversations" with applicants in the next round. 

Like it or not, this is a "new reality" that job seekers "will have to put up with no matter what," because a growing number of companies view it as a "way to free up time for overworked hiring managers," particularly for "high-volume hiring" in areas such as customer service, said Futurism. 

It may seem a dehumanizing development, but proponents insist the opposite is true. It's "really paradoxical," but "in a lot of ways," this offers a "much more humanizing experience," Arsham Ghahramani, the co-founder of Ribbon, a company that has produced an AI interviewer, said to The New York Times. AI can screen the avalanche of applications and then "ask questions that are really tailored to you." 

'Not all AI interviewers are created equal' 
Many job seekers are "swearing off" interviews conducted using AI, which they say makes them feel so "unappreciated" that they prefer to miss potential job opportunities, said Fortune. Candidates may reason that the company's culture "can't be great" if human bosses won't take the time to interview them. 

However, "not all AI interviewers are created equal," said the outlet. While some are "monotonous robotic-voiced bots with pictures of strange feminized avatars," other AI interviewers are a "faceless bot" with a "more natural-sounding voice." And unlike humans, said Forbes, they can focus on "relevant signals" while "ignoring irrelevant" ones like those "linked to social class, demographic status," and any other "information likely to decrease fairness."

A hairless English-French bulldog mix named Petunia is held by her human for a photo after being crowned the winner of this year's World's Ugliest Dog contest in Santa Rosa, California. The 2-year-old rescue from Oregon took home $5,000 and will be featured on limited-edition cans of Mug Root Beer.
Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Image

The definitive endings of limited series offer viewers closure or at least a tidiness that can't always be found in long-running programs. And these shows can be appreciated years or even decades after they air.

'Roots' (1977)
ABC's adaptation of Alex Haley's 1976 novel was an "important benchmark in U.S. race relations," said Time. The show follows Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) as he's kidnapped from The Gambia by slavers in 1767 and sold to an American family. "Beloved white TV stars" were "enlisted to play unsympathetic roles," said the Los Angeles Times, and the unflinching depiction of slavery was unusual for its time.

'Band of Brothers' (2001)
The success of 1998's "Saving Private Ryan" led to a flurry of ultrarealistic war films, as well as HBO's series that traced the exploits of Easy Company from basic training through D-Day and the grinding months that finally vanquished Hitler's war machine. Ron Livingston ("Office Space") and Damian Lewis ("Homeland") led an ensemble cast in this "incredibly visceral and evocative war drama," said Den of Geek.

'Station Eleven' (2021)
HBO Max's "Station Eleven," a multiple-timeline flu-apocalypse drama, is based on Emily St. John Mandel's novel about the aimless Jeevan (Himesh Patel), who by happenstance pairs up with a child, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) (both pictured above) on the night of a deadly outbreak. Years later, a grown-up Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is part of The Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors who perform for small communities of survivors. The "stark beauty of the ruined world the characters inhabit" propels this "moody, beautiful and moving" show, said Slate.