Google is so synonymous with online search that its name has become a verb in its own right. But now, as the company seeks to “revamp its decades-old business model to fit the era of artificial intelligence,” said CNN, Google “wants to help you Google less.”

‘New era’ 
Rather than simply typing keywords or short phrases, users of Google’s new Gemini 3.5 Flash model that launched on Tuesday can ask conversational questions and even interact with agentic AI through live video. Instead of generating only the familiar list of blue links, Google Search gives a customized AI-written summary of the topic being researched. Users can also open a conversational interface by clicking on AI mode on the main search page, allowing them to ask follow-up questions more naturally.

This marks a “new era for AI search,” said a Google blog post. The update allows users to deploy AI agents “just by asking a question.” The company has also introduced a new intelligent AI-powered search box described as Google’s “biggest upgrade in over 25 years.” Crucially, the shift moves away from the need to click through to web pages for information. So Google will increasingly function more like an assistant than a traditional index.

‘Vital information literacy skills’
For many people, Google’s search box is the “lobby of the internet,” so this “radical transformation” signals a major shift in how people use the web, said Time magazine. It could “disrupt many industries” that rely on search traffic to attract customers, with news publishers and small businesses particularly vulnerable. Referrals from Google to publishers have “already been suffering from declining referrals” because of AI Overviews, said TechCrunch. And now things will “likely get worse.”

Using AI-based search could also erode important skills, said Riley MacLeod at internet news site Aftermath. Google Search is one of the “first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information-searching skills.” So “spoon-feeding” users AI summaries and “obscuring or bypassing the source of the information” risks depriving people of the opportunity to apply critical thinking and build the “vital information literacy skills” that they “need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world.”

Among the many crusades in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again,” one target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is antidepressants. He has long said that psychiatric drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are harmful, including claiming they cause mass shootings.

Kennedy recently announced at a MAHA Institute mental health summit an initiative to help wean Americans off antidepressants. The announcement sparked a debate among experts over the campaign’s pros and cons.

Stigmatization and lack of access
Kennedy’s perspective on deprescribing SSRIs “really is an oversimplification,” said Theresa Miskimen Rivera, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, to NPR. The health secretary has “no real interest in fixing structural problems,” said Amanda Marcotte at Salon. On the contrary, Kennedy has a “long history of talking about people on SSRIs in dehumanizing, often racist language” that implies their “actual problem is they are lazy and need to just work harder or even work for free.” It’s the “same old Republican playbook, just dressed up in a phony mask of compassion.”

There’s a “legitimate clinical problem” at the center of Kennedy’s initiative, said Jonathan Slater, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, at Stat News. Deprescribing is indeed “understudied, undertaught and under-reimbursed.”

But the health secretary’s campaign “conflates that genuine clinical need with claims unsupported by evidence, and some that are actively dangerous,” said Slater. Redirecting patients away from medications is “only clinically responsible if the alternatives are accessible. They are not.” 

Blind eye to weaning difficulties
In diagnosing “overmedicalization as a major problem,” the MAHA movement “gets something right,” said Khameer Kidia, a physician and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, at The Boston Globe. However, the issue “doesn’t begin with physicians and our prescription pads.” As the opioid epidemic has shown, the “problem starts higher up.”

The problem with MAHA’s approach to mental health is the “overarching placement of responsibility with individuals” rather than the “exploitative systems that create poor mental health,” said Kidia. MAHA is “half right with the diagnosis,” but its “prescription conveniently ignores the root causes of the problems it has identified.”

A girl plays between tents set up by the Lebanese government for displaced people. More than a million residents have been forced to flee their homes in Beirut and southern Lebanon to escape Israel’s ongoing military strikes, despite the official ceasefire announced a month ago.
Anwar Amro / AFP / Getty Images

While there are still some holdouts against the idea that animated entertainment can be perfectly suitable for adults, even hardened skeptics would be moved to open their minds to these tremendous series. Though many fully grown adults enjoy shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” our list includes only shows explicitly designed for them.

‘Family Guy’ (1999-)
As historically significant as “The Simpsons” in making animated series appeal to grown-ups, creator Seth MacFarlane’s pointed farce is about the misadventures of a dysfunctional family. The show has “laughs and lots of them, poking fun at targets as diverse as prison perversion, Hitler’s inferiority and football announcers,” said Barry Garron at The Hollywood Reporter. (Hulu)

‘The Boondocks’ (2005-14)
Adapted from Aaron McGruder’s popular comic strip, this is one of the few animated series to make a serious effort to tackle issues of race and privilege in contemporary America, albeit in an often intentionally crass fashion. The writing is “funny and pungent from the start,” and the “Asian-influenced animation” makes it the “American show truest to the look and feel of serious Japanese anime,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Arcane’ (2021-24)
It’s not easy to make something that feels genuinely fresh and that looks like nothing else on TV, but that’s exactly what showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee deliver with “Arcane” (pictured above). Easily “one of the most lavishly acclaimed animated series of the past decade,” it is carried out with a “fascinating collision of style,” said Kambole Campbell at Empire. (Netflix)