MIT Technology Review 2026 July/August Issue

Jul 9, 2026

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MIT Technology Review Vol. 129 No. 4 (July/August 2026) presents technology convergences and practical AI insights, anchored by a feature titled “The Debrief.” The issue explores large-scale engineering and reconstruction challenges after the 1991 Gulf War, including efforts to extinguish Kuwait’s oil fires and address environmental risks. It also highlights chipmaking breakthroughs, notably ASML’s advanced lithography machines, and frames how innovation across scales—nanoscale, infrastructure, and planetary—can drive measurable progress. Contents preview references “Group chat” and AI-focused coverage.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryTechnology

FormatPDF

Pages92

Reading Time3 h 52 min

The Debrief

Letter from the editor

Group chat

The latest from Tech Review

Front

ASML’s latest machine promises to keep the AI party raging

Chipmaking’s next big hope The data science rebooting soccer PLUS! 10 things that matter in AI right now Vol . 129 No . 4 • July/August 2026 Discover what The future is forming matters where technologies converge. September 29– October 1, 2026 In-person on theMIT campus and online [EmTechFuture.com](EmTechFuture.com) Subscribers save 25% with code READERVIP26 Alumni save 40% with code ALUMVIP40 02 The Debrief All challenges great and small By MatHonan When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was incomplete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up the desert and dimmed the sky overhead. Everything had tobe rebuilt, and fast. I was there to work on that reconstruction, partofan international effort to fix what war had broken. It was the first time I’d ever seen a truly massive engineering project with my own eyes. The challenge was one that had tobe addressed on multiple fronts, simultaneously, to get an entire country back up and running. Everywhere you looked, there was something todo. I was mostly working with a labor crew to jump on quick fixes to things like windows and doors blown out in the fighting. But there were, of course, bigger jobs too. Most notably, there were those massive fires to put out. The Iraqi army had set hundreds of oil wells ablaze, the majority of which were still spewing soot and oil smoke into the air. On bad days, the sky would remain dark all day, and the air would burn your eyes and hurt your throat. It was so apocalyptic that none other than Carl Sagan warned of massive environmental consequences. If smoke from the oil fires reached the stratosphere, he predicted, the result could be akinto the 1815 explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which triggered what’s known as “the year without a summer”; global temperatures dropped between 0.4 and 0.7 °C, and crops failed around the world. Fortunately, the plume from Kuwait never made it that high, and although temperatures did decline regionally, there was little effect on a planetary scale. As it turns out, predicting what will or won’t lower global temps is quite hard.(Reader, I am foreshadowing here.) Firefighters from companies with monikers like the Red Adair Company or Boots and Coots (as well as less colorfully named outfits, like Bechtel) rushed to Kuwait after the war’s end to figure out how to extinguish the gargantuan blazes and cap the wells. At a hotel in downtown Kuwait City, one of the few places with working phone lines, I would occasionally run into them covered head to toe in black oil and soot. Putting out the fires took all sorts of creative thinking. Engineers working in the burning oil fields figured out they could repurpose existing pipelines meant to pump oil out to sea to instead pump water in from the Persian Gulf. One company from Hungary rigged up a firefighting machine called Big Wind by outfitting an old Soviet T-34 tank chassis with two turbines from a MiG-21 fighter jet, each of which could blast 220 gallons of water per second. Sadly, I never got to see it in action (except in the movies). Other jobs were less cinematic but no less dire. The retreating Iraqi army had left booby traps all over. They snaked hand grenades into the plumbing (at a facility where I worked, among others). They planted mines everywhere, and those had to be found and removed. Many of them were small plastic “toe poppers” designed not to kill but to maim. Hunting them was a herculean effort. And although it was mostly successful, hundreds of thousands of them, by some estimates, still remain. Which is to say, we can’t fix everything. But we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the July/August issue ofMITTechnology Review is a

FAQs

What is the main theme of the July/August 2026 MIT Technology Review issue?

The issue focuses on how technologies converge and how major, knowable challenges—from engineering to AI—can be tackled through human ingenuity.

What story does “The Debrief” feature and what does it emphasize?

“The Debrief” recounts reconstruction work in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War, emphasizing multi-front problem solving, environmental concerns from oil fires, and the value of rebuilding efforts.

How is chipmaking covered in the issue?

Chipmaking is highlighted through coverage of ASML and its latest machine, presented as key to sustaining advanced computer chips for AI over the coming decade.

Jul 9, 2026

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